You forgot one of the biggest arguments for free transit. Fare collection on buses slows the system down and makes drivers handle potentially unsafe disputes with passengers. Proof of payment is obnoxious because you can't put a ticket machine on every block. Free buses are in fact service improvement.
Seems to me that fare gates are the speed cameras of the subway. How would we square Matt's call for sporadic human enforcement here with his call to shift from a patrol approach to a mass automated enforcement approach for cars?
Retailers have a similar problem around shoplifting - they will take advantage of better technology to allow them to make better cases against the worst offenders.
Totally agree with Matt’s take on the Pelosi story that the facts matter and we need more fact based “newsy” kind of coverage. I would love for a news organization to be riotous about facts and truth instead of narratives.
This reminds me a little of a Bill Burr bit. He said when he argues with his wife she always sticks to the facts when she’s right. But when she’s wrong she goes rogue to puss him off. He eventually says something not nice and ends up having to apologize for it. Either way - he loses.
Most partisan media (almost all of it today) kind of does the same shit.
Seattle’s BRT and light rail system uses POP and I was really hot on them in 2019. I was there as an intern during the summer and rode transit at least twice a day and got checked maybe 4 times in the summer. It clearly made sense and I never once saw someone who hadn’t paid.
Post-2020, I am more skeptical. For social distancing reasons, POP isn’t viable during a pandemic (or at least the early stages - perhaps it should have been brought back later with the fare people wearing N95s etc). I now live in Seattle and bringing back fare enforcement is controversial for the same bad left-wing ideas you mention in the article. The liberals on the transit board have explicitly stated they’re OK with not collecting fares (I suppose if you’re willing to pay an order of magnitude more for new construction, proper budgeting starts to seem unimportant).
This to me, is the fundamental flaw of POP: it gives politicians with bad ideas (or even just politicians trying to win a nearby election), the ability to variabalize fare collection to align with their bad ideas. To me, the fixed cost of turnstiles is worth the cost to prevent this.
The obvious counterpoint to this is that if you can’t trust a politician to not collect fares normally, you can’t trust them to run a mass transit system. There’s some truth to this - most American transit officials wouldn’t be qualified to be a janitor in any non-American city’s transit system (and frankly, I think we should consider that reality more when deciding to support or not support new transit projects) - but I think it’s fairly common to design political programs for optimal political durability. For example, libraries and such are often funded by trusts to make it harder to cut their funding.
Some time back, the Wall Street Journal reported that proof of purchase was done by two employees, one entering each end of a car. Each passenger was asked to show their ticket. No ticket resulted in a fine.
Local administration noted that minorities were a disproportionate part of the group fined. They concluded that disproportion equated to racism. Checks were stopped, revenue dropped.
1. It’s probably hard to overstate the damage that stop and frisk did.
2. The instinct by public officials here is good but transit agencies are not going to fix the black-white wealth gap and, if they do, it’ll be by giving poorer people a cheaper way to move
I disagree on 2. The checks were objectively unbiased. The instinct by public officials isn't good. It is a reflex to ignore a reality inconsistent with their ideology. I don't grasp how that helps anyone.
This is one of those issues that facial recognition could solve (but wont because of privacy issues). Identify offenders, then next time they walk into the station, the AI could alert police who were on duty to bust them.
Of course the problem is... even though I would never avoid paying a fare... I do jaywalk and speed or break other laws occasionally... and once used for one purpose....
Obviously the solution is to live in suburb with your own car and never use public transportation.
There's got to be a relationship to them pulling out staffed kiosks at many subway stops (in NYC). I can't imagine that the complete lack of MTA staff in the station doesn't mean greatly increased turnstile hopping.
Laws and rules are meaningless without enforcement. Laws and rules with selective enforcement invite corruption. When people don't respect laws and rules, or decide they should decide for themselves whether or not to comply without any consequence, society breaks down.
Last night I took BART for the first time in a while. Despite numerous signs telling people not to bring bicycles on the escalators (you should use the elevator), two young men dragged their bikes up the escalator.
Exiting, a young man in front of me vaulted over the fare gate rather than pay. He did this 5 feet away from not one but TWO station agents, one of whom was outside the booth. Neither of them batted an eye or otherwise acknowledged the fare evader.
It made me wonder what we pay those two people for, why I bother to pay for BART, and why we have rules or laws at all anymore.
Transit systems cannot and should not be free. "What is free has no value". And "free" just means everyone else is paying for it.
The trains/buses and validation stations already cameras. We should be close to automatically detecting who didn't pay and where they are sitting. Pass checks can be avoided for 90% of riders. Further more, you can identify violators on the platforms.
I've been transit-dependent (albeit with the disposable income and flexibility to avoid it in certain circumstances) for about 15 years in a medium-sized Midwestern city (Minneapolis) with a reasonably useful transit system. This is really one of those situations where "what is going on out there" wildly diverges from what people on the computer think is going on. I continued taking transit occasionally throughout the pandemic, but went back to (night) school this fall, taking the train back from St. Paul at night, and there's pretty regularly some kind of scene*.
The situation on the trains started to deteriorate, pre-pandemic, when the usual suspects (Twitter users with cartoon avatars) started complaining about fare enforcement on the trains maybe six or seven years ago? People did not smoke crack on the trains in the middle of the day ten years ago. People are currently smoking crack in the middle of the day on the trains.
This isn't rocket science. We don't need to hire teams of consultants with master's degrees to get to the bottom of why people are smoking on the trains. People are behaving antisocially on the train because there are no consequences for behaving antisocially on the train. Tossing the people who aren't paying fares off of the trains would be a very straightforward way of improving conditions on the trains and making them usable. The trend in some circles towards ruining the few usable, high-quality public services we have in this country in order to make a point about the lack of other, different public services does not make the case activists think it does.
--
*Why don't I just ignore it? It's not bothering me personally, is it? Putting aside the easy joke that the same people who were losing their minds about microaggressions six years ago are now asking people to ignore considerably more macro aggressions, it's repeatedly been the case that when someone is blasted and laying on the floor yelling obscenities at people, someone less enlightened than me (i.e. also blasted) takes matters into their own hands and escalates the situation into a fight.
The leftist view is that particular norms are merely instruments by which one group dominates another. Raising the salience of microaggressions is good because historically powerful groups commit them a lot & their members can be brought low when called out. Lowering the salience of fare evasion is good because the people being punished for it are already marginalized.
I think the frame is flawed, but it’s perfectly consistent.
This reminds me of the supreme court case(s?) on affirmative action which I stumbled across on Youtube last night. I was watching a bunch of excerpts and it was interesting how much the conservative judges were using pieces of logic that I normally see from the left and applied to attack apparent discrimination from businesses and / or society at large. The reason was that they are on the "side" of being against Academia, just like the leftists are on the "side" of the marginalized.
To expain, Harvard / UNC have to "discriminate" in some subjective ways to select a student pool. They don't want to rely ONLY on SATs or a formula or some quota system. So whether they are allowed to use race or not, they are always going to end up with a student body that is not perfectly aligned with whatever ideal anyone could put forth. And the subjective element will always push the percentages around in some racially non-equal ways, whether by intent or not.
This is the same argument that businesses use to defend their hiring or credit or insurance practices. They want to use race-neutral decisions, but it's not always that simple. For example, zip codes are quite predictive of certain things, like automobile accidents, so car insurance providers want to use zip code to set prices. But clearly zip code align with race, so there's no truly easy answer.
The right-wing is usually arguing that the businesses should be able to use whatever data helps them achieve their objectives without worrying quite so much about racial discrimination. But in this case the left was using those arguments and the right was using the other sides' rhetorical toolkit. It was strange, even a bit unsettling.
At the end of the day these discrimination decisions come down to "who do you trust" and "what are the potential costs" Do you trust businesses to do business in a way that is racially "fair" whatever you think that looks like. If you do, you let them use zip codes to set prices, b/c after all that really is colorblind and they're out to make a buck, not oppress people racially. But if you don't, you restrict their toolkit so that few if any minorities are ever badly priced based simply on where they live (but it's still ok if white people are badly priced based on where they live).
*Why don't I just ignore it? It's not bothering me personally, is it?
I think it's very fair to be bothered and people who would just you for being bothered are the real jerks. Especially because, if it bothers you (I'm assuming you're a young or middle-aged male) it only takes a little imagination to guess that it might really bother more vulnerable and defenseless people like children, women, the elderly, etc.
I don't have much to say about this argument, but I do ride the metro every day and have seen zero transit cops in my 3 trips and everyone still jumps the gates like usual. Anyone seen anything different?
fares are good, but the major transit agencies are gonna have to find ways to cover more non-fares way to cover operating costs once the pandemic money runs out if wfh remains a thing. the back half of this decade has the potential to be really really dark for transit agencies if new revenue sources aren’t found.
You forgot one of the biggest arguments for free transit. Fare collection on buses slows the system down and makes drivers handle potentially unsafe disputes with passengers. Proof of payment is obnoxious because you can't put a ticket machine on every block. Free buses are in fact service improvement.
When I ride the metro bus, and person after person boards without paying, I feel like a total chump
Seems to me that fare gates are the speed cameras of the subway. How would we square Matt's call for sporadic human enforcement here with his call to shift from a patrol approach to a mass automated enforcement approach for cars?
This, but for illegal immigration.
The point about cheaper cameras/storage reminded me of this:
https://old.reddit.com/r/IllegalLifeProTips/comments/ycwrw3/ilpt_how_to_not_end_up_in_jail_with_a_felony/
Retailers have a similar problem around shoplifting - they will take advantage of better technology to allow them to make better cases against the worst offenders.
Totally agree with Matt’s take on the Pelosi story that the facts matter and we need more fact based “newsy” kind of coverage. I would love for a news organization to be riotous about facts and truth instead of narratives.
This reminds me a little of a Bill Burr bit. He said when he argues with his wife she always sticks to the facts when she’s right. But when she’s wrong she goes rogue to puss him off. He eventually says something not nice and ends up having to apologize for it. Either way - he loses.
Most partisan media (almost all of it today) kind of does the same shit.
This post could also be summarized by watching the episode of Seinfeld where Uncle Leo shoplifts from Brentano's
First reasonable thing you've written on crime in weeks.
Seattle’s BRT and light rail system uses POP and I was really hot on them in 2019. I was there as an intern during the summer and rode transit at least twice a day and got checked maybe 4 times in the summer. It clearly made sense and I never once saw someone who hadn’t paid.
Post-2020, I am more skeptical. For social distancing reasons, POP isn’t viable during a pandemic (or at least the early stages - perhaps it should have been brought back later with the fare people wearing N95s etc). I now live in Seattle and bringing back fare enforcement is controversial for the same bad left-wing ideas you mention in the article. The liberals on the transit board have explicitly stated they’re OK with not collecting fares (I suppose if you’re willing to pay an order of magnitude more for new construction, proper budgeting starts to seem unimportant).
This to me, is the fundamental flaw of POP: it gives politicians with bad ideas (or even just politicians trying to win a nearby election), the ability to variabalize fare collection to align with their bad ideas. To me, the fixed cost of turnstiles is worth the cost to prevent this.
The obvious counterpoint to this is that if you can’t trust a politician to not collect fares normally, you can’t trust them to run a mass transit system. There’s some truth to this - most American transit officials wouldn’t be qualified to be a janitor in any non-American city’s transit system (and frankly, I think we should consider that reality more when deciding to support or not support new transit projects) - but I think it’s fairly common to design political programs for optimal political durability. For example, libraries and such are often funded by trusts to make it harder to cut their funding.
Some time back, the Wall Street Journal reported that proof of purchase was done by two employees, one entering each end of a car. Each passenger was asked to show their ticket. No ticket resulted in a fine.
Local administration noted that minorities were a disproportionate part of the group fined. They concluded that disproportion equated to racism. Checks were stopped, revenue dropped.
a few thoughts
1. It’s probably hard to overstate the damage that stop and frisk did.
2. The instinct by public officials here is good but transit agencies are not going to fix the black-white wealth gap and, if they do, it’ll be by giving poorer people a cheaper way to move
I agree with you on 1.
I disagree on 2. The checks were objectively unbiased. The instinct by public officials isn't good. It is a reflex to ignore a reality inconsistent with their ideology. I don't grasp how that helps anyone.
This is one of those issues that facial recognition could solve (but wont because of privacy issues). Identify offenders, then next time they walk into the station, the AI could alert police who were on duty to bust them.
Of course the problem is... even though I would never avoid paying a fare... I do jaywalk and speed or break other laws occasionally... and once used for one purpose....
Obviously the solution is to live in suburb with your own car and never use public transportation.
There's got to be a relationship to them pulling out staffed kiosks at many subway stops (in NYC). I can't imagine that the complete lack of MTA staff in the station doesn't mean greatly increased turnstile hopping.
Laws and rules are meaningless without enforcement. Laws and rules with selective enforcement invite corruption. When people don't respect laws and rules, or decide they should decide for themselves whether or not to comply without any consequence, society breaks down.
Last night I took BART for the first time in a while. Despite numerous signs telling people not to bring bicycles on the escalators (you should use the elevator), two young men dragged their bikes up the escalator.
Exiting, a young man in front of me vaulted over the fare gate rather than pay. He did this 5 feet away from not one but TWO station agents, one of whom was outside the booth. Neither of them batted an eye or otherwise acknowledged the fare evader.
It made me wonder what we pay those two people for, why I bother to pay for BART, and why we have rules or laws at all anymore.
Transit systems cannot and should not be free. "What is free has no value". And "free" just means everyone else is paying for it.
The trains/buses and validation stations already cameras. We should be close to automatically detecting who didn't pay and where they are sitting. Pass checks can be avoided for 90% of riders. Further more, you can identify violators on the platforms.
I've been transit-dependent (albeit with the disposable income and flexibility to avoid it in certain circumstances) for about 15 years in a medium-sized Midwestern city (Minneapolis) with a reasonably useful transit system. This is really one of those situations where "what is going on out there" wildly diverges from what people on the computer think is going on. I continued taking transit occasionally throughout the pandemic, but went back to (night) school this fall, taking the train back from St. Paul at night, and there's pretty regularly some kind of scene*.
The situation on the trains started to deteriorate, pre-pandemic, when the usual suspects (Twitter users with cartoon avatars) started complaining about fare enforcement on the trains maybe six or seven years ago? People did not smoke crack on the trains in the middle of the day ten years ago. People are currently smoking crack in the middle of the day on the trains.
This isn't rocket science. We don't need to hire teams of consultants with master's degrees to get to the bottom of why people are smoking on the trains. People are behaving antisocially on the train because there are no consequences for behaving antisocially on the train. Tossing the people who aren't paying fares off of the trains would be a very straightforward way of improving conditions on the trains and making them usable. The trend in some circles towards ruining the few usable, high-quality public services we have in this country in order to make a point about the lack of other, different public services does not make the case activists think it does.
--
*Why don't I just ignore it? It's not bothering me personally, is it? Putting aside the easy joke that the same people who were losing their minds about microaggressions six years ago are now asking people to ignore considerably more macro aggressions, it's repeatedly been the case that when someone is blasted and laying on the floor yelling obscenities at people, someone less enlightened than me (i.e. also blasted) takes matters into their own hands and escalates the situation into a fight.
The leftist view is that particular norms are merely instruments by which one group dominates another. Raising the salience of microaggressions is good because historically powerful groups commit them a lot & their members can be brought low when called out. Lowering the salience of fare evasion is good because the people being punished for it are already marginalized.
I think the frame is flawed, but it’s perfectly consistent.
This reminds me of the supreme court case(s?) on affirmative action which I stumbled across on Youtube last night. I was watching a bunch of excerpts and it was interesting how much the conservative judges were using pieces of logic that I normally see from the left and applied to attack apparent discrimination from businesses and / or society at large. The reason was that they are on the "side" of being against Academia, just like the leftists are on the "side" of the marginalized.
To expain, Harvard / UNC have to "discriminate" in some subjective ways to select a student pool. They don't want to rely ONLY on SATs or a formula or some quota system. So whether they are allowed to use race or not, they are always going to end up with a student body that is not perfectly aligned with whatever ideal anyone could put forth. And the subjective element will always push the percentages around in some racially non-equal ways, whether by intent or not.
This is the same argument that businesses use to defend their hiring or credit or insurance practices. They want to use race-neutral decisions, but it's not always that simple. For example, zip codes are quite predictive of certain things, like automobile accidents, so car insurance providers want to use zip code to set prices. But clearly zip code align with race, so there's no truly easy answer.
The right-wing is usually arguing that the businesses should be able to use whatever data helps them achieve their objectives without worrying quite so much about racial discrimination. But in this case the left was using those arguments and the right was using the other sides' rhetorical toolkit. It was strange, even a bit unsettling.
At the end of the day these discrimination decisions come down to "who do you trust" and "what are the potential costs" Do you trust businesses to do business in a way that is racially "fair" whatever you think that looks like. If you do, you let them use zip codes to set prices, b/c after all that really is colorblind and they're out to make a buck, not oppress people racially. But if you don't, you restrict their toolkit so that few if any minorities are ever badly priced based simply on where they live (but it's still ok if white people are badly priced based on where they live).
*Why don't I just ignore it? It's not bothering me personally, is it?
I think it's very fair to be bothered and people who would just you for being bothered are the real jerks. Especially because, if it bothers you (I'm assuming you're a young or middle-aged male) it only takes a little imagination to guess that it might really bother more vulnerable and defenseless people like children, women, the elderly, etc.
I don't have much to say about this argument, but I do ride the metro every day and have seen zero transit cops in my 3 trips and everyone still jumps the gates like usual. Anyone seen anything different?
My home station is Columbia Heights and they had several transit cops hanging around the fare gates during my morning commute yesterday.
Interesting. Maybe they're skipping Rhode Island Ave because
fares are good, but the major transit agencies are gonna have to find ways to cover more non-fares way to cover operating costs once the pandemic money runs out if wfh remains a thing. the back half of this decade has the potential to be really really dark for transit agencies if new revenue sources aren’t found.