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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34405 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 13, 2023

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I think the reason that American subways end up as shitholes is the confluence of a lack of rules enforcement, and the relative cheapness of a ticket. In most large American cities, there’s no bouncers on the train. If you’re blatantly shooting up, causing a disturbance, committing a crime, etc., nobody’s going to throw you off the train.

Part of this does fall on the left which has a weird sort of allergy to rules, no matter how well meaning. They often work against rules to keep decorum in public places, even when those rules would make those places more useful and accessible to people who want to be there. The idea of throwing a violent drug user off a metro for harassment is abhorrent to a certain subset of the liberal left. So the trains get filled with thieves, drug users, and mentally disturbed people. Nobody else wants to use the trains because they don’t want to be attacked, robbed or harassed.

You could also sort of fix the problem by raising prices. If a ticket (assuming enforcement of having a ticket) were $10 or more, then paying $10 to ride from one end of town to the other over and over becomes a lot less possible for people who have no jobs or regular income. At $2 a three-hour ride, you can basically move onto the train as a home for the day for $16. At $10, it’s $80, and thus isn’t that much cheaper than a hotel. Make it $20 and you’re now too expensive to be an ad-hoc cheap home for people.

Part of this does fall on the left which has a weird sort of allergy to rules, no matter how well meaning.

They do? The same people who write humongous lists of micro-agressions, lengthy manuals about how to ask somebody for their gender without offending them, institute Rules of Conduct, Diversity Statements and Bias Incident Reporting Policies? The same that regularly rewrite books and change old TV shows to remove anything not matching the current directives of the Party? I think they are plenty fine with rules - as long as it is their rules, that they have developed and have all the power of enforcement over them. Replace violent smelly drug addict on a train with a clean-shaven white supremacist calling other people n-word, and see how fast the rules enforcement will be called in. They are just fine with you being harassed by a violent druggie because you are the oppressor and the druggie is the oppressed, so you get what you deserve.

If a ticket (assuming enforcement of having a ticket) were $10 or more,

Who cares, they'd jump the gate or just break it. If there's no police around, who'd stop them?

At $2 a three-hour ride, you can basically move onto the train as a home for the day for $16. At $10, it’s $80, and thus isn’t that much cheaper than a hotel. Make it $20 and you’re now too expensive to be an ad-hoc cheap home for people.

Yeah, but the problem is that this penalises the honest but poor people who need to use public transport to get to their jobs. Make it expensive enough to be a deterrent, and you deter people for whom $10 is a chunk out of their day's wages, so they don't travel anymore. While the criminals and homeless and druggies just learn how to fare-dodge etc. and public transport is abandoned to them, and goes even further downhill.

Give a discount to those who pass a drug test.

I think other countries subsidize transit tickets heavily and don't see those issues, or at least not nearly to the same extent. I've even been to some places where the transit is free to use, and don't have those problems, because there aren't homeless thugs wandering around (admittedly these places have some unique advantages, but still--actually doing something about homelessness and crime seems like a better idea to me). Unless you actually enforce rules against skipping a fare, it wouldn't even accomplish anything (it would probably be counterproductive, since you would have fewer regular passengers, and therefore a higher rate of the indigent). And in that case, why not just enforce existing statutes?

I feel like you might need to walk this one back. The metros in other countries are often shockingly cheap (for example, 25 cents in Mexico City) and vagrants don't pay anyway. Cost is not the issue here and in fact raising the cost will make things worse as it will provide even more incentive for normal people to stay away.

Vagrants don't pay for tickets, they hop the turnstile or otherwise evade the fares.

I think the issue there is that theoretically you are doing this for the sake of the people using the system, and I don't know if most of them would be willing to pay 5x to 10x the current cost of the ticket.

Might be a work around where single tickets are much more expensive but an annual pass or something can be bought at a more reasonable rate. Could also do some kind of partnership with hotels and/or airlines to provide discounted tickets so that tourists could still utilize the system.

Though the biggest practical obstacle would still be that

(assuming enforcement of having a ticket)

Is a big assumption. I think if you could get policy in place to enforce that, you could probably just take the next step and get policy in place to get the people causing problems off the public transportation and not need to bother with too many pricing adjustments.

Might be a work around where single tickets are much more expensive but an annual pass or something can be bought at a more reasonable rate.

I'm not seeing how having annual passes fulfils MaiqTheTrue's intended goal of preventing homeless people using the train as a home. They would, if anything, benefit more from the discount than commuters would.

In theory yes, since they could just buy the one pass and have it cheaper on the per ride basis.

Practically, I don't think that would be the case. Homeless drug addicts are not known for their ability for long-term planning of finances and so would have a hard time getting the lump sum together (well, getting the lump sum and not then using that money for drugs), while having a few bucks leftover on a daily basis is easier for them.

Edit: My thoughts go to the "boots theory" of poverty, taken up to 11.

The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet. This was the Captain Samuel Vimes "Boots" theory of socioeconomic unfairness.

That doesn't explain whay this is a problem in America. Seoul Subways are cheaper (1/40000 median income for a one way ride) and also lack bouncers (police enter the train 5 stops after an incident). We have a few screamers and a lot of drunks but hard drug use on the train does not exist.

We have a few screamers and a lot of drunks but hard drug use on the train does not exist.

Is this not just a case of geographic determinism though? America's hard drugs problem exists because it has a border with Mexico, not because it has any particular social structure / public transportation pricing. Ain't no smugglers bringing coke and coke sellers across the Korean DMZ.

Does every country with a large uncontrolled land border have a drug problem? It's possible.

America’s hard drugs problem probably does exist because of its issues with its social structure, though, and the badly run and impoverished war zone to our south is just what happens to be able to take advantage.

I think a decent fraction of America's troubles in this regard happen because our rules enforcement mechanisms target the middle class. There is an entire class of people (including those disturbing your train ride) who are functionally judgement proof. They aren't afraid of a fine because they can't pay it anyway, and so aren't dissuaded from all sorts of anti-social behavior.

There is also a very middle-class sensibility that instinctively opposes criminal punishment for things that can mostly be enforces with fines.

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