The NYC subway is using AI to detect fare dodgers
The NYC subway is using AI to detect fare dodgers
The MTA claims the software doesn’t flag fare evaders to the police.
Mass transit should be free.
Fare evasion is like stealing bread. It's a crime of desperation.
This kind of budgetary indulgence only indicates the MTA doesn't much like the public of the city it serves.
Nah definitely not. If you're that desperate where are you even going on the subway? I've literally seen homeless people pay the fare. The only time I'd consider it justifiable is if you're in a rush, the train is right their, and your payment isn't working. Otherwise like what, where you gonna go and what you gonna do if you can't even afford $2.75?
If it was free, conservatives would put more effort into killing it off like they did in the 60s and 70s when they killed off trains and subways in a bunch of cities, killed off the trolley systems in several cities, etc. Otherwise their donors would lose too much money on people switching from driving. But yeah, it's almost entirely funded by taxes anyway. Would be logical to make it 100% funded, but keeping a small fare keeps it a smaller target of conservatives.
Maybe they should start electing people to charge property taxes correctly to those ultra luxury condos.
Local mass transit should be free. It is already really heavily subsidized, often almost entirely subsidized, so it wouldn’t cost as much as you think.
America won't achieve that with such low tax rates
Mass transit barely exists in most of America.
Yes. Interestingly US taxes aren't even low if you factor in what you have to pay for directly, compared to what other countries pay though taxes.
Mass transit cannot be free.
It should however be without toll. It can quite reasonably be funded with tax.
But free? No. Someone somewhere has to pay for the infrastructure and operations.
Free to use, funded by taxes. Like how healthcare should work.
This seems like needless nitpicking. The end result is the same, it's still free at the point of use.
I'm curious how much of the budget is covered by fares. I think here in Europe it tends to be roughly 50%. But the trains are much better than NYC and the fares are cheaper.
this
It's a service that costs money to maintain
I REALLY don't like even more cameras tracking everyone (because that is the real purpose of this) but... that ship has sailed.
Tangential: Maybe a decade ago in the UK I had to catch a train. Smaller station and their ticket booth was empty and the machines were broken. Looked around, awkwardly waved at a camera, and just got on the next train. When I arrived at my destination, I hopped off and made a beeline to the ticket booth to explain what happened and make even.
As I am walking away from the platform I see three burly ass guys rush to the now empty train and start searching it. And when I start talking to the ticket counter the girl just starts laughing. Apparently they had detected I had not paid a fare and were going to hunt me down. And I literally walked past the security guards as they rushed it.
Nobody detected you and went to find you. That...just isn't a thing. Fare evasion here in the UK is handled by checking tickets. I don't know what you saw, but it wasn't what you thought it was
On San Francisco MUNI broken machines mean rides are free. It was a common policy in the States taken advantage by a penny protest in the mid 20th century, in which a fare increase by pennies was responded to by riders paying exclusively in pennies, quickly jamming the machines.
DDG won't find it since Daniel Penny recently killed someone in NYC by choke hold in the subway system, so all the news is about that.
Wow guess we need the lemmy equivalent of /r/thathappened now.
The title should be "NYC wastes money on software that doesn't work rather than reducing fares or eliminating them entirely".
what a great use of resources 😒
I haven't paid for the NYC subway or bus for probably 15 years... XD
I hope that's cause you moved out of NYC 15 uears ago. Otherwise fuck you, this is why we can't have nice things. Why do some people only accept paying for things if we force it out of their paycheck instead of just when they use it?
2.75x4 per day, 5 days a week, 15 years, I've saved over $40,000 XD thanks nyc
😂😂😂😂😂