Try this one for size: Upper East Side marketing director is late for a meeting. She sees a Select Bus pull up to her stop at E. 79th St. and Second Ave., and without paying, she hops on the bus. The driver tells her she will need proof-of-payment, but she can’t get off because the doors are closed. The driver, Daryn Mayer claims, allegedly says, “OK. Don’t pay. Ride for free.” He later denies saying that.
At the next stop, enforcement officers board while Mayer does not get out to pay. She can’t produce the receipt and gets slapped with a $100 ticket. She’s challenging the fine, but the MTA has little sympathy for her. “When asked by the inspector, the bus operator denied he had let her on the bus, and said he explicitly told her she needed to pay her fare. At that point, she was removed from the bus and received a summons,” authority spokesman Kevin Ortiz said. She also, Ortiz said, “became combative, responding with an expletive.”
The story in The Post, linked above, seems designed to elicit sympathy in Mayer, but I can’t find much in her story. Boarding a Select Bus without pre-paying is akin to hopping the turnstile. You aren’t excused from paying the fare because the train might leave, and the same applies to the bus. Select Bus Service has been up and running since early October now, and ignorance of the law is no defense.
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While it does seem like she is lying, I do question why they don’t have fare boxes on the bus. How hard would it be? Then people that are running up to the bus while it’s arriving could buy a ticket onboard, what’s wrong with that? They could make it cost a little bit more to deter everyone from doing it, like they do on MetroNorth and LIRR. They could put the box in the middle of bus so it doesn’t create a back-up near the doors. She’s still wrong, but it’s a legitimate criticism.
The problem is that people would get on, and then wait until they see a fare enforcement officer to buy a ticket. If no fare enforcement officer comes along, they get a free ride.
If she truly did intend to pay the fare, the driver is partially to blame. He should’ve opened the door and told her that he was going to leave without her because she didn’t have the ticket. It would’ve been up to her whether to stay on and risk getting caught, or to get off, buy the ticket, and wait for the next bus.
Like most problems you could think of with POP, this has already been solved in countries where it’s standard (scroll to the bottom of the page).
The MTA is scamming people by making them pay twice. For example, when you pay with a metrocard, you automatically get a tranfer, however with these select buses, that metrocard with that transfer cannot be used. You have to pay for a ticket to board the bus. Therefore, the City of New York and the MTA are taking advantage of commuters.
By calling her a fare-beater you are clearly taking sides. Sounds more like a he said/she said story. The SBS is new enough that you might not think to check if you are running on to a bus to see if it is a regular bus or SBS (some of the new models are not SBS, just regular M15s). And I regularly see a) passengers hop in the back door and go to the front to pay and b) drivers wave a passenger in who can’t get the MetroCard to work/find exact change/etc. Her story is plausible. Obviously, the prudent thing for her to do would have been to wait for the next bus, but the scorn (and fine) being heaped on her for what she did is a little out of proportion. Unless, of course, you assume she’s lying. And publicists never lie, right?
A more humanitarian approach might be to simply require inspectors to also sell tickets, a la LIRR conductors. And as with a ticket bought aboard a train, the price could be jacked up considerably. Just not all the way up to $100. The inspection process is inherently time-consuming anyway, so maybe it could also serve as an additional point of sale. The last thing the MTA needs these days is more irate riders / voters.
By the way, what happens if a person doesn’t have the fare on a commuter rail train? Do they get fined if they don’t have the money, or do they simply get kicked off at the next stop?
They get kicked off at the next stop. If they refuse to leave, the conductor then contacts the police.
When I was a lot younger, and in a Tokyo train station, I took what I thought would be a quick peek inside a bullet train. The doors closed behind me and it was off on its high speed sojourn. I had neither a ti nor ready cash to buy one.
When the conductor came for tickets, he quickly sized up my situation, and without hesitation wrote out an absolutely free round trip ticket to & from the train’s first stop. I got back to Tokyo niether humiliated nor broke. And with a newfound appreciation for the common sense that seems to abide everywhere but New York.
Not true for Metro North (at least as of a few years ago), can’t speak for NJ Transit or LIRR. Often Metro North will write up a receipt for you and you’ll pay by mail.
That defeats the whole purpose of POP. LIRR and Metro North can afford to sell tickets on the train, because there are conductors on every train. On the SBS there are only irregular checks, and the fine is so high to deter people from fare evasion despite the irregularity of the checks — basically the expected cost of fare evasion (fine*frequency of checks) should be higher than the ticket price.
On a side issue, commuter rail systems should switch to POP as well, because it would allow running trains cheaper (with only one person), and thus more often. Use RER and S-Bahn as an example (which incidentally have higher farebox recovery ratios as well).
The Paris RER has faregates (which people routinely jump anyway), and a low farebox operating ratio, as is routine in France. But the provincial TER networks and the Geneva RER use POP.
Yes, but if you go further out, the ‘gates’ don’t actually keep you from entering without paying. For example at the station where the polytechnique is, there are no turnstiles etc., just a ticket validator — I’d consider that POP. But yes, it’s a mixed system.
We could avoid this whole hassle with properly funded fare free transit, get rid of the need for the drivers to police the bus, get rid of the cost of the fare machines and the waste the receipts produce, increase the overall speed of the transit system, get rid of the need to have employees lug the money to and fro and count it, and encourage ridership which reduces congestion, pollution and road ware and tear.
No one ever wants to have that argument though because OMG SOCIALISM BOOT STRAPS.
“OMG SOCIALISM”
😀
I don’t want to hear this argument because it’s totally bunk. The best industry practices minimize fare collection costs, to the point that the benefits of going fare-free are nil. A system the size of New York City Transit can and should generate profits, ensuring that transit plans last more than one election cycle.
It’s also possible that the driver did make that statement but meant it sarcastically. He probably meant,”OK, take your chances on getting a summons”.
Sounds like Daryn Mayer was totally in the wrong.
According to the article, she jumped on the Select Bus from a rear set of doors. If she truly believed this was a “regular” bus, then she should have boarded from the front door.
Even worse, if she thought it was a regular bus, then it means she was planning to skip paying the fare.
But she went to the front to pay the fare, though.
If she went to the front to “pay the fare”, then she should have had her money ready before she got on the bus. Not just hop on because the bus was going to leave. If she discovered she didn’t have money for the bus, then that’s too bad for her, she should have never gotten on. Obviously, she was just trying to scam the system; and does it say in a different article that she went to the front to pay? Or did the bus driver just catch her and tell her she had to pay?
She rolled the dice and lost.
When I went to law school in Newark every year there would invariably be someone at school who would try to beat the fare on the Newark City Subway. After saving $1.25 a couple of times, they’d eventually get nailed with a $125 ticket . . . then wail and rage over the injustice of it all.
Pay up, Ms. Mayer.
[…] the weekend, I wrote a not-so-sympathetic post on a woman who jumped the fare and bemoaned getting caught. I compared her actions to jumping the turnstile in the subway, and I don’t feel bad for her […]
So stupid…why would she get on the bus if she couldn’t pay? Even if the bus driver told her to ride for free, it’s only cause she was stupid and got on and couldn’t get off. She should have just gotten off at the next stop. That’s what happens when you try to cheat the system. I doubt she just didn’t have money….she should have had her money out before even stepping on the bus as so to not inconvenience the people behind her and make her wait. No one should be sympathetic to her. If she got to ride for free, then everyone should get to ride for free. There’s no privilege.