Yeah, it’s not just “get where you’re going alive” that should be the goal.
In 2018 DC decriminalized fare-jumping (over the mayor’s veto) and told officers that they couldn’t ask for ID from people who did jump gates, citing disparate impact on young minorities. In 2023, after plummeting ridership, they cracked down on fare skipping.
Results— assaults fall by 40 percent. Homicides virtually disappear. Vehicle thefts and attempted thefts cut by half (to explain here, the people from the city who were taking the train to steal cars at park and ride lots in the burbs weren’t riding the train anymore). The crime that went up? Fare evasion.
Now DC is expanding to crack down on buses, too and I expect better results. But it’s slow moving and you still see fare jumpers taking their chances, anti-social behavior, etc.
This may sound like a success story but it’s really a fail story because for four years the local authorities in a first world stubbornly stuck by a patently asinine law to prove their ideological bonfides and let ridership and revenue plummet before reversing course. All they had to do was stop hitting their dicks with a hammer.
It turns out that the One Simple Trick of getting rid of rule-breakers means there’s less rules being broken and fucking up everyone’s day.