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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34407 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.

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.

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