On the heels of a report that the MTA is losing $31 million to fare-jumpers, one State Senator wants to jack up the penalty. Charles Fuschillo, a Nassau County Republican, has proposed to raise the fine for fare-jumpers from $100 to $500, and he wants scofflaws who fail to pay the fine in a timely fashion to be penalized an additional $100.
Fuschillo, who has submitted a bill with these proposed changes, says he has the MTA’s bottom line in mind. “Fare-paying riders are being forced to pay the multi-million tab for those who are trying to beat the system. At a time when every dollar counts, the MTA and its riders can’t afford to pay for freeloading fare-beaters. Raising the fines for fare evasion will create a stronger deterrent by making the cost of an illegal free ride far more expensive,” he said.
The bill, which has been referred to the Senate Rules Committee, is numbered S05870 and is available here. The $500 fine would likely to be high enough to serve as a serious deterrent.
28 comments
How many cops do you really think are going to issue a $500 ticket — more than a week’s pay for most of the folks who are dodging fares — to people who will be crying about how it will be a life-wrecking event?
How do we plan to collect from people who say they lack the money and do lack the money? Allow them to work it off paying them $10 an hour for repainting graffiti? Allow them to work it off paying them $10 an hour to clean stations?
I’m not against this in theory, and I actually think that offering people the option to pay or to work solves the problem of ruining the lives of people who literally cannot afford this.
But I also know enough about human nature to know that most cops will have a lot of trouble issuing this ticket and society will have a lot of trouble mustering the will to enforce a penalty this severe against people who refuse to pay. The non-payers, for the most part, are going to be poor and the very liberal populace of NYC will have a lot of trouble forcing people on food stamps to cough up $500 and they’re not going to force anyone to work. We don’t even force felons to work in prison.
Society is always outlawing things and creating big penalties that it has no intention of following and it only creates contempt for the law.
Initial offer: $500
Counteroffer: $150
Compromise: $200
Compromise:
1st time offender: $50
Repeat offender: $500
If you can’t afford a $500 fine, there’s a very simple way to avoid it: Obey the law.
It’s a myth that people turn to crime for economic reasons. Criminals commit crimes, often because they’re lazy or stupid or both.
Anyway, the point here isn’t to collect $500 fines. It’s to deter people from jumping the turnstiles.
I think the vast majority of fare evaders couldn’t tell you what the fine is. It is not as if they make a carefully calibrated decision that the risk of paying $100 is OK, but the risk of paying $500 is not.
Visitors to this website are atypical: we’re transit geeks. The average person doesn’t memorize the list of offenses and the fine for each.
No, people don’t know offhand what the fine is. But once someone gets hit with a steep penalty, he might think hard about committing the same offense again.
Also, they can post signs warning people what the penalty is.
I agree. Excessively large penalties will just lead to more forgiveness by the few enforcement officers. I’d rather see stepped up enforcement with the current fines than ridiculous ones which are not proportional to the offense.
Fare evaders are one thing I have little sympathy for. The fine needs to be set high enough that its not a discount from the fares even if you get caught.
Here in CA. there is a $491.00 car pool violation. Its an excellent deterent.
I guess the blow up doll bsuiness in CA is booming…
I support this. I have no sympathy for fare evaders. Zero. I’m sorry, but the fare is the fare, no exceptions. Also, while we’re at it, sentence all graffiti artists to a couple of hundred hours of community service per year. I’m sick of their crap. 4 Ave on the Culver is in the process of being renovated and one of the towers above the Manhattan-bound platform, just renovated with new brick, is already covered with ugly black squiggly line graffiti.
Graffiti “artists” are willing to risk their lives to put their mark on billboards, tunnel walls, track equipment, etc. (remember the kid who was vandalizing a switch-case and was hit and killed by an LIRR train?). If losing one’s life isn’t a deterrent, then neither will be a fine. I seriously believe the chances of getting killed while vandalizing is greater than the chance of getting caught. What we need is enforcement. Both in reference to vandalism and fare-evasion.
The fine can be $5,000 and it won’t make a difference unless there’s more enforcement of the fare evasion law. People jump the fare because they can get away with it, not because it’s only a $100 fine.
Put undercover cops by every turnstile for a month or two and fare evasion will go down significantly more than raising the fine to $500.
Do you have any idea how many cops it would take to cover EVERY turnstile?? If you look back at last week’s article, they do issue a fair number of fare evasion tickets. However the fine is low enough where, even if you do pay it, you pay less in fines than you would have in fares. Is the solution paying more cops to issue more $100 tickets or issue the same number of tickets, just for $500 instead of $100? I’m not sure what the right answer is, but I do think raising the fine will cut fare jumpers at least a little bit.
Just catch enough beaters at $500/pop to cover the cost of the enforcement and to make up for the lost revenue. There’s no reason to get your briefs in a twist about every single evasion.
I got a better solution design a turnstyle that cant be jumpt. Problem solved!
I know we all just went over this yesterday, but let me just say that almost everyone here is missing the point. There are two reasons to have the fine: one is punitive; we want to prevent fare beating and punish fare beaters. The other is simply administrative; we want the fines to cover the lost revenue plus the costs of enforcement. The hitch is, since we have enforcement agents (in NYC, the NYPD), we actually want some fare evasion. Otherwise, we’re paying the cost of enforcement without actually getting any additional revenue to pay for the enforcement costs.
These are police we’re talking about, not meter maids. We’re not hiring them exclusively to monitor the turnstiles. If there were no fare evasion, we’d still be paying them to enforce other laws.
I suppose, but that just means there really should be an enforcement arm in the MTA. That enforcement division should pay for itself, or even make a bit of a profit. The police should be…well, I don’t exactly know what good all the extra NYPD should be doing these days. There’s not much for them to do.
Nothing for them to do? Did it occur to you that we have less crime because we have more police?
In that case, perhaps we have more crime than other large developed world cities because we have more police. Many (most?) that don’t have police forces the size of a small country’s army and have lower crime than we do. I can buy that we have less crime than we once did because more of our former criminals are in prison, grown up, or dead, but I have a hard time crediting a police presence to persistent reduced crime – especially given the types of things the NYPD has time to focus on these days.
cops can’t be everywhere all the time,
why is it that you are so much smarter than all of us all of the time?
you always present things to us in a way that belittles us all and makes us feel so unhappy to have discussions with you!
No one ever seems to mention that this is a class A misdemeanor (theft of service). Officers can kindly issue a TAB summons instead (civil vs. criminal) of a desk appearance, and the fine is the same $100, but they could also arrest. There are provisions for repeat offenders in the law, too. People can’t just keep getting caught and getting $100 fines without really facing arrest or jail. I’m going to have to agree that enforcement is more the road to go rather than drastically raising the fines, though a modest increase to mirror the fare increases wouldn’t be so absurd either.
Also, not every fare evader is truly trying to evade the fare and get in the system. I know a handful of people, self included, that have been fined after no machines were working and we were in a panic to get somewhere (I was late for a grad school midterm). I had my WageWorks credit card in my hand (NYC employee pre-tax credit card) as I had to buy one because I just mailed in my unreadable unlimited two days earlier. I used it to buy a return fare from my school; I wasn’t trying to beat the system.
With the lack of station agents, sometimes people get frustrated. I live at 110th/Lex, and we don’t have an uptown agent anymore. And every day the vending machines have a different status (coins only, credit only, single ride tickets only) and at least once a month it tells everyone to “SWIPE AGAIN” repeatedly and no one can get in.
So before we go beating up all fare evaders as criminal scum of the earth, remember that with lack of station agents and aging infrastructure, there are those of us that have had to do it in a pinch when we’ve done everything we’re supposed to do entering the station, payment ready. I’m sure this applies to a small minority of fare evaders, but it happens every day.
I’m wondering why the move in the bill to send notices of violations via first class mail only instead of registered or certified. Sure, it’s cheaper, but there is then no proof of delivery to the respondent. Seems like it opens the door for contesting violations via the mail. (Though, when do people get violations by mail anyways?)
It’s a start, but enforcement officials should be able to force people to pay on the spot. That would really deter them. If they can’t pay, you detain them until they do.
Plus, The fines for repeat offenders should be even bigger and if they continue, ban them altogether from using the system (TriMet does that).