Comment by jacquesm
16 days ago
That's a different problem, and it requires a solution by itself.
> You let people evade fares and then those people go onto stab people like Zarutska.
That has nothing to do with it. The guy that committed that murder wasn't going to be deterred by a ticket fee. But it is interesting that you should right away jump from the one to the other, effectively using the poor dead girl for your agenda. Crime and homelessness are complex problems some parts of which are easy to solve and some of which are much harder.
You can't simply jump from 'someone got murdered on public transport' to 'public transport can't be free'.
https://www.bart.gov/news/articles/2026/news20260908
I ride BART. I'm two blocks from a busy transfer station. It's great for going to a show and getting home without driving (drunk).
Arguing that modern fare gates lowered crime is a pretty terrible response to the comment to which you responded. It shows a real lack of articulation ("crime bad, crime down here, therefore I don't need to refute what you said").
The original poster said:
> The guy that committed that murder wasn't going to be deterred by a ticket fee.
I don't see how lower crime on BART due to fewer people hopping the turnstiles refutes that at all. (Huh, I just learned turnstiles is spelled with an I and not a Y. At least your comment led to me learning something.) It just seems defeatist, which is what the people looting this country want.
> "crime bad, crime down here, therefore I don't need to refute what you said"
You're literally making up entire sentences, are you OK?
> The original poster said:
>> The guy that committed that murder wasn't going to be deterred by a ticket fee.
> I don't see how lower crime on BART...
Maybe you didn't read the link, but it's a 67% reduction in crimes against _riders_. Not property, not soliciting, but crimes against other humans.
The murderer in question was unemployed, homeless and aimlessly riding public transit. We (as a society) should have done a lot more for him, but (see stats above) it seems clear to me that making it easier to be in a confined space with the rest of society wasn't solving his problems and certainly didn't help her.
You can cut crime all the way down to zero by shutting down all transport. You could decrease it to a very low minimum by setting a $100 / trip fare. But then it wouldn't be public transport anymore.
He might've been deterred from committing the murder if he wasn't on the train at all but was instead in jail because he got immediately arrested by the cops for fare-jumping. Also murder isn't the only crime I don't want to happen on transit, that is most likely to be committed by someone who is already breaking the law against fare-jumping to be there at all.
so we should put fare-jumpers in jail because they could be murderers?
that's a strange argument.
No, we should put them in jail in order to keep them off the subway in the moment as well as to disincentivize other people who are considering fare-jumping. Murder is not the only additional crime an antisocial person who is already committing the crime of fare-jumping might commit, that affects the well-being of everyone else using public transit.