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This sounds like the NYPD working like the Mafia, no work and no show jobs, taking jobs that they know they're not gonna do or investigate. They're stealing from the city to make their officers and departments richer.
You get your car stolen, or robbed and you can't find a cop to even pretend they give a shit. But they're happy to take $150 million off our ass.
You're dead on. NYPD is entirely useless. I've had to call them before due to violent fights outside my door, they called back 3 hours later asking if the fight was still happening.
I love the ticket systems in places like Berlin, Helsinki, Heidelberg, and Tampere. They don't use turnstiles at all, just occasional onboard ticket checkers.
It's so much faster for large groups of people to move through the stations so it keeps people moving instead of piling up at a ticket machine, even ones as fast as those in London.
You don't need officers standing guard at turnstiles, just extra onboard sweeps to keep most people honest.
Even better is a whole free system like some cities are going to. LA is having a freeway widening project happening. If the money for that went to their public transit system, they could make it fare free for 20 years at the same price point as "just one more lane, bro" of freeway that will still be a parking lot anyway.
I know someone that grew up in LA. Their childhood home was demolished and turned into an extra lane for the freeway.
Same in Oslo. No turnstiles, you are just expected to have a valid ticket, (mainly digital) within the zone. And you can get checked at any time
Mass transit should be free if they have ads on it
Mass transit should be free and not have ads on it.
In fact, all advertising in public spaces (including things like billboards mounted on private property but aimed towards the street) should be prohibited.
If I were "dictator for a day" one of the odd things I would do is ban all billboards. I think this every time I drive down the highway.
In Washington State, it's relatively difficult to have billboards along highways. It's one of the reasons our state is still beautiful to travel across.
Every time I end up in other states that have much looser billboard placement laws it's just awful and I wonder how people can live like that.
For the public and environment policy that mass transit is made for (freeing up parking space; removing polluting cars from the road; reducing congestion; reducing carbon burn) yeah. Mass transit should have no usage cost
I'll accept public service adverts. Telling you about services, advertising health and well-being, telling you to keep your feet off the seats
Is the ad revenue on mass transit actually high enough to support its operation?(ignoring even maintenance or expansion, or the replacement of unrepairable vehicles)
It's not, and I don't even need to go look it up.
Operating a subway is expensive. Maintenance, new lines, new trains, you name it, it costs shitloads
I know this is a Captain Obvious moment but I'll bite anyway, just imagine how great it would be if we just socialized public transit and our tax dollars worked for us, instead of trying to incarcerate us.
I was going to say it is a socialized transit program, but apparently the NYC MTA is a "public benefit corporation," aka the bog standard neoliberal privatization fetish that oh-so-accidentally serves to funnel wealth to the C levels and boards.
Citations Needed did an episode about this. "Fare evasion" crackdown is a bullshit excuse to beef up cops and redirect public attention
I feel like you can make that case about sooo many 'crackdowns' because of the way crime statistics and reporting is done in America. But if that was true we'd eventually have declining violence rates in the face of over militarized police where the media focuses on spectacles of violence to justify the spendings. Good thing thats not what's happening right now /s.
Something isn't adding up here:
Fare evasion cost the MTA $690 million last year, according to a new agency study that recommends upping enforcement
Just casual news reading has shown different numbers here.
Edit: oh I get it hellgatenyc is looking for s story and saying that the people they caught only amounted to 104k in fares at like 3 bucks a fare or something around that that's a lot of people. I'm not a fan of the NYPD but no way they didn't deter way more than that by their presence. Whether or not you think policing fares is right this is bullshit sensationalism. Think for yourself.
At the same time, $150 million could fund a shitload of free or discounted rides for poor people if it was administered as a social program with the same decrease in fare skipping.
Public transit trips create positive externalities by reducing car trips. In order to maximize societal good, the best fare price for public transit is $0 for everybody.
Yup, public transit fares are regressive taxes.
A better city would have free public transit and pay for it by taxing the businesses that insist on nobody working remotely.
Can you imagine? Every business taxed according to the total transit time of their workers.
Either everyone lives in dense housing or everything becomes remote, it'd be amazing!
This is what I want my taxes to pay for.
Right... But they spent $89m to prevent 104k in shrinkage...
If you're the executive at Walmart who handles loss prevention, and you put $89m into a program that reduces shrinkage by $104k, your new duty position becomes "don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out". It's a gross mismanagement of public money, and while it was obviously glowed up considerably, that was what was implied In the title.
The lack of a comparison in overall losses specific to skipped fares before and after is a contemptible omission though, I'll definitely join you on that hill :)
Of the estimated $690 million annual loss, buses accounted for the largest share with $315 million, subway evasion cost $285 million, about $46 million was due to drivers avoiding tolls and commuter rail evasion totaled $44 million, the report said. Source
Subway losses were $285 mil (41% of the total you quoted) and "the state reimbursed the city for about $62 million" of the $151 mil OT pay (leaving $89 mil).
Overall, there were 48 fewer serious crimes like murder, rape and robbery reported in the subway system this year than in 2022, according to NYPD data. The biggest change was 65 fewer reported robberies, where someone stole property by using force or the threat of force. There were also seven fewer reported rapes this year and four fewer murders, according to the newly released data shared with Gothamist. Assaults were an exception, rising by 5%. There were 26 more assaults this year than 2022, according to data. Source
So numbers are the same.
And then there's this gem ...
The vast majority of New Yorkers ticketed and arrested for fare evasion this year – 82% and 92% respectively – were not white, according to NYPD data. That’s a pattern that’s stayed consistent since 2017, when the NYPD first started publicly reporting fare evasion arrest data. Black New Yorkers are 10% more likely now to be ticketed for fare evasion than they were six years ago.
Tell me again how "good" the NYPD is.
First, fantastic job tracking down the actually relevant stats rather than the person above you who was trying to debunk.
Second - and this would only make your argument stronger and I’m not saying you needed to go this far - we would need to see if there has been an overall drop in crime rates. The tough on crime types love to tout numbers that reflect general trends as if they’re a justification or proof of the effectiveness of their policies. You need to demonstrate using proper statistical analysis to show that the falloff can accurately be attributed to a given policy.
That's nothing. Trump never paid taxes for a decade on millions of dollars of income and property. No one bothered to catch him until it was convenient to not get a psycho president again.
It's not about the fares, it's about the control.
If I spent $150m in my private sector job and did not at least net in the positive, I'd be out right shit canned and black listed from the company, along with everyone who approved such a waste.
It's not about money, it's about sending a message. And also, being a clown.
Man they take that shit seriously. Roughly twenty years ago, I was headed for a train, which I paid for. I think the mechanics were that I bought a paper ticket that had a magnetic stripe on it, then put that into the turnstile to enter.
The turnstile ate the ticket, didn't let me go through, and didn't come back out.
So I hopped it.
No fewer than four NYPD were right up on me and they were not happy about the situation at all. They surrounded me I guess so I couldn't run?
I explained, and the only reason I got out of it was that some other people had seen me pay and attempt to put the ticket in and told the cops the same story I'd told them. This combined with my out of state license demonstrating that the whole thing was indeed new to me got them to let me go, but not without a very stern warning.
I really thought I was going down that night.
Cool, so the city paid for 4 people to sit and watch a turnstile for who knows how long to prevent, what, $100, $1000 in lost revenue?
It costs them $50/hr per cop (roughly). Is the argument really that this squad is stopping more than 60 people every hour from skipping fares?
I've seen no less than eight cops hiding around the corner from an open emergency door at Times Square. They truly are terrible.
They were so psyched they could, they never stopped to think about if they should?
Is farebeater what we’re calling it now?
Tbf I can do that without leaving my house.
imagine how much better the public transit in NY would have been with that 150 million.
What I'm hearing is if the fare was free they'd have saved at least $104,000 not including the salary of public servants that would be saved instead of spent on the same fare.
No, they would still have missed out on those 104k - but they would have saved 150M. That's .... yeah. A lot of school lunch meals.