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.
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
Another star for Norway. If I could get family issues disentangled, I’d be applying for jobs there in a heartbeat.
A better reason to make all these free is that they are largely funded by taxes in the first place.
71% for the MTA in NY.
https://cbcny.org/research/how-much-do-city-taxpayers-really-contribute-mta
Save money by getting rid of the ticket infrastructure and enforcement and encourage use.
I wish the UK would go to the German system. Particularly the 50EUR/m unlimited slow train travel, that’s goddamned amazing.
I’d consider getting rid of my car if we had that here.LA does have turnstile-free trains though.
Nice! I haven’t had the opportunity to visit their system yet.
I was right near a station when I lived in North Hollywood, so we took the train constantly. I wish there was a train to the beach when I lived in L.A. because that was one of the big letdowns about the train system, but there is now! I don’t remember how much a ticket cost, but it was pretty affordable.
Berliner here. That’s not better at all. It makes it much easier to forget to validate the ticket, and the people who control are usually assholes.
IDK about that, have you ever been handcuffed and arrested by an armed uniformed police officer because you didn’t spend $3? Lots of people in NYC have. The transit system in Berlin sounds similar to the one we have where I live (not NYC). Here, you can get a fine (a couple hundred dollars iirc) and kicked off the train, but that’s it. Not pleasant, certainly enough to keep me honest, but a damn sight better than having a police record and maybe getting shot by a cop.
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.
Actually the Metrolink trains that run to/from LA to/from the other nearby counties/suburban areas all work the same way, no turnstiles, just conductors checking for tickets on them.
Some local community cities even subsidize the monthly fees for the Metrolink trains.
And once the Metrolink trains get to downtown LA’s Union Station you take the subway to different areas (yes, LA does have a subway system as well).
That’s all great. I have been hearing about the LA transit build out for a while and I’m excited to see more investment for the region. It’s one of the largest metro regions in the world and deserves to have one of the best public transit systems to go with that.
If they could just get that Vegas high speed rail line to actually reach into downtown instead of stopping 40 miles out, it would be a serious upgrade to the Intercity efforts.
If they could just get that Vegas high speed rail line to actually reach into downtown instead of stopping 40 miles out, it would be a serious upgrade to the Intercity efforts.
Well, people don’t commute from Los Angeles to Las Vegas to work daily, which is what I understand this conversation is about, commuters paying their fares (or not).
Having said that, I totally agree with you.
You’d think that’d be a no-brainer, but I’m sure there’s probably legal reasons for it, or fighting the legal reasons so it’s costs reasons.
Maybe it’s just they don’t want to have the regional airports lose money from the lost fares to Vegas. /shrug
It’s going to be about cost of construction. You can build a lot of miles across the desert for the same price as a mile in the city. Getting all the way into the core of one of these expensive real estate markets in the world can’t be cheap. I hope they manage to make it happen at some point, though.
I can also assume the regional airports are also not overly pleased with the HSR build out too, but reducing car trips and plane flights is basically the core goal of the train.
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.
At least last I was there, wholly illegal in Vermont. You also never see it in Norway.
Maine is a billboard-free state
Many cities have taken baby steps, such as prohibiting tall signs. More steps to go
I do want to leave the Gentlemans club advert with an anime bunny girl on it though. Its funny.
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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 don’t care. I just hate ads.
The fares themselves usually account for a tiny portion of the overall revenue. For example, in 2021 the MTA had $7.8 Billion in revenue. And they are fighting for $100k of lost fares
McDonalds should show ads instead of charging me for a burger
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!
lol the wealthiest people that work in New York don’t live in New York, they mostly live in Connecticut and other close states. I’m all for it. Tax the companies that need their execs to show up the most, based on their salary, and then watch the boomers that don’t like working remote get feisty about the tax, especially because they usually have equity in the company they work for
This is what I want my taxes to pay for.
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.
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 :)
One thing I miss about Reddit is the vetting of news sites on the major news sub.
Whether right or wrong, this “news” article comes off as pretentious and childish.
I just want facts. If I’m reading the news, I want the facts from the news site, and I’ll get the opinions from forums.
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.
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.
imagine how much better the public transit in NY would have been with that 150 million.
They were so psyched they could, they never stopped to think about if they should?
Citations Needed did an episode about this. “Fare evasion” crackdown is a bullshit excuse to beef up cops and redirect public attention
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Thankfully there are a lot of grifters so at least we hope corruption reduced their arsenal
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.
No.
That’s not “all fares added up to 104 thousand”, that’s “the fares of people jumping turnstiles and walking in emergency exits added up to 104 thousand”.
Keeping the status quo of not replacing turnstiles would have been cheaper. But making fares free would be more expensive.
Which isn’t to say that it wouldn’t be worth it. Public transit is hugely valuable due to the economies of agglomeration it enables and the infrastructure you don’t have to build because of it. It benefits drivers, retail businesses, employers, etc.
An R160 subway car can hold 240 people; they run in 4 or 5 car sets. The E train has 15 trains per hour during peak times, and runs 10 car trains. So that’s a capacity of ~36k people, and it shares tracks with some other lines at various points
A highway lane can support 2.2 k people per hour in free flowing traffic. That single subway line can move as many people as a 16 lane highway, assuming that there’s no bottlenecks at the exits. Plus the cost of all the parking garages for 36k cars.
And this is why Seattle mostly ignores people who skip out on fares.
The Capital Hill train is totally useless, but I love that I’ve never paid for it, so… Win win?
Capitol Hill train? Do you mean the light rail, which visits many neighborhoods and even other cities?
It’s not about the fares, it’s about the control.
If you own a house but can barely afford it, this is how you become homeless. Ofcourse, a new body would come into the story to purchase your home from the bank after it reposese it.
