- cross-posted to:
- politics@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- politics@lemmy.world
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.
bruh they think it like a DBZ fight or something 💀
“Yeah officer they’re still there and they’ve been monologing for two episodes, come now, they’re distracted.”
“Come quickly before he remembers the good memories he made with his friends and get a power up!”
Brooooo, super off topic but seeing you name and profile pic got me fired up, I love ocelots.
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.
Mass transit should be free if they have ads on it
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
Operating a subway is expensive only when you don’t compare it to operating a city on cars shrugs
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.
Might also be because of how massive the US is with relatively big distances between big cities
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
It varies. Usually fares are just there to ration use of the mass transit, providing less than a third of its cost (ignoring capital)
Also: why would you ration transit? You want as many people as possible to use it
No one’s so cheap they cycle instead. Those who cycle do so for health. We could free up there roads for the die hard drivers
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
I don’t care. I just hate ads.
McDonalds should show ads instead of charging me for a burger
My city’s transit is already being treated like a homeless shelter, so having free transit would be amazing but a disaster.
Transit should be free and the money spent implementing the fare-collection system should be spent on housing the homeless instead.
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.
They’re against the old school mental institutions that abused people. They very much advocate for concentrating services and shelters so homeless people aren’t trying to get all over the city for that stuff. Psychologists and Pharmacies would absolutely be included in those services.
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.
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.
What sort of country would it be if the police wasn’t trying to ruin anyone’s life on a daily basis?
Citations Needed did an episode about this. “Fare evasion” crackdown is a bullshit excuse to beef up cops and redirect public attention
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.
It’s not about the fares, it’s about the control.
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.
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.
deleted by creator
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.
Jesus, someone call the burn unit
No point, they might as well of been thrown into the sun.
deleted by creator
Dude just be wrong
Thankfully there are a lot of grifters so at least we hope corruption reduced their arsenal
It’s not about money, it’s about sending a message. And also, being a clown.
Don’t forget the corruption.
- what message is that?
- Who are the targets of said message?
More rhetoric than actually asking, I think I have a pretty good idea on both.
It’s referencing a meme.
I love that scene… well that whole movie actually.
Message received, they are clowns.
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?
Is farebeater what we’re calling it now?
Tbf I can do that without leaving my house.
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?
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.