For the past few months, the Daily News has continually beaten the drum of fare capture. The paper has focused on turnstile-jumpers and Select Bus Service violators, and while the pure numbers seem high, the MTA’s bleed rate doesn’t appear to be out of line with that suffered by most transit agencies. Last week, though, the News highlighted a problem that doesn’t get too much attention: MetroCard swiping scams.
The story is simple: Con men looking for a few quick bucks buy used, but not empty, MetroCards from tourists or unlimited ride cards, jam MetroCard Vending Machines and charge straphangers $2 per swipe. The fare is lower for those paying, and the folks selling the swipes pocket a few bucks — sometimes as much as $200 at a time. According to the Daily News article, riders at Sutphin Boulevard, a “hot spot” for vandalism and swipe scams, are fed up, but the cops do nothing about the scammers.”They break the [MetroCard] machines on purpose so that when you go in in the morning, only one machine works, and they’re ready for you to use one of their MetroCards,” a woman identified only as Erica said. “Nobody cares about it at al,..they always come back. They’re like roaches.”
The MTA says that Sutphin Boulevard is on their internal list of potential problem stations, and other tourist-heavy stations with or without agents have suffered as well. It is unclear how the authority plans to tackle the problem. “Our station agents would report any incidents of illegal swipe activity and they have done that in the past at that station, and we’ve also had some vandalism at that station,” an agency spokesperson said of Sutphin. “The vandalism can be an indicator, but not always, of swipe-selling.”
16 comments
It’s been all too clear over the past few years that the NYPD does not want to go after petty criminals. It’s much easier and cost-effective for the police and NYC Dept of Finance to go after licensed drivers who park six inches too close to a hydrant. They can write out a $135 ticket and they know that, since the driver is more often than not a tax-paying citizen, that the driver will pony up the cash. Why spend half the night processing paperwork for some skell who’se actually committing crimes and stealing revenue from the city when you can pull a “gotcha” on people who actually work for a living?
It’s times like this I miss Rudy Giuliani.
parking violations are given by a completely (and non-peace officer) division of the nypd. patrolmen don’t (or very rarely) write parking tickets. they’re usually busy conducing stop and frisks and getting their quotas met, which often don’t include cracking down on illegal swipe sales.
The cars, uniforms and tickets all say NYPD on them. If ticket-writing, non peace officer agents wrote gave out 10% as many tickets to fare beaters or swipe stealers, they’d make a pretty little chunk of change. But it would make agents actually work instead of holding their hand-held computers and scanning barcodes on car registrations for all of 10 seconds. They don’t even give you the courtesy of looking you in the eye or explaining why they are ticketing you. I’d love to see these NYPD agents try giving a similar ticket to a swipe-stealing skell. They’d get their ass kicked in about 2 seconds, which is why the NYPD (yes, NYPD) won’t go after these thieves.
a parking violation isn’t the same kind of crimial offense. i realize they’re all employees of the NYPD, but however aren’t allowed to issue tickets for just anything. in fact, it was a big to-do to have them be able to write tickets for blocking the box violations.
it’s a different kind of crime and summons to sell a metrocard swipe. a criminal violation, not a parking violation, which can oftentimes result in arrest, which traffic agents are NOT authorized to do.
The swipers have been working the closed booth stations all over Manhattan for the last 2 years. That’s why you see the yellow light announcing No Bills on the MVMs. The TA has a lot of their MVM repair crews coming in for the late tours after 4pm but the MVMs are usually disabled right after the morning rush and then they target tourists to buy their swipes so that the machines are sometimes unable to sell for cash for 8 or more hours. If the MVMs were fixed quicker and some arrests were made the swipers would be stopped and the TA would get this lost revenue.
At least for the AirTrain station at Jamaica, I hope tourists realize they can buy regular metrocards at those same machines to use for the subway too. That would be A LOT of machines for the swipes to bust up and i’m hoping swipers aren’t brazen enough to go after those too.
The only long-term solution for this is enforcement. But independently of enforcement, MTA management can reduce vandalism risk by encouraging people to use prepaid cards, i.e. unlimited monthlies.
I miss the days of the token suckers.
Or they could just make the subways and buses free.
Or give everyone unicorns and ponies. I want a pony!
Why not just get rid of the Unlimited cards? It may tick off a lot of people but it will A-Get the swipers to get a real job and B-Help curb the 9 billion dollar defecit that everyone in here are complaining about.
Because the per-swipe fare collection cost is the lowest when people use long-term unlimited cards.
Why can’t they require that passengers keep their fare media with them until they leave the subway, and issue a penalty fare to persons found in the subway without a fare medium that has been properly swiped in?
Most other transport systems can do this (even the Paris Métro which is also flat-fare with turnstiles at all stations), so why not New York?
If they did this, hardly anyone would risk buying a swipe as if someone did he/she risks being challenged for a ticket at their destination (or en route) and fined something like $100 if one is not forthcoming (or if a Metrocard is held but hasn’t been swiped in).
[…] missing their agents, and they’ll jam machines. In November, the MTA and NYPD started targeting stations from which they’ve received a high number of complaints. Sutphin Boulevard, which was […]
They need to put the Smartcards in ASAP to stop the illegal swipers.
& put the $1 new metrocard fee for now.