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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   20536 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 16, 2024

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For underground/metro/subway, you want barriers with card scanners.

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.

there aren't the personnel to operate those only manually

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.

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 gangs vibrant 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 subsequent thugs delinquents persons of alternative socialization can stroll right through

Once 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.

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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