Over 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 plight. This story, on the other hand, irks me.
To set the stage: Yvette Stokes uses her 30-day MetroCard to procure a Select Bus Service receipt at 106th St. and 2nd Ave. Upon boarding, enforcement agents ask her for her proof of payment, and she obliges. Then, 72 blocks and 15-20 minutes later, another group of officers board the bus and again ask riders to procure the POP receipts. Ms. Stokes rummages around in her bag and pulls out a two-day-old receipt instead. “The officer was very agitated with this and started shouting at me,” she told The Post. “The very next thing he said was that I couldn’t hold up the bus — and then he ordered me off the bus.”
After exiting the bus, Stokes shows the officer the proper receipt, but he writes her up a $100 ticket anyway, ignoring her proffered receipt. The summons has since been dismissed, and the MTA claims the officer did nothing wrong. Yet, this response is unnecessarily hostile. By checking POP receipts multiple times one one bus route, police are making normal bus riders seem like criminals, and the office in this instance showed an utter lack of common sense. If the point of SBS is to convince riders to take the bus over subway-like distances, Transit and its agents must toe the fine line between proper enforcement and overbearing ticketing.
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