In Hong Kong MTR system, with both the gated heavy rail system and open access light rail system, the operator have employed a lot of additional fare inspector at all stations, to the point multiple of them are visible at every ticket gate, trying to curb down any attempts at undermining the systems revenue, following a trend of distrust against the political stance in operation of the MTR system. On Monday, Democratic legislators pitched a new system decriminalizing fare evasion on public transit statewide, making the offense a petty misdemeanor, similar to a My solicitorhas been extremelyprofessional and his confidence has put my mind at rest. This is true for all of the major world cities and there encouraging efficiency is vital. But fares account for the largest chunk about 38 percent (or $6.2 billion) of the MTAs annual earnings. The next state government forced the city transit operators to simplify their systems and work together for the next contract . tfl fare evasion settle out of court le de France Mobility wants to improve service quality, achieve greater operator responsiveness, find innovative solutions and improve passenger information. It is $12.40 to go from Fremont to SFO (a 30 mile drive). Why should systems like the Washington Metro spend money to tear down their faregates and adopt Proof of payment, spending money to make it easier to avoid paying the fare? For Ile de France the versement transport VT payroll tax has at times funded 40% of StiFs operational costs (I dont know how that breaks down for different modes) and it sounded like they were proposing something like that for the UK. Your argument against which kind of trips that are induced by marginal price costs of 0, just makes no sense. Thatcher was pathologically psycho about it. If this is the case, follow the instructions carefully. BVG doesnt break even on fares, but thats because of buses, not the U-Bahn. People who buy monthly cards are the biggest users of the system and deserve any discounts over occasional users while you appear to believe the biggest users are captive and thus can be charged as much as possible (the British mentality). Of course fare gates need manning so outside of the busiest stations fare gating is often a peak time only operation. I am an experienced litigation solicitor specialising in pragmatic risk management. Precisely. In Berlin theres a similar situation DB Regio runs the S-Bahn, BVG runs the U-Bahn and surface transit and thus a similar issue arises of how to split revenues. Yeah, this makes sense. Up to 20 million workers would see increases in real incomes. And London. Beyond population density, efficiency is an important reason why transit is so cheap in East Asia. Whats a little food poisoning now and then? What fare evasion offences could I be prosecuted for? Whats really at play is a class war issue. They were extremely professional and helpful. This opinion will be unpublished and Thats Fare Evasion 101. Thats not the way real people actually use a Metro system (well maybe London where you might expect to get hit with an unexpected big bill depending on trip length, time of travel blah, blah.) They did an excellent job and she gave me all the information Ineeded. It may be possible to have some legal advice without charge. Webboston college early decision acceptance rate 2025. In this context market pricing of public transport isnt really consistent. BART charges too much, runs too little service, and its stations are too deep underground. V.S November 2018, I recently contacted BSB Solicitors in relation to a potential fare evasion prosecution. If the goal is to get people to stop driving to work, then making driving more expensive and housing cheaper, and promoting denser inner suburbs, seems like the much better choice, as politically difficult as that is. Also, it was valid on everything 24/7 (I understand the rough equivalent pass in London isnt actually valid for weekend use! The consequences for me as regards my right to work in the UK were extremely high, and so this situation was cause for lots of stress. It is you who is artificially creating a them versus us war, which is reminiscent of London where there is definitely a class that would never use the Underground. It certainly helps the use of the Metro/RER, keeps car use low (you need to be slightly insane to try to drive in Paris; I did for the first year . In Paris everyone I knew used the Metro and most would have had a monthly card; and thus this is by far the dominant group in Paris with non-users being a pretty small minority and there was no class war over this issue. I imagine the Ring here breaks even too and the subsidies go to the branches in the suburbs. Ridership on those marginal branch lines was cratering before. Paris has one-way faregates, so half the exit space is unusable during (one-way) busy times, and the exit gates are hard to open and easy to close in order to discourage fare dodging. Counter-productive user pays econo-rat bullshit. I was lucky to find BSB Solicitorswho helped me with my case. Generally, the train companies argue that prosecutions are in the public interest because of the huge sums of money which are lost to the rail industry as a result of fare evasion. Seattle uses a third way of incentivizing monthlies, in addition to low-income fare discounts and relatively affordable monthly passes; Washington States Commute Trip Reduction law incentivizes large employers (>100 people) to reduce driving alone rates, and buying monthly passes for employees and making them available for little to no charge is a fairly common strategy to do so. These are the exact opposite of your econometric analysis. 250km2). But from a nation that does allows compilation of such statistics: A report by Statistics Denmark released in December 2015 found that 83% of crimes are committed by individuals of Danish origin (88% of the total population), 14% by individuals of non-Western descent and 3% by those of non-Danish Western descent. The question boils down to how New York crowding levels compare with those on the busiest urban POP line, the Munich S-Bahn trunk. And of course the marginal cost to the operator of these discretionary trips is close to zero, especially as they are almost wholly out of peak periods. OUTRAGED. What happens if I just ignore the Notice? All of this is pretty reasonable cops desperately need to treat sexual assault victims better, and getting to universal enforcement is really good at reducing sexual assault rates, and Boudins language on this makes it clear he intends to help men as well as women (in the US, men who are raped report at even lower rates than women). So why do it at all? Stronger measures to deter fare evasion Because it reduces maintenance costs and eliminates a serious bottleneck to pedestrian throughput, and I dont think systems with faregates have lower fare evasion rates than systems with POP. The notice contains details of the charge against you. This weekend in the same Travel section there was a letter replying to the first letter writer. Even if the OP did have full details written in the post, nothing is linking the OP's post to the guy showing up in court. Revenue enforcement and prosecutions policy. Is there any country where ethnic minority which is poorer than rest of the population is not disproportionately inprisoned? Transport for London cannot give any advice with regard to completing the forms or on how you should proceed. These activities are really not the same fare evasion really is something to be discourage, just not with batons. Good lord! Solano Verde Water District. That is true in HK and Singapore which arent really inexpensive city-states but have transit use as a priority over road use. Instead of forever delaying spending money today for appropriate infrastructure that will serve the city for ages, they have constantly convinced themselves and the politicians they can play these games with the travelling public. Pendeltg is the proper S-Bahn / RER after all and that started in 1968. Its not about catching habitual offenders. Instead of developing an open system, they created an opaque Key farecard that offers many benefits to those who can afford it and severely penalizes those without it. Why not try to minimize the average cost of a trip in the system instead? As you can imagine, any criminal record on a 27-year-olds CV would be detrimental to many future opportunities. Extra induced trips by a switch to 0 from 0.5 a trip, are of course relatively more often going to be new 0.8 km trips than 15 km long. Answered in 5 minutes by: Solicitor: Jo C. Jo C., Barrister Category: UK Law Satisfied Customers: 82,725 Experience: Over 5 years in practice. Aditya Chakrabortty, 19 July 2016. Most months have a holiday in them, and there may also be a sick or vacation day thrown in. You may receive a letter called a 'Single Justice Procedure Notice' if you are charged with an offence relating to not having a valid ticket. Locked. The crime rate of immigrants in those countries is lower than the non-immigrant communities. That is illogical. Because the higher your passenger-to-visible-check ratio is, the lower your casual evasion will be.. They rely on people voluntarily going to the cash register and checking out. And incidentally I totally reject your repeated assertion that low fares, or flat fares, to the outer zones of big cities, encourages sprawl, because it does the opposite (it will encourage TOD around the stations) and is much more likely to entice them out of their cars. Also, people in those places tend to lower SES, so theres an element of social justice (the opposite of what applies in most places where they are punished by paying per km travelled). Every dollar that doesnt come to us, in terms of fares that should be paid, is a dollar that we cant improve in service, he said at a news conference in September, according to AM New York. a longer trip across town to an Ikea store or whatever. Theyd be lynched if they tried that in France, and probably by other politicians I dont think Aaron was saying he agreed with this position. Why? (LogOut/ Lets assume that a bus operator has one equipped vehicle for each size (standard, articulated). The monthly pass users are the majority of transit users, at least in a city with good fares to encourage lots of people to use it. In 2016, it [Paris] has been ranked as the best public transport system in the world by the ITDP with 100 percent of people in the city of Paris having an easy access to rapid transportation, ahead of 26 other international cities (including London, New York City and Tokyo). 800851655). If you really think there is something really worth subsidizing in very frequent transit use, then you can make higher-order trips cheaper at various thresholds. Of course efficiency is important but it is not achieved by those approaches, no matter how theory predicts it. A Monthly Travelcard for zones 1-2 (inner London) is 134.80 (US$169.45, 150.96) People do not take mass transit at rush-hour if they can help it. Maybe I meant A15s? I dont see the benefit of making these trips really cheap for monthly pass users, while very expensive for everyone else. BART has a three-pronged problem that it is dealing with concerning fare-evasion. Change), You are commenting using your Twitter account. Cash payments subject them to a 50 penalty for the first boarding of a trip and a _$2.50_ penalty for any transfers needed to complete the journey. But railways, especially ones that have to cope with a giant network, hardly ever run at a profit so all it really means is a horrible choice between running fewer services, increasing fares (on routes with lower traffic than the ones chosen by the commercial entities; yeah that will work but of course it will simply force these horribly inefficient lines to close) or other kinds of cuts, slash & burn etc. Question is not whether, its by how much. In fact, I think most US cities should be fareless anyway since their farebox contribution to revenue is so low. One could envision that stationing 1 officer / entry watching for fare evasion should bring that fare evasion down to nearly 0 regardless of types of gates, as well as put a significant dent at crime since anyone chased out of the system can quickly be apprehended. tfl fare evasion settle out of court proceedings of the international conference on learning representations. (The metro area mode shares are 43% and 30% respectively, but Ile-de-France has 240 annual rail trips per capita and Metro New York has about 100.). The reason is that Americans practically never look at other countries on hot-button culture war issues, even less than (say) the lip service the center-left pays to foreign universal health care systems. to reduce road congestion for other road users (inc. other cars). Like the time an older African-American woman got pissed off about younger African-American woman having a White boyfriend and decide to take it out on me, subjecting me to big rant on why African-American women can only really be sexually pleased by African-American men while hitting me with a plastic bottle. The sprawl exists. put in half-height gates and theyll jump them. Have you noticed that the new boss of SNCF, Jean-Pierre Farandou, was formerly boss of French Keolis? As I pointed out in a recent post, Melun which is on the other side of the river Seine to Fontainebleu about 45km from central Paris, has 50,000 residents at density 5,000/km2. IIRC it is Keolis who operates the appalling Southern network in the UK which cops the worst vitriole from passengers of the entire British network). ), especially if I had just come from Paris. Most importantlyI got the result that I wanted! WebTo have a criminal record for fare evasion, you must be found guilty of an offence or plead guilty at Court. monthly passes is that be encouraging heavy rather than occasional (mixed with biking and walking) use of transit, it encourages large geographical sprawl. Viewed through a regional city perspective JNR was bad, the neglect of infill alone, I counted 15+ new stations on the Sanyo mainline alone all of them getting 2000 riders a day, and only a minority where in Hanshin area! Contrast with Japan which even with almost entirely privatized rail has heavily regulated fares. Fares are integrated between buses and trains (which is more than I can say for, say, London), and theres a schedule for fare by distance. Stores dont have gates. 2) Crime prevention costs The travelling public in the East seems a lot more happy with their experience than the travelling public you refer to in the West. The lack of S-bahn style operation patterns in the non-megacity regions is a failure of government and private-sector since no-ones pushing it. HL February 2021, I highly recommend BSB solicitors, they are professional and responsive. I dont know if the EUs Open Access is involved but this wilfully stupid experiment has plenty of evidence to suggest where it ends. What a wonderful system! I had been using it for a few weeks when I was stopped by aticket inspector. By accepting all cookies, you agree to our use of cookies to deliver and maintain our services and site, improve the quality of Reddit, personalize Reddit content and advertising, and measure the effectiveness of advertising. Incidentally, a follow up on that Letter to Ed from an Antipodean that I reported at the top of this blog. And also that Caltrain may realize based on the new data whether they should be charging participating employers more or less, etc. Try cutting the breakeven point to something starting with a 3 instead. michaelrjames , youre rather confused. WebFare evasion is a strict liability offence, meaning it does not matter if an individual intended to evade paying a fare or it was an innocent mistake, the mere fact that you failed to produce a valid ticket when requested for your journey, is sufficient for the network provider to take Court Action against you. and then got arrested and taken to court when they refused to pay the outrageous fines. Rural mode-share collapse isnt about private vs public its about the mismanagement of regional cities and their relationship to their hinterlands. Thoroughly recommend! Is it a shorter trip? In his acclaimed book on the creation of modern Australia, Fatal Shore, Robert Hughes noted that this nation was founded as a dumping ground for criminals whom the motherland ejected nevertheless rapidly turned into one of the most law-abiding nations on earth. Yes, though my employer (in as much as they paid my salary since a lot of the time I was on fellowship, ie. (I have literally just joined this site so apologies if I do anything wrong!) I have just returned from an overseas trip to the UK and Italy. . Labour will scrap the bewildering and outdated fares and ticketing system that discriminates against part-time workers, discourages rail travel and excludes the young and low paid.. For the thousands working on an employment pass, youre out of luck. Fare evasion As for cheap trips outside rush-hour, that is exactly what I am arguing for instead of bulk-discounts (that make the marginal cost 0 in rush hour). In Paris, various classes of low-income riders, such as the unemployed, benefit from a solidarity fare discount of 50-75%. American transit agencies and activists resist calls for large monthly discounts, on a variety of excuses. More people either work from home one or two days a week or are often hopping between client sites or their own company locations throughout the week and which might not even be in the same city. AAR (August 2107), BSB Solicitors are a company you can definitely put your trust in. But most of our metro stations are not even staffed, so fare gates would be a huge cost for limited advantage. The main way to encourage compliance is really to make it easier to follow the law than to break it. In the east, well Hong Kong, Singapore and Japan, there is a paternalistic care about the travelling public that balances the overt greed in the west, hence Japans government-imposed ceilings on fares. To you and others, it seems to be narrowly econometric efficiency and my experience is that it is anathema to passenger experience or satisfaction, and not least to the ease and functionality of transit in a big city. However, the imposition of a criminal conviction often carries far more serious consequences and could This report is by a NGO so almost zero chance of anything like it being adopted by a conservative government. The advice I received was always well thought through and was communicated promptly at every point. This thread has been locked by the moderators of r/LegalAdviceUK. city bankers) because its both an easy PR win, AND a lovely big reminder to potential casuals not to try it themselves., And there you go. It is evident that she is very experienced in dealing with fare evasion prosecutions and aware of the impact that a potential prosecution can have on ones career and volunteer work. This setup works at palatial East Asian stations, but a cheap cut-and-cover Continental European station gets overwhelmed when a million Parisians all descend on a handful of stations to celebrate. Its probably one of the most American-friendly ways of encouraging more monthly distribution, since itd be hard to argue that employers shouldnt mitigate their employees commute impacts. The Swiss at least do zonal fares with monthly passes. Its probably best to see if your Powers-That-Be ever manage to get past Fare Evasion Kindergarten first before doing that. In France and most places* it is highly correlated to poverty and recent immigration status. Its about whether its fair to impose essentially middle-class bourgeois standards of behavior on public transit systems. with modern technology varying fares dynamically by distance is very straightforward (with 1990s technology) and westerners would adapt very quickly. Since racial identification is supposed to not occur in official stats. Much less a whole restaurant. Has Jacob Rees-Mogg ever used London Underground? Its not the far right or the far left, can we please keep these terms for the most radical 10-20% of the population on each side rather than for anodyne center-left and center-right politics? I didnt understand this the first time I read it. I think its also right thing to talk about the sum of the three: Based on a five-day work week, the average month has between 22 and 23 work days. All of the agencies have counts, they just chose the laziest way to enforce things, then went ahead and enforced it with vigor. And the London lessons are very applicable to NY. There needs to be some power behind the ticket-writer. BSB was my first choice when I faced the likelihood of prosecution after I failed to show a valid bus ticket when travelling in Central London. If occasional riders have to read a massive chart to figure out what theyre supposed to pay they probably just wont pay it at all. For Walkability and Good Transit, and Against Boondoggles and Pollution, fare evasion costs $240 million a year on the subway and buses, The total cost of the new patrol program is $56 million in the first year, https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2019/11/public-transportation-security-safety-laws-protests-equity/602212/, https://www.traveller.com.au/traveller-letters-campari-spritz-is-far-superior-to-aperol-spritz-h1jm5q, https://www.inquirer.com/transportation/septa-bus-fee-transfer-poverty-transit-pew-study-20190724.html, https://tfl.gov.uk/fares/how-to-pay-and-where-to-buy-tickets-and-oyster/travelcards-and-group-tickets, Todays Headlines Streetsblog California, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_Settlement_Plan, http://www.caltrain.com/Fares/tickettypes/GO_Pass.html, Op-Ed: What America Gets Wrong about Fare Evasion Streetsblog USA, News roundup: Happy Thanksgiving Seattle Transit Blog, Cops on Public Transportation | Pedestrian Observations, The Port Authoritys New Fare Policy is an Improvement Connect-PGH, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jul/19/southern-rail-failure-crush-unions, https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/07/18/free-public-transportation/#comment-61991, We Gave a Talk About Our Construction CostsReport, Burning the Midnight Oil for Energy Independence, Pittsburgh, Youngstown, Akron, Cleveland Arts And Livable City Blog, Jim Aloisi, Trimount Consulting and Board Member at TransitMatters.