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Recently there has been some discussion in the media about fare evasion, and I thought in light of @WhiningCoil's comment on low trust societies it might be of interest to you all.
Over the past five years the fare evasion rate on New York City's bus lines has risen from 20% to 50%. while there has also been a similar (but less dramatic) rise among subway customers.
Recently the MTA commissioned a study to investigate the psychology of fare evaders and The New York Post has picked this up and mocked the project.. The study broke down different "personas" of fare evaders like a software product manager might. The NYP felt that this was inane as the obvious conclusion was that scofflaws were simply motivated by a lack of enforcement:
I enjoyed this article by Manhattan Contrarian that criticizes the New York Post for completely ignoring race when discussing this issue, and pretending that lack of enforcement is the source of our woes.
I'll note as an amusing aside, that even the conservative Post uses an image of a White teenager for their illustration of a common fare evader.
However, I have to disagree with Francis Menton of The Manhattan Contrarian here when he writes the following:
The racial makeup of fare evaders is perfectly well known of course and actually quite openly acknowledged so long as it is being done by the right sorts of organizations for the right ends.
I also wonder why the Post refuses to ask why draconian fare enforcement measures are only now needed? Somehow the MTA functioned perfectly fine with its easily-avoidable turnstyles decades ago. To relate it back to WhiningCoil's comment, I can only say "I think the bottom line, is this is just what a low trust society looks like."
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.
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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