Maybe we need to stop thinking about public transport as a revenue generating/ self funding organization and just think about it as a critical piece of making a city work.
Nobody worries about whether the fire department is “breaking even”, you just pay for it through taxes because it’s essential
Even Sweden and Denmark have bus fare. If half the people are evading bus fare, then that’s a problem that needs to be fixed regardless of anything else you might do. It’s not likely that the people jumping the turnstiles are orderly and polite riders who help keep the system clean. You’ll just end up taxing everyone to create a system that’s unpleasant for normal people to use, which will destroy public support for those taxes.
Toxic empathy, ironically, is antithetical to building functioning transit systems. To get buy-in from the public to direct tax dollars to transit, you need to have pleasant, orderly, clean systems that people who can afford to drive want to use instead of driving. You can’t get that if half your riders are law breakers.
Sweden and Denmark have low economic inequality and high income transfers.
On the other hand nearby Estonia has less income transfers & higher inequality but free bus fares.
So do Sweden and Denmark, and they have bus fare on top of that. NYC uses that to subsidize 80% of the bus system and imposes user fees for the rest. The people who evade the fare are anti-social, and it’s toxic and ultimately detrimental to the goal of functional, widely used public transit to empathize with anti-social people.
Even in my home country of Bangladesh, which is extremely poor and dysfunctionally anti-social, I would guess fare evasion isn’t as high as in NYC (including the people riding on top of the bus).
Agreed, a lot of this 'empathy' is largely naivete, 48% of New Yorkers aren't so poor as to be unable to pay for the bus. Most of them are anti-social or lacking in a sense of duty towards the commons, making the fare free would not make them suddenly feel a sense of duty, they'd just become even more brazen in abusing the infrastructure.
Those who make $16*8 = $128/day before taxes, and <$100 after taxes, most definitely cannot afford to pay $5.80/day on the stupid bus fare, nor should they have to. They're getting a raw deal as it is for their labor.
> Anyone making that little doesn't pay net taxes.
The IRS certainly taxes an annual income of ~$30k, basically anything above $11k. Any benefits require jumping through a lot of hoops. Moreover, like everyone else, they also have to pay a sales tax for every non-food item they buy. There is also a property tax that they're indirectly responsible for if they're renting. When choosing between rent and bus fare, the choice is obvious.
The difference is nobody sees firefighters saving a homeless man and thinks "Eww gross I'd rather not have them saving lives next to me."
When public transportation gets the reputation of being the place of juvenile delinquents and petty criminals, people start to ask why their tax money is spent on it, and it becomes a self-reinforcing cycle.
I may sound like a cold bastard but I'd rather have public transportation system frequented by middle class families and commuters, because that's how you get these people to demand more public transportation.
The fare has to be low enough that poor people can afford it because they have to be able to use mass transit to get to work. Even the homeless need to be able to use it so they can e.g. get to a job interview. And a fare is not going to be a deterrent to juvenile delinquents because they're the ones jumping the turnstiles.
But if you're not actually excluding the deplorables then the fare is just a regressive tax and a deterrent to mass transit use for everyone.
The real problem is that you have unsheltered people without taking effective action against it and then the subway is a form of shelter. If you want to help them then you fix the zoning so more housing can be built, provide shelters, etc. If you want to be a cold bastard then you give them a one way ticket to a lower density city. Charging 10% of the cost of the transit system as a fare, which costs about as much to collect as it generates if not more, is neither of those things and counterproductive.
This would be fine if government projects like this had any sort of accountability. As is, these systems can become infinitely inefficient while claiming "we just need more money to fix it". Privatization seems to be the only way to enable accountability.
Privatization doesn't fix that; the state just ends up continuing to chuck money every time the companies (who are now in charge of critical infrastructure, and thus can't be allowed to fail) cry poor. It ends up being less efficient with a bunch of extra money flowing to the private sector. At least this is the Australian experience.
The endless streams of private contractors blowing through deadlines, budgets and billions of dollars on government contracts doesn't really agree with that assertion.
A lot of that happens because the government provides the contractors with an endless stream of money and refuses to use the accountability mechanisms in the contracts when they mismanage their tasks.
As a currently popular example, most of the contracts around SLS, with Boeing and other companies, are like this. They consistently mess up, have quality and speed issues and overrun costs, and the government never exercises the option to cut their profit share, even when the overruns reach several times the original agreed upon cost.
The government is also to blame for this. If you look at well regarded public transportation construction companies that have bid out contracts in the US they say it's more dysfunctional than a 3rd world country.
I don’t think it’s about accountability, after all democracy has more or less the same accountability mechanisms as a publicly traded company.
Given the massive public interest, there is probably at least an order of magnitude more oversight of public offices than there is for private companies.
In the end it’s the same challenge that every team, department, company has to solve: how to have people that care about their job?
Here my impression is that that’s often not the case, leading to the effects you described.
Given the often severely reduced pay in public jobs, compared with industry, I don’t find that overly surprising, you get what you pay for.
A profit motive is often a decent replacement for a sense of social responsibility. That sense of responsibility has never been there in the government of New York.
Fire departments aren't something open to a public which doesn't give a damn about it being shared property, (fire department equipment is typically only handled by the trained people employed by the department) nor do they typically involve much infrastructure that incurs constant wear and tear.
The solution to the MTA being exceedingly wasteful and unwilling to enforce rules isn't to just make it easier for them to be even worse.
If these people already feel such little civic responsibility for city infrastructure as to be skipping the fare and effectively taking advantage of everyone else, it's going to get much worse if it appears to them that they aren't even being asked to pay. Deciding to just make it 'free' would be the same as deciding just not to measure things that reveal inconvenient facts and celebrating that as having solved the problem.
Not to mention that the fire department in many places will also send you a bill if you happen to use their services. It's usually a very small bill (a few hundred bucks for a service literally worth hundreds of thousands), and your insurance will usually cover it.
If you need an ambulance ride, that bill can be thousands, but is covered by health insurance.
I think when you have a finite resource like seats on a bus, having a usage-based fee helps to promote more efficient usage.
I have lived in communities where buses were free to ride, and it was a great option to get around. But these were relatively small and wealthy communities where demand for public transportation was relatively low. I'm not sure the same system could work in NYC.
There aren't really finite seats on a bus. The hardest problem with mass transit is being able to operate routes at enough frequency that people will use mass transit instead of driving because the next train is too long a wait. If you can get more people to ride it then you can justify more frequent service and further increase usage -- which gets more people out of cars, reduces pollution and traffic congestion, etc. These are public goods.
And most buses are not going to be 100% full most of the time. So if you have an empty seat, the cost is zero. If you don't have an empty seat, now you can justify another bus/train, which reduces latency and causes several more people to take mass transit, which is good.
Huh - are you being serious? Of course the number of seats on a bus is finite. And the number of buses in a city are finite. The raw materials and energy used to produce and power the bus are finite. The pool of labor needed to drive and maintain the bus is finite. The tax revenue to fund all of this is finite.
Yes, it is possible to add more buses. But doing so requires drawing from a finite pool of resources. So it makes sense to incentivize people to use public resources more efficiently.
> And most buses are not going to be 100% full most of the time. So if you have an empty seat, the cost is zero.
I think this is a very good argument for time-of-use based fares. (Of course you don't want to gouge people who are commuting to work/school, but if there's a way to incentivize people to spread out the load while still keeping things affordable, I think that would be a good thing).
Just to be clear, since you have kind of made this about cars vs. mass transit, I'm not at all against mass transit. I'm in favor of applying the same principals to roads to incentivize people to use cars more efficiently as well. Tolls and parking meters (with time-of-use pricing), gasoline surcharges, etc.
> Of course the number of seats on a bus is finite.
It's possible to run more buses and thereby get arbitrarily more seats. The ultimate limits placed on this by the laws of physics are irrelevant because the actual rate limit on how many seats you need is how many people you can get to ride the bus.
> I think this is a very good argument for time-of-use based fares.
But peak hours are the times at which you most want people to take the bus, so they don't clog the roads with cars. It implies that's when they should most be free.
Then off peak will be more likely to have empty seats, implying they should be free then too, i.e. they should be free all the time.
> I'm in favor of applying the same principals to roads to incentivize people to use cars more efficiently as well. Tolls and parking meters (with time-of-use pricing), gasoline surcharges, etc.
And I'm in favor of the same "have the government build this and pay for it entirely from taxes" for roads. The construction cost and most of the maintenance is a sunk cost that doesn't depend on usage. The benefit of their existence accrues to people who don't drive and the benefit of roads to various motorists is proportional to the value of the activity they're engaged in rather than how many miles they drive, which is a much better fit for general taxes than road usage fees.
Also, the collections infrastructure for these things is a large expense, whereas we already have a collections infrastructure for general taxes, so when the incremental cost is negligible and the benefit goes to approximately the entire public it makes much more sense to use the latter. And collecting tolls/fares characteristically involves a significant privacy invasion, because the payments system will then tie your identity to your location history, which we could certainly do without. The main exception to this would be gas tax, which is cheap to collect (gas station is already remitting other taxes), serves as a de facto carbon tax (serving an independent purpose) and avoids most of the location tracking issues.
It otherwise doesn't make sense to waste the public's money and invade their privacy just so they can pay a higher amount for the same thing.
Mobile day centers for the unhoused? Surely there is a more efficient way of going about that. A lot of people avoid the bus due to safety concerns, not due to paying the fare.
The difference is that the fire department is only used for emergencies. If you call the fire department to help you get downtown you are probably getting a bill.
Where I live, the fare ticket's affordance is the ability to kick homeless off public transportation as it is the most comfortable place they have during hot summer days.
I wish they would also kick off people who eat on the train and leave their mess behind, but they never confront nuisance-makers.
Of course. But they have to have the money, and based on the number that flee ahead of the ticket checker, it's not a way many want to spend what they have.
> just think about it as a critical piece of making a city work
That's what the NYC MTA is... and they're $42 billion in debt. And they need to "borrow" another $23 billion from taxpayers to fund themselves for 2025-2030.
It has to do with the fact that “[a]t $2.5 billion per mile, construction costs for the 1.8-mile Phase 1 of the Second Avenue Subway were 8 to 12 times more expensive than similar subway projects in Italy, Istanbul, Sweden, Paris, Berlin and Spain”[0], repeated for every activity they undertake.
I think it's wrong of you to group "revenue generating" and "self funding" together like they are the same thing. Public transport should absolutely be self funding, if even partially, to provide the right value structure for both riders and the planning agency when choosing when/where to ride/set routes.
Of course we should but I think you will quickly find yourself out on the street as a politician if you propose this. I don’t think proposing free anything these days goes over all with the public who often won’t benefit from it.
Public transit fares are generally malformed. I personally never pay the LA Metro fare. Why? Because I pay the Metrolink fare, which by their own admission covers same-day Metro transit. But police will actively seek me out as a person who looks like they have money and give me a hard time for not “tapping”, all while folks who very clearly have no money waltz on into the metro, stopping only to smoke crack on the elevator up. There’s a general problem in this country of what to do with law breakers who do not have money. It seems like the answer is to make them work and garnish their wages, but for whatever reason we are against that.
It didn't used to be a problem, but over the course of the last 12 years or so, people have abdicated any agency they had. It started out in areas like the SF panhandle where well meaning folks got the cops to not arrest delinquents for trespassing, mistreating animals, loitering, begging, etc. Some got tired after a while and they passed redundant sit-lie laws... that stuck for a tiny bit, till riots were used as excuse to engage in all kinds of unlawful behavior and that in combination with Covid and a national defund-the-police movement led to a substantial increase in quality of life crime and petty crime that has now pervaded and has entrenched itself like an invasive species but the people responsible for this are loath to admit a mistake and now pretend it's not really an issue.
Maybe people will tire of this and hold officials accountable --but it will take a change of perspective from bleeding hearts and lots of time as well. It can be done. The wild west was tamed. This can be tamed as well but it takes will and commitment.
> substantial increase in quality of life crime and petty crime
Do you have any sources for that?
I was only able to find numbers on violent crime, which have gone down recently, and weren't as bad as thirty years ago. The 70s through 90s were pretty rough.
I've heard other people say that these minor crimes go unreported and undercounted, but then it's difficult to get past anecdotes without some kind of meaurement, for example perceptions may have shofted due to more news coverage, or as we've gotten older.
I notice more beggars in general. I take that as mental health, drug and poverty than crime. I also notice less traffic law enforcement and more reckless driving. A lot of other things seem to depend on the neighborhood.
I agree that mistakes have been made in some localities. Some of problems are too big to sweep under the rug.
Yes. Even on this very form, a suggestion that folks who break the law are held accountable for their actions and are made to pay back society for their transgressions results in an immediate downvote brigade.
The rebuttal to Scrooge involved a heavy reliance on divine intervention, ghosts and threats of eternal damnation in hell wrapped in heavy chains. While rhetorically powerful, I'm disputing that Dickens' opinions are the most thoughtful approach to direct social policy.
As a starting point to benefiting from society there is a reasonable expectation that people put a couple of hours a day into making life better for others. Prisoners can achieve that lofty goal. So can people travelling on the NY Metro without paying. There is a lot of room to haggle over the details, but argument from chubby ghost of Christmas present is not really the path to a good compromise.
“Keep society functioning”? I’m not asking for them to man the electric grid, but there’s still a ton of work that is too inconsequential for any minimum wage job to be worth it, yet would still be a net benefit to society for somebody to do it. Things like picking trash up off the side of the highway.
> work that is too inconsequential for any minimum wage job to be worth it
If it’s not worth minimum wage it’s been judged as not worth doing like that. You can automate picking up trash which is exactly the kinds of thing you avoid doing if labor is cheap enough. As such the wage floor is very much a benefit to society by opening a wedge for automation rather than having people do such tasks.
Reality doesn't care about cost fixing attempts like minimum wage. People will just go around that and restore equilibrium to supply and demand. So long as excess labor is available, labor costs will be driven down until equilibrium is reached.
You might say "don't treat humans as commodities"; well, reality doesn't care specially about humans; we are just animals even if we like to think we aren't.
No, it’s been judged as not worth doing like that by people who have freedom. If you’ve chosen to rescind your freedom, you by extension rescind your right to choose not to do work for less than minimum wage.
You can set minimum wage to zero and you still get trashed streets because trashed streets aren’t considered worth fixing every week. Instead there’s an equilibrium where X money is used to maintain reasonably clean streets and people will just spend less if they already look ok.
Minimum wage isn’t the issue here. You said 30-50 cents an hour isn’t “relevant” yourself, but haven’t backed that up with anything. They could be paid 0 for all I care, the situation would be the same: folks who have stolen something from society (be it direct financial losses or more abstract things like health and safety and peaceful movement) being made to give retributions back to society for their crimes. There are easy wins here (trash), and more involved projects.
It’s backed up by the finite supply of unemployed people willing and able to work below minimum wage.
As to your obsession with clean streets, the government does spend money on it the general public doesn’t actually care enough to spend more on it. It doesn’t matter how cheap it is as long as nobody is willing to fund it.
Elaborate. As of yet you’ve said nothing to refute the idea that forcing people who aren’t working to start working would result in more work being completed.
> Elaborate. As of yet you’ve said nothing to refute the idea that forcing people who aren’t working to start working would result in more work being completed.
That’s literally the first time you made that argument, so obviously I didn’t counter it.
Prisons labor is already forced. It’s even an enumerated exception in the constitution.
If you argument was simply to send these people to prison then just suggest that. The only thing worth discussing is non prison labor and thus non forced labor.
Has the parent comment already fallen out of your context window? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41386593 That’s exactly what I’m suggesting, you’re wasting my time if you can’t even keep track of a basic thread.
There are no jobs that want jobless people. There's few that even want 18 year olds
Your response was: Plenty of work for prison laborers.
My response of “at 20-50 cents an hour, but that’s not really relevant here.“ Obviously 20-50 cents is the nominal prison labor rate, but it also excludes the overhead of keeping prisoners which is what makes it “irrelevant” as a cost.
Thus by responding to the nominal rate you implicitly acknowledged we are no longer talking about prisoners because the actual cost of prison labor is ~64,000$ / year / inmate not their nominal wage.
“No, because the people are already a net drain on society.”
Not a 64,000$ drain on society. There’s roughly 1 correction officer per 4.9 inmates and that excludes many jobs associated with prisoners like administrative staff etc.
And again, nobody is willing to fund it at the current price. It’s simple economics that if the price were to be lower, the willingness to buy it would go up. I don’t need to explain this to you.
You are basing things on economics 101 models, demand curves max out. People don’t drink infinite water when it gets cheap enough. I don’t think streets need to be cleaned as much as they are, and that’s not based on how much it costs to clean them.
Ah. I should have guessed the “homeless people categorically cannot do the things I can do and never will” axiom was at the root of this argument. I chose not to be so defeatist nor elitist.
If they didn’t pay, they should be made to pay. If they can’t pay and have no ability to pay in the near future, they should be helped into situation where they will be trained to develop capacity to work with guaranteed employment opportunities. Call it prison if you wish, but the cell isn’t the point, the job is.
The concern with prison labor is that it's profitable to pay below market wages and then whoever is getting the profits has the incentive to lobby for more prisoners.
If the public at large is getting the profits (community service), and there are a high number of dangerous criminals who are not being prosecuted (there are), then… cool. We agree.
Community service has a particular problem in the context you're trying to use it in though, doesn't it?
Where community service works if for e.g. misbehaving kids with non-absentee parents. Because then the parents make sure the kid actually does the community service, and the kid is thereby deterred from doing it again.
If you do the same thing for someone who is going to blow off the community service, then you'd need the police to make them do the community service, and police get six figures in salary and benefits, so that's a very expensive babysitter and you've eliminated any kind of net benefit.
No, because the people are already a net drain on society. They already require dedicated police force, they already require dedicated sanitation force, food stamps, etcetcetc. And that’s not to mention the health and psychological cost on society of not being able to walk freely without fear cracked out guy will assault you.
I’m not proposing moving from these people providing $0.00 to taking whatever a person to monitor their work and provide institutional food costs, I’m proposing we move from these people costing a society a shitload, both financially and health/safety wise, to perhaps similar financially, but removing the health and safety burden and finally putting them on a path to success.
You're proposing putting them in prison, and for a reason, because otherwise they just blow it off. It turns out that's really expensive though, e.g. California pays $128k/prisoner/year. Now you're going to have them do some kind of menial labor with a value of what, $10k/year or less? You're still >$100k/year in the red, which has to be less than the per-person inconvenience of having them out in the world.
It also costs a lot more than building homeless shelters. It even costs more than mental health services and welfare programs, neither of which are cheap. It is quite possibly the most expensive option that anyone regularly proposes.
If they’re able to do work and believe they robbed society, but simply do not feel paying someone back whom you have robbed is a good thing to do, that sounds like a serious mental issue that should be treated by asylum workers. Certainly not someone I’d want roaming the streets.
You think slaves were all criminals who were simply paying back society commensurate to their transgressions? Got anything to back that up? My impression was they were free men captured and forced into a lifetime of work.
The simple truth is that urban progressives no longer believe that the poor owe anything to society in general. The idea of enforcing the law against such a presumably disadvantaged group is anathema. Until there is a cultural shift where you can discuss the idea of mutually upholding the commons more and more city services will devolve into taxes on honesty.
In the case of the NY subway, it would cost a poor person receiving subsidized fare about $2.20/day to do their part, or about 9 minutes of work at minimum wage. It is not a crime to ask a person to participate in their own survival.
That's not true in NYC, food service workers have a minimum wage of $15. other groups you're thinking of also have minimum wages (i.e. door dash drivers)
the labor force participation percentage is a slight of hand. You're including children (who receive free metro cards), retirees (including social security beneficiaries, pensions), and people who might just be rich. 40% has nothing to do with people's ability to make or have money.
What highly rarefied air source are you pulling that number from?
The 7-day MetroCard (for unlimited rides) costs $34, which comes out to $4.85 per day, or $6.80 per working day -- closer to 40 min of work per day (after taxes).
Mind you these people are likely paying half their income on rent at that wage, and a very significant chunk of what's left just on food and other necessities.
In other words - 4x your estimate. (BTW if you work 40 hours per week, or even 25 per week you do not qualify for the subsidized fares program).
This is real money to them. If you don't understand this (or you do in principle, but can't be bothered to get your math ballpark correct) then you have no business chiding them for not pulling their weight.
It doesn’t matter. Each individual has an obligation to be unobtrusive to those around them. Maybe society will reciprocate and provide support to the individual in return—the US certainly gives poor people more than poor people give society. But the obligation to society comes first.
> Each individual has an obligation to be unobtrusive to those around them. Maybe society will reciprocate and provide support to the individual in return—the US certainly gives poor people more than poor people give society. But the obligation to society comes first.
That's asking a lot when people are living on the edge. In Les Misérables, Jean Valjean wasn't sent to prison for nothing: it was for stealing bread for his starving sister and her family.
(Yes, we can debate how many Americans are truly living on the edge — but everyone makes that judgment for themselves.)
It’s not, and it’s not a relative judgment. Violent crime was rare in my dad’s village in Bangladesh, where people did starve. 20% of kids died before age 5 because of the lack of vaccines. Violent crime should be virtually non-existent in America. The fact we have it at a much greater rate than other developed countries is a flaw in our people and culture, not our economy.
> Violent crime should be virtually non-existent in America. The fact we have it at a much greater rate than other developed countries is a flaw in our people and culture, not our economy.
What's your proposed solution? The Puritans tried, and the Taliban are trying, to change human nature, with only limited "success" (if you want to call it that).
I’m not comparing America to some utopia that has fixed human nature. There’s lots of countries where people don’t jump turnstiles, do pay their fares, don’t fill public spaces with graffiti and used drug needles, don’t yell or dance in the subway, etc. It was our choice to let things get this way. That said, I don’t think you can put the toothpaste back in the tube. We would need an intervention on the scale of denazification to mitigate the individualism and entitlement that causes anti-social behavior. We would have to reform the very narratives parents tell their young children about the world around them and their relationship to society.
Because at the end of the day, there is a (small) percentage of the population that will do the absolute minimum they can get away with. Or even less than that (criminals).
So you’ll get what you tolerate, and often somewhat worse (depending on strength of enforcement).
Is that fair? In at least some cases, probably not.
Should that matter enough to stop enforcement? That is the classic ‘the road to hell is paved with good intentions’.
No drama, I'm not in NYC but other comments have pointed out that many in NYC that use buses already face high rent and and high food costs that consume large percentages of their earnings - there are estimates of $60/month for transit which could be hard to meet when just scraping by and having family etc. to support.
If we go off the 1.4 million passengers daily number, 48% would mean ~700k people who don't pay the fare. NYC has a population of ~9 million.
I find it hard to believe that ~7% of the population can't afford to pay for transit considering the discount programs (~250k low income people get 50% reduced fares, seniors and people with disabilities also get 50% reduced fares, students get free rides).
Of course not, but that doesn't mean that we can have a functional society without having rules about what conduct is allowed in public places, and enforcement mechanisms to make sure that those who violate the rules are removed from society.
How about removing their disadvantage first and enforcing the law next?
What's the point of wasting increasing amounts of money on escalating enforcement against people behaving socially because they were pushed out of society instead of working to being them back into society first?
Being poor does not cause dysfunctional behavior. There’s lots of Eastern European countries much poorer than NYC and SF that have a fraction of the dysfunctional behavior you see on public transit in NYC or SF.
> Being poor does not cause dysfunctional behavior.
"Being poor" isn't an activity, it's a lack of life resources, and that can certainly be a contributing factor. Analogously, lack of exercise doesn't "cause" heart attacks, but it's widely accepted as being a contributing factor. Sure, some individuals live to be 100 years old with no more exercise than lifting their forks. But that doesn't alter the general case.
Even if poverty contributed to disorderly behavior, you would expect to see more such behavior in poorer places, and you generally don’t. NYC’s bottom quantile income is $27,000 or below. That’s significantly higher than the median (purchasing power adjusted) income in Thailand. Bangkok public transit is incredibly nice compared to NYC. Nobody jumping turnstiles, no graffiti, nobody talking loudly in train cars, no homeless people or aggressive drug users in train cars, etc.
Public disorder is primarily a sociological and cultural problem, not an economic one.
Purchasing power adjustment doesn't take into account cost of housing sufficiently. Those poor countries you compare NYC to have vastly cheaper housing. Also poverty is not just about absolute measures. Inequality is also a huge factor. When everyone's poor property crime is somewhat lower than what you'd expect it to be. Another thing is that those poor countries have societies and infrastructure adapted to the poor. NYC would even ensure that some infrastructure is hostile to the poor.
NYC has vastly bigger safety net and subsidies for housing than a place like Bangkok.
Countries like Thailand also have very high inequality—many city dwellers have family living in literal villages. And even if inequality was higher in NYC—doesn’t that prove it’s a moral and cultural issue rather than an economic one?
>Transit should be free, like sidewalks and parks.
And most similarly, roads. The theoretical 'farebox recovery ratio' of most roads is 0, but this is never part of the conversation. Maybe if it were, transit would look much better in comparison.
NYC has 470 stations, by far the most. Who cares about long-distance stops with nothing in between. NYC has train stations in every single neighborhood in the city.
It's more complicated than that, because some stations with multiple lines get counted multiple times for that. Though even if NYC does have 20 more stations than Shanghai, it's a bit of a stretch to call that "by far". When, again, other cities have twice the tunnel length and nearly twice the ridership.
There are neighborhoods in Queens and Brooklyn where the closest subway station can be miles away, and there is an entire borough in NYC that has no general subway access at all, so not buying that one either.
The difference is that when a sidewalk or park is ruined and un-walkable then it's cheap and easy to just put up some orange cones. So the cost of failure is basically zero.
Not the case with the 4 train, or the L, or the 2-3. Those trains can't fail. So it's very expensive to make sure they don't. Nobody cares if Madison Square Park is blocked off for a day. (Maybe except the vagrants).
But the city will literally grind to a halt if the green or red lines aren't running.
Strange. 48% is a lot, and the difference indicates that there may be design problems.
By design problems I mean... For a while my bank's ATM gave me only large-denomination notes and the bus company's machine didn't accept those. So I'd stand there, money in hand and unable to pay.
Later, when I had my first child, a few of the tube station entrances only had ticket-stamping machines at the stairs, not at the path I had to use with my baby pram.
I wonder what percentage of that is people getting on a bus to get to a train, where they actually pay the toll.
I used to have to take a bus to a train and it was normal to have people get in through the exit doors in the back because the front of the bus was too packed to get through (people not moving to the back because they're old or want to be close to the exit to get off). Almost everyone got off on the last stop that was next to a train stop where they would go down and pay to get on the subway.
I also used to take another bus down metropolitan ave in Queens, which usually only had 5-10 people on it at a time but would be stuck in heavy traffic due to all of the people driving down the avenue from Queens to Brooklyn, and it made me wonder how much time everyone would save if we made the bus free to incentivize more of the drivers to take the bus instead.
Even without tapping, I mean. You’re within a few feet of one of those sensors for more than a minute? Thanks for your purchase (if you have credit, or a card tied to the system).
And if you don’t, it’s one line on your record, just like you were speeding or peeing on the streets. I’m not against treating buses as something we pay with taxes. But as long as we are required to buy a bus ticket, I think we should track those who don’t.
Half of riders evading bus fare is third-world country levels of dysfunction. How does a developed country get to that point? And is it even possible to get things back on track? I imagine you could institute harsh punishments for fare evaders, but if you need to do that, you’ve already lost. You can’t beat orderliness into people.
I was curious about your claim, having spent time abroad in Germany and never having seen an honor system. In fact, what your link describes is not an honor system but a proof-of-payment system. Proof-of-payment systems are common in the US too, for example on Caltrain in the Bay Area (which reportedly has very low fare evasion rates).
Proof-of-payment works on Caltrain because they have conductors who will walk up and down the aisles to examine your ticket/scan your Clipper card for payment. On busses, which don't have conductors, it really is an honor system.
Also, some systems have had to transition from proof-of-payment to fare gates - I know Vancouver had to do so on Skytrain a decade or so ago. I think proof-of-payment works best on a commuter line like Caltrain, where there are a few main nodes. In Caltrain’s case, that would be San Jose, Millbrae (connects to the airport and BART), and San Francisco, along with perhaps Palo Alto. I could probably take a train from Mountain View to San Jose without ever encountering a conductor, and perhaps even the other direction. But they know most people are riding all the way, so they only need to check a few times.
I suspect that the biggest reason for the low fare evasion rate on Caltrain is that the line serves a relatively-wealthy clientele for whom the fare isn't a burden. Many of Caltrain's patrons even get subsidies from the companies they're commuting to.
Interestingly, until recently fare evasion on Caltrain was a criminal infraction. In the past few years, Caltrain has moved to a flat $75 civil penalty instead (like a parking ticket), which I believe ended up earning Caltrain more money overall because it's less hassle for conductors.
In Germany they have Kontrollieren who come through the buses and check all the passengers. The frequency varies from line to line, but you generally won't be allowed to get away with not paying for long. I have no doubt that if they weren't there, fare evasion would be high even in Germany (and this isn't a recent thing--my experience is from 2003).
I wonder how the frequency is now. A lot can change in 20 years. I’m also surprised that Kontrollieren can fit on the busses - during peak hours, busy bus routes generally are standing room only.
On the other end of the spectrum, Istanbul has turnstiles at bus stops, just like a subway.
Why would you if you can get away with not paying? When I was a NYC resident, I looked at people who evaded fares with disgust for raising the price for all of us, but it's really just a consequence of failing to enforce the law. I should have been looking with disgust at the NYPD guys who walked around the platform like tough guys but constantly failed to hand out tickets to fare evaders.
Because it’s the right thing to do. You can’t have a cop behind each person to enforce all the laws. People should “self police” and realize that we’re living in a society where we must actually adhere to the values we say we have instead of just paying lip service.
Self-policing is nice but it is nicely complemented by actual police work. Cities should be aggressively policing fare evaders and maybe that means putting actual police in front and inside the fare areas to catch fare evaders, exclude people with hygienic issues and take harassment reports/arrest sexual harassers.
I’m only familiar with the buses near me - I don’t think the bus driver would let me on board if I didn’t pay - how do these riders get away without paying? The driver will wait for people to get exact change and not move, though I have seen a driver let someone on who claimed they lost their card. I can see how people do this on a train or subway (until you get spot checked for fare) but I have to walk by the meter/card reader where I am for buses. The article is behind a paywall so I only got the first two paragraphs.
> I’m only familiar with the buses near me - I don’t think the bus driver would let me on board if I didn’t pay - how do these riders get away without paying?
There's a history of bus drivers being attacked pretty badly for ticking off the wrong traveler. So they don't enforce this for the sake of their safety; they're supposed to just make a record of it and move on.
They usually just don't insist that strongly because they'd rather not get into a confrontation, as not moving might also anger people other than just the one you're holding for (as an argument I once saw happen on a bus went after a driver insisted, "the money isn't coming out of your paycheck so why do you care?").
Previously the consideration used to be nice because it was possible to end up in a situation where your metrocard was too low on balance, too far away from a machine to add more money to it, and you didn't have change. But nowadays most busses have tap-to-pay, so there shouldn't be many excuses.
Select Bus Service uses those paper tickets or OMNY app reader, both of which are self-service and available in the middle door of the bus, far away from the eyes of the driver.
I totally agree, in principle! But I also remember what Seattle buses were like when we still had the ride-free zone: people would just ride the bus back and forth across the zone all night, to have somewhere to sleep. To a point, making buses free makes them more accessible as transportation; but then, literal free-riders make them less accessible as transportation. I don't know what the solution is.
In King County, buses lost -a lot- of riders when COVID appeared. And that ridership hasn't rebounded yet. At non-peak times, it's maybe 1/3. (And that's at 15 minute intervals ... a -lot less- frequent that New Yorkers expect [Youtube] ). So yeah, a high tolerance for freeriders should prevail below 1/2 loads.
Also there a lot of new drivers these days ... there's more than enough for them to learn and watch ... policing should be low priority. Kids (IIRC) are free-riding anyway.
Fare evaders are often critics of the high price, not realizing that the price could apparently be cut in half if all riders simply cooperated to pay the fare.
Nobody worries about whether the fire department is “breaking even”, you just pay for it through taxes because it’s essential