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I disagree that race is central here. Treating fare evasion as a complex socio-economic problem where you need to understand the demographics is overkill.
Like copyright infringement and unlike shoplifting, riding a mostly empty bus without paying when you would otherwise walk seems a mostly victimless crime. The extra amount of gas the bus requires to transport you is likely a few cents. As such, you will always have a substantial amount of people who see nothing morally wrong with it, whatever their racial distribution.
Rather than trying to understand why people think that way and how they could be persuaded to change their attitudes, the way to fix this is enforcement. For underground/metro/subway, you want barriers with card scanners. For busses, you could require everyone enter through the front door and pass such a barrier there. While we have seen a lot of AI systems fail spectacularly, I feel "detecting people entering through the rear doors of the bus and telling the bus driver to wait until they have validated their tickets" should be well within the realm of the doable.
The point of having fares in city public transports is not to pay for running the service. The point is to price the undesirables out. I vaguely recollect Scott mentioning that once BART put up barriers, this generally improved the feeling of safety for the customers, because the homeless and drug addicts which made people detest travelling on BART were not buying tickets.
This can be totally solved in color-blind mode, no need to bring up race. Of course, sooner or later the other side will bring up race, claiming that blacks are over-represented in subway fines (due to systemic racism, surely!), but the law&order side should stick to the color-blind mode here.
This isn't standard? It's how it works on the buses here in Anchorage: enter at the front door, pay at the little podium next to the driver, take your seat, and exit out the door further back (about midway down the bus) at your stop. No tickets, nobody sneaking on, or past the driver, only one employee on the bus — the driver.
Some busses have a door in the front and a door in the middle. No real way to monitor those ones. Not like the driver is going to notice you walking in throughout the rear door and stop his route to demand you leave.
Yes, that's how they work here: the front door is for getting on, the middle for getting off.
Our bus drivers seem to do it just fine. A big mirror that lets them see down the aisle and pretty much the whole bus interior.
That's exactly what they do.
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Yeah that only works for a limited population, it's too slow to handle the volume buses get in new york.
I think that's probably the key. Bus size and usage here in Anchorage is a minuscule fraction of that in large cities.
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Having everyone enter through the front of the bus is bad because it slows the travel time of the bus considerably and also makes it more of an interference to other traffic. Minimizing stopped time is very important for effective transit.
The better strategy is just very visible and frequent fare enforcement. Teams of inspectors rove the bus lines and bust people for not paying, in a very visible and obvious and shaming way. Yeah maybe you still have serial cheats or whatever but you get average people to think there are consequences and more importantly not feel like they're a sucker for paying a fare.
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They bypass them. By literally jumping the turnstiles, or entering through the exit gate when someone else is exiting. Passive enforcement won't cut it; you could use man-trap style doors in every entrance, but you're still going to need openable gates for handicapped, people with luggage, etc, and there aren't the personnel to operate those only manually. Also the man-trap doors are slower to use and will result in congestion.
I don't know about New York, but race does play a direct role in fare evasion in Philadelphia. A bus driver simply isn't going to give trouble to a co-racial free rider.
This is a technical problem. There are turnstiles you can't jump over. A waist high rotating bar can't stop a palsied child from crossing it. 7 foot high one-way turnstile on all entrances and exits are impossible to slip by.
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How come? There are 472 stations, they have, let's say, 1000 entrances, you need just 8000 cops to patrol each entrance round the clock. But you really need much fewer people: you only have to patrol the stations with the highest rate of fare evasion and you don't have to do this round the clock.
There's actually more than 2000 entrances. There are less than 1200 MTA police officers. And 36,000 in the NYPD. The cost of having enough of them to stop farebeating would be staggering.
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An individual in a central control room (who can eventually be replaced by AI) can monitor dozens of man trap doors on CCTV to allow those with luggage or in wheelchairs to come through. This isn’t intractable.
… right up until
roving gangsvibrant urban youth groups start smashing the CCTV cameras for laughs. Or even just start loitering around the station until someone with luggage or a stroller comes, and then they swoop in and prop open the gate so subsequentthugsdelinquentspersons of alternative socialization can stroll right throughOnce in Shanghai there was a problem with my subway card. The scanner at the turnstile would not let me out for some mysterious reason. I went to the nearby help desk which is an enclosed room with glass panels you can talk to workers through. I gestured to the turnstile with my card and the woman at the help desk gestured me to use a nearby turnstile. It was unlocked when I reached it. She must have unlocked it for me.
There are simple systems that allow for manual override but are not susceptible to gangs of urban youths bypassing. Forethought and will the size of a mustard seed would let us have this in America. It's not like special Chinese-only DNA let them set up this handy and secure system. We are choosing to live this way andcanchooseto stop anytime.
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Sure, but this is the general crime spiral. Some percentage of subway fare evaders will give up because they do not want to smash the cameras, are too short, don’t have enough time, etc.
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The issue isn't that race is central to fare evasion, but any difference, or perhaps even more importantly, the perception of differences in the prosecution of fare evasion, will be used to show that this is a racist policy.
I spent around seven years living in Seattle. There are a few gangs in Seattle, generally based in the southern area. As it turns out, most of the participants of the gangs happen to be black. This led to the black gang members being arrested and prosecuted for crimes in a disproportionate way compared to the overall population of the city. Seattle's solution to this was to disband the gang unit.
The criminal irony of this style of thinking is that the (in the case of Seattle) primarily black gangs tend to commit violence predominantly to the black community itself. By not dealing with the problem of gang violence, the black community is being further set back. It's all in the name of "equity" in terms of punishment since there doesn't happen to be any prominent white gangs.
Now apply the same to fare evasion. The moment you have blacks being arrested for it, even if it is proportional to the population, you'll have the activists protesting that this is racially motivated. The end result is that certain crimes go unpunished -- and once that happens, it's defacto no longer a crime. It gets compounded when the individuals involved know they're not going to be prosecuted so they continue to break the law even more.
This looks like it'd be a good basis for a reboot or spiritual successor of The Wire. Like how the then-contemporary issue of the drug war was used as good fodder for showcasing dysfunction in policing in the original series, the now-contemporary issue of DEI/socjus/idpol/CRT/etc. seems like it could provide plenty of fodder for showcasing dysfunction in policing today, as well as other related institutions like schools and local government. I just wonder if there's a David Simon today who's been covering local police work in some city for the past 15 years who has the depth and breadth of experience to now put together a show.
Or perhaps rather than something like The Wire, something more akin to Dr. Strangelove would be more appropriate.
I don't disagree. However, I doubt something like this would ever get made while the folks signing the checks are the same people cheering on the DEI, et al. initiatives.
Honestly, I'm hoping there's going to be sea change in the coming years and we get back to something more normal. There are so many changes going on all over the western world with people getting fed up with their governments. Who knows..?
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