A passenger on the B46 who refused to pay his fare and was denied a transfer stabbed the driver to death, CityRoom reports. Edwin Thomas was pronounced dead this afternoon, and this shocking murder is sure to raise concerns about the safety of bus drivers who are lefty very exposed to the whims of their passengers. The B46 features the highest rate of fare evasion of all the city’s buses.
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that is awful! i hope they caught that bastard!! so senseless.
Wow. The Times article says that bus drivers are instructed not to confront passengers that don’t pay. That makes fare evasion pretty easy.
I’m shocked that someone would kill a bus driver who wouldn’t hand him a transfer after he didn’t pay. The Times article said this was the first murder of an on-duty bus driver since 1981, so luckily such incidents are rare.
Clearly, this murdered is more than a little unhinged. That’s for sure.
Fare enforcement on buses is necessarily weak. It’s a flaw but what are you going to do? Driver safety is paramount.
Necessarily weak? The Times reports that there are 2,000 MTA security guards who work the subway system, in part to catch fare evaders, but that there are have been no guards specifically assigned to buses. It sounds as if the MTA has been running on the honor system. I wonder how much money the system has been loosing on bus fare evasion.
Security guards, or transit police? A radio and a funny hat is not an effective deterrent to the mentally ill and imminently violent.
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