This is a follow up to her fare jumping thread. Lady had time in her work day to hang around multiple stops counting fare jumpers and write two threads about it.
Over here metro stations just have a line painted on floor near the entrance to the platforms and text that says you will be forced to pay a fine if you are found past it without a ticket by a ticket inspector*. They randomly board metro cars in teams assisted by guards to inspect tickets and occasionally form checkpoints on platform exits at the larger stations.
Is that just not dystopian enough for Americans? Do you need the whole prison aesthetic :thinking-about-it:
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*Lovingly called Smurfs by the non-ticket-paying community because of their blue uniforms. They got pretty annoyed years back when there was a rash of “Remember to inform your fellow passengers if you spot a smurf” stickers in metro cars
I think the turnstiles get used because paying a guy to fine people ends up costing more money than it brings in. In Canada only the commuter rail has that type of enforcement and really only because it both costs more to ride and you have essentially the same group of passengers for an hour. Like randomly inspecting a packed subway car where people constantly come in and leave seems impractical.
They still pay cops to hang around and do those sorts of checks, they just also spend a lot buying machines from private businesses to automate parts of it. IIRC in NY they verifiably spend more on ticket enforcement than it would cost to make the entire system free for everyone.
Yeah, I was also thinking about how the sheer difference in the volume of passengers in a Northern European country versus a gigantic city probably changes the dynamic a bit. They usually manage to check an entire car in the few minutes it takes between stations, but again, it’s not packed like a subway car in Tokyo.
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Actually I haven’t considered how much the new type of subway train has changed the way their tactics work, since you can now travel the entire length of the train since the cars are connected. On older trains each car was enclosed which made it easy for them to board one car without alerting every ticketless passenger on the train.
