The point on transit fares in relation to safety is really interesting. I remember seeing a study about KCATA that said with the zero fare policy, 80% of residents surveyed said they felt more safe, and incidents per 100k fell 17%. I think fare enforcement in the first place is cause for a very large chunk of safety incidents in the first place.
Thank you for reading! I think there is a very real and reasonable argument towards overpolicing, which is something I tried to avoid in the above. I did some research on the stat: it seems as if the number of supervisor-escalator calls fell 39% in the first year. Which does make sense! I think that fare enforcement can work alongside with an essentially fare-free policy for low-income riders (including homeless riders!).
When you get to see breakdowns in service quality (I'd recommend looking into Atlanta's MARTA system) when the buy-in to a social service becomes optional for the wrong group of people. But, I will look more into this! Very interesting
Also: interestingly, the 39% drop is also correlated to the 2019-2020 ridership drop. I do think there's an argument that the incident was confounded with other ridership stats. KCATA's current system–which reinstated a 2$ fare after 2020 funding ran dry–does provide a good foundation for what I'd like to see nationwide: where rides are free for low-income, homeless, veteran, and student riders but we still are able to enforce entry/exit of that transit.
The point on transit fares in relation to safety is really interesting. I remember seeing a study about KCATA that said with the zero fare policy, 80% of residents surveyed said they felt more safe, and incidents per 100k fell 17%. I think fare enforcement in the first place is cause for a very large chunk of safety incidents in the first place.
Thank you for reading! I think there is a very real and reasonable argument towards overpolicing, which is something I tried to avoid in the above. I did some research on the stat: it seems as if the number of supervisor-escalator calls fell 39% in the first year. Which does make sense! I think that fare enforcement can work alongside with an essentially fare-free policy for low-income riders (including homeless riders!).
When you get to see breakdowns in service quality (I'd recommend looking into Atlanta's MARTA system) when the buy-in to a social service becomes optional for the wrong group of people. But, I will look more into this! Very interesting
Also: interestingly, the 39% drop is also correlated to the 2019-2020 ridership drop. I do think there's an argument that the incident was confounded with other ridership stats. KCATA's current system–which reinstated a 2$ fare after 2020 funding ran dry–does provide a good foundation for what I'd like to see nationwide: where rides are free for low-income, homeless, veteran, and student riders but we still are able to enforce entry/exit of that transit.