As much as maybe fare evasion is a secondary concern, I think the main reason they're cracking down on the subways in NYC is because people weren't feeling safe on the trains anymore.
As much as I love a free and open and fair society, you can see why people not my size might be uncomfortable next to people growling, sleeping with trash bags filled with their belongings, drinking out of brown paper bags, rolling and smoking blunts and cigarettes. (I mostly bike these days but I saw all of that in recent subway trips during the early summer).
And then there was the rash of incidents on the subway with people getting shot at stations, the guy who tried to set off a smoke bomb and pulled out a gun on the car and started shooting, the guy who smeared shit on someone's face, the people who've been pushed onto tracks.
These incidents are _incredibly_ rare, but the way humans work doesn't let a lot of us shake off that perception of the subways being less safe than they used to be.
I'm not one of those people, I base my fears on statistics, but you can't expect every human being, especially smaller people, the elderly, and women to be as carefree.
in new delhi, india, metro is "actually amazing"....
you have mandatory baggage x-ray checking and a physcial patdown, both for men and women EVERYTIME you enter the station so you cant have weapons of any sort.
the stations are guarded by trained police (cisf) whole job profile is to only secure highly sensitive operations and they are trained to actually do their job....
you have full CCTV coverage of stations and trains and it is generally safe.
for women, the first carriage of every train is mandatory for women only and any men who board that carriage are fined and removed from the train...
you cannot eat or even "sit on the floor of the train" so its very clean even when many thousand passengers ride it every single day...
tickets are enforced so you cannot just freeride the stations and cars. you need a card/ticket to enter and exit and are charged by the time between these two entries so there aren't panhandlers, beggars there...
india has a generally dirty habit of doing chewing tobacco and the city stinks with the stink of red stains on every building, wall, road, vehicles but spitting is an offense in the station/train permises so its also clean by that way.
if you are in india and in delhi, try it once. you will enjoy the ride
I don't have an issue with tougher policing of the fare with actual doors and police presence but a patdown is kind of ridiculous. I'm afraid people too easily give up their freedom for a tiny increase in safety
nope. a patdown to prevent any concealed weapons is a good thing....
may i ask, what kind of freedoms do you loose if you are 100% sure that in a train station or in a train that no one is carrying a knife or a gun or something lethal?
>tiny increase in safety
yeah, right... guns don't kill people, it is people who kill people. same for cigarettes i suppose.
I dunno, that seems like a lot to me living in NYC where we have basically none of that and life is fine. We all get on the train and go our ways and peak ridership is millions a day (prepandemic was almost 6 million on the MTA trains alone (not including the LIRR, Metro North, and NJ Transit, and Amtrak)).
I don't think anyone in NYC wants that. Talk about a police presence sheesh.
And yea I just talked about the perception issues, which is why they're cracking down on fare evaders. Basically increasing police presence to make people feel like it's the safe system they've been using for years before the pandemic.
NYC subway is said to be stinky, with homeless people and people dying and such, people throwing fights and stuff...
>And yea I just talked about the perception issues, which is why they're cracking down on fare evaders.
why should that not be a problem when they are running a public utility? oh, did i mention that women just have to carry an empty "card" with no balance and they can "actually freeride" the whole train for as long as they want ?
so only men have to pay for their rides and everyone is happy with the arrangement in delhi so why should they NOT enforce men not paying?
I see people jump the turnstiles all the time, and they're usually not the type that growl at you. Usually (at least in my area) it is young, teenage or early 20-something brown/black males who blend back into the crowd immediately.
I agree the types of people you described are a problem, but they aren't the farejumpers.
lol brown/black males. Isn't that a bit passive aggressive version of racism hidden under "just pointing out what I noticed"? Is that because you are biased that you notice or is it the actual reality?
Please expand on what was racist about my message. Was it where I said that fare jumpers just blended in with the crowd and didn't growl at people, and were not the problem makers that OP was describing?
Was I also sexist in pointing out it is mostly males I see doing it?
As much as I love a free and open and fair society, you can see why people not my size might be uncomfortable next to people growling, sleeping with trash bags filled with their belongings, drinking out of brown paper bags, rolling and smoking blunts and cigarettes. (I mostly bike these days but I saw all of that in recent subway trips during the early summer).
And then there was the rash of incidents on the subway with people getting shot at stations, the guy who tried to set off a smoke bomb and pulled out a gun on the car and started shooting, the guy who smeared shit on someone's face, the people who've been pushed onto tracks.
These incidents are _incredibly_ rare, but the way humans work doesn't let a lot of us shake off that perception of the subways being less safe than they used to be.
I'm not one of those people, I base my fears on statistics, but you can't expect every human being, especially smaller people, the elderly, and women to be as carefree.