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 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.
Dunno how it works there, as I’ve never used public transport there, but here in Tampere we have ticket readers right next to tram doors and everyone taps their card / mobile on those to activate the ticket. Not easy to forget at all. Same in local trains.
The thing I hated about the Munich system was having to validate your ticket. My girlfriend and her friends got harassed and threatened by a cop because they didn’t know they had to validate the tickets they bought.
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.
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.
The problem with this approach is that the NYC subway cars in Manhattan and the surrounding areas are usually packed like to the point where you can’t even move. Also, so many people get on and off so quickly that it would be difficult to keep track of people.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah. Not just NY, either. About a decade back where I live we called the cops about a curb-stomping we witnessed living across the street from the local bar. We had our radio on. Here was the timeline.
We call and report it
Bouncer comes outside of the bar and says "I just got a call there’s a fight going on. You guys gotta break it up; the cops are coming"
Wait 5 minutes, as the victim gets told to leave and “go clean up” and the attacker walks back into the bar.
Dispatch (who has been quiet) reports on radio that somebody reported a fight in front of that bar
Wait 5 more minutes (did I mention the station is about 0.5 miles from this bar? In a small town with no traffic?)
One officer shows up, looks around without asking anyone anything
Radio back to dispatch “no fight here”
The end. We identified ourselves in our report, the officer declined to visit and question us. There were at least 5 eyewitnesses, and we live in a town that they’d probably talk… but nope.
Isn’t it absolutely asinine that new york voters literally elected a fuckin cop from the NYPD, which is well-known as being one of the most corrupt and racist police departments in the nation?
I honestly couldn’t believe it even after all the 2020 protests against American law enforcement.
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.
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.
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.
He’s saying the rich don’t ride the subway and if they do, they buy a ticket. So a wage based scaling infringement system would be borderline useless, because you’d likely be issuing a lot of fines to the homeless and working class
Rich people steal more than poor people. Not even getting into things like wage theft, they just do, so yes, they absolutely would jump a turnstile and laugh when you tried to punish them with a non-income based fine.
This is barking up the wrong tree. I mean these fines are hitting people who are too poor to pay. They should go to the rich people’s tree and find stuff to find there. Illegal logging? Illegal dumping? Price gauging, illegal businesses, money laundering, illegal product importation etc.
It would be depend on what the percentage is. If it’s low enough that the poor could pay it, but still substantial enough for you to not want to pay it, rich or not, it would be more effective than the current system.
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.
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.
I know it can be difficult to search for answers when you have questions. I did a deep dive into the subject matter, and found the following info hidden within the first sentence:
Overtime pay for cops in New York’s subway system increased from $4 million in 2022 to $155 million over the same period in 2023, according to an analysis by Gothamist.
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.
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)
Yes exactly this. Car infrastructure is the most expensive transportation infrastructure per capita possible. It’s why the US spends tons of public money on transportation and has just crumbling highways to show for it.
Most commutes are not between major cities, they are within metro regions, so the size of the US doesn’t explain the terrible infrastructure. Besides, for decades now, most of Europe has no political impediments to travel, same as the US. People can commute from Berlin to Madrid as if it were one country. Density matters, but not the size of the country.
As for density, there are many US regions that are of similar density and distance apart as European cities, such as DC-NY-Boston, or Portland-Seattle-Vancouver, SF-LA, etc.
It’s so expensive that the NYC subway used to be multiple private railroad companies but the business just wasn’t feasible (at a reasonable price) when the market had a downturn - which is why the city eventually took it over.
This is why the track geographies are so odd in NYC
For bus systems at least the amount fares cover is typically on the order of 5% give or take in the US. The fact that bus fares exist at this point in the US has got everything to do with emotions, narratives and a political stance against providing a social safety net and nothing to do with cold hard economics.
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
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.
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
edit sorry I have feelings about this lol, I didn’t mean to send all this energy at you, more like I needed to howl into the void
This is such an enraging narrative and I encounter it all the time. My city has lots of homeless because the climate is temperate (and for other reasons but not the point of this post). My city also has free bus transit (no fares no nothing).
People ALL the time hem and haw to me about being concerned if we have free transit it will be “overrun” by homeless. Often it is people I am talking to about mass transit living in my own city who have zero clue we have even have free bus transit.
At the end of the day if you are “concerned about the homeless” using the bus too much or something you know the best solution? Use the damn bus, not only will you actually see with your own eyes that homeless are just using the bus like everybody else, you help push the needle of what the average bus user looks towards you and away from whoever you are imagining as bad.
Free mass transit is the foundation of the best cities in the past and future, hamstringing transit because of a fear of homeless “ruining” it is the definition of shooting ourselves in the foot for no reason.
Yes I see homeless on the bus a lot, I see lots of people on the bus. There tends to be a lot of humans on the bus.
I use the bus daily. And mentally ill homeless walking around pointing their finger at your kid and saying “bang!” Or telling your wife “I wanna touch you!” Is not ok. Those are the ones I’m talking about. The ones that make their issues into everyone else’s. When you start threatening my family, my sympathy for your situation and mental health vanishes
I have rarely if ever encountered homeless like that. Sure it makes sense to get upset about that, but a lot of people’s perception is that every single homeless person is like that.
So, give them homes. Tiny homes are cheap and for most homeless people not having a house or address is the number one reason they can’t get a house or address. The others need to be in a care facility. It should take a true renegade to remain homeless. But we value profits over everything else.
The biggest homeless issue in my city isn’t with the homeless who want help, it’s with the mentally ill ones who don’t want help or are too sick to ask. There’s really no way to deal with that tier of homeless unless you do it by force, which most anti homelessness activists are against.
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