Nice Faith based argument there. Requiring "free" citizens to care about a problem they didn't have anything to do with. No different than saying "if everyone went to church/temple/mosque and and adhered to $DEITY all problems would vanish"
You can’t unless were willing to forcibly put these people in shelters. Many of the persistent ones are hardcore drug users waiting to die, they don’t give a damn about being rehabilitated.
The number of people who can afford a home is very strongly correlated with how affordable homes are. I therefore propose that if we can make homes more affordable, homelessness will decrease.
Most people here don’t realize how much the homeless are hated and how willing trump voting Americans are to literally let them die on the streets or worse.
Schadenfreude is the dominant feeling of the times, and many if not most Americans would basically celebrate a “purge” of the homeless.
The fee gives a reason to kick them off. Portland's trimet recently made it a policy to not allow sleeping which means the transit police can now intervene when the opioid addict does his dose on the train. Meanwhile the tired professionals are left alone. As it should be
It seems like the more straight forward version of that policy is 'no drugs on the train'. Allowing selective enforcement is a sure path to unintended consequences.
Nah the consequences are more riders. That's a great consequence.
> no drugs on the train
Nonsense. I'd rather have people carry their illegal drugs on the train and take them at home. The issue is people experiencing the effects of the drug on the train and often times making it unsafe for women, children, and men too (it doesn't really matter what your sex is when the drugged out man vomits on you). I honestly don't care if you carry your illegal drugs everywhere, as long as you make sure the effects of said drugs are dealt with privately. I have major issues with people making the consequences of their drug use other people's problem
You think it's presence of a fare that prevents homeless people from getting on a bus?? Even the light rail has ways to get on without paying, and the homeless know them.
I'm sure the trip to the police station and immediate release is a real setback for these people. Unless they're breaking more serious laws, no one is paying to put these people behind bars for any length of time.
I mean, you're right in theory, but in the real world things are very different.
I don't know, all the places I lived in (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46029488) manage just fine. Must be some crazy black magic rocket science they are doing over in Germany or Britain or Turkey or Singapore or Australia to keep non-payers off their public transport.
And in many places I haven't lived but only visited, too.
Some countries have cameras on public transport with security people watching the footage live. If someone misbehaves ever so slightly (like drinking alcohol) the doors wont open until enforcers arrive. With modern AI you can have one person monitor countless cameras. They could even retract before the doors open so that you cant smash or spray them and run away.
Assuming a perfect system this still fails because you have now locked in all the law abiding citizens with someone who has proven they are ready to break the rules, effectively inventing a hostage situation out of thin air whereby a miscreant can terrorize their fellow passengers for the duration of the police response time.
Oh which continent? Is it possible that what you assume it's normal and default is colored by your personal experience and not representative of the world at large?
what answer could i possibly give to you that would change your response? antarctica?
> Is it possible that what you assume it's normal and default is colored by your personal experience and not representative of the world at large?
of course this is true. what are you going for here. my objection is to standing up a Train Security Panopticon with "modern AI" and locking commuters (in north america) on a train (in north america) who might depend on a schedule (using a north american time zone) stuck at a station until the (north american) cops can come and pull someone (who statistically, but not for sure, would be north american) off of the car for being drunk (off of beer i've had in my personal experience, coloring this example, which may not be the beer that is representative of the world at large) and napping on the seats
lol, what? You’re gonna hold 20 people hostage on the bus until some enforcers navigate a busy city to ticket a person who is likely to wipe their ass with the ticket? What country is that exactly?
Seriously, other than law enforcement what else can you do to someone who brazenly refuse to follow the rules? Even law enforcement (at least in the US) highly depends on where you live. In left leaning states and cities, DAs are not very likely to prosecute such small crimes like not paying a bus fare because they know it’ll make them unpopular next election. I live in a very left leaning county and state and it swings between center and left every 4 years or so. The swing is always “look how awful that guy was. He prosecuted vulnerable people for petty crimes for no reason”. Cops don’t wanna have to deal with all the paper work to book a guy for a couple of nights before they get released and do it all over again. If they know the person will not get prosecuted because there is no political capital to do so, why bother with the theatrics and all the paper work of arresting them? Brazenly refusing to pay the bus fare and getting in a verbal altercation with the driver and everyone on the bus is a fun afternoon for some people.
You end up with an outcry from the rich “liberals” (for lack of a better word), who never take the bus in the first place, complaining about how enforcing fares on buses is harming the poor who can’t afford transportation and pushing people away from public transportation.
It’s pretty infuriating. I started biking to work 2 years ago and try to bike almost anywhere I can. Mostly to lose weight but also put my money where my mouth is. I voted for every levy and prop to improve bike-ability and public transportation of the city in the last 10 years and figured I’m a hypocrite if I expect others to bike and take the bus and I never do. My tolerance for the homeless on buses has been dropping as I have to deal with them more and more. I was always “It’s our failure in not helping them. If I can’t help, least I could do is let them be” kind of person. Now every other week I end up with a negative interaction with someone on the bus or at a bus stop. Every time I air my grievances with people I know (who never take the bus) I always have to find myself on the defensive somehow.
In my third world big city, a lot of people sleeping in the streets are the ones who don't have money to pay public transport for their far way homes. The jobs are downtown. It's perverse.
They're already mobile benches for unhoused people and druggies. They just get on anyways already and don't pay the fare. And the driver does nothing because they don't want to get in a fight. (Unless a passenger threatens others, then they get the police involved.)
Making the buses free isn't going to produce any more of it.
Yeah comments like the parents are typical from people that don't use public transit. The people who can't/aren't going to pay that some people "don't want" on public transit are always going to not pay and still use it, so why not make it free for everybody?
I live in an area that had outdated payment systems on their bus network. They determined that the cost to upgrade the payment systems would be higher than the revenue of fares, so they just made the buses free.
Edit: A lot of replies associate fare payment with behaviors (and smell?) of riders. I think that it's important to recognize that ones ability to pay a fare does not inherently indicate that they are "undesirable" in some way. Could their be a correlation? Possibly. But dedicate the policing to things that actually matter - an unruly passenger should get policing efforts, not a non-paying one (or smelly, really? Obviously homeless people can be putrid but seriously people smelling bad is not a crime).
I use public transit (mostly SF BART) on a regular basis. It's not a matter of "don't want," it's a matter of public safety. People won't use public transit if they have to deal with mentally ill people or hucksters.
This is very basic economics of public transit. I completely agree with the comment about having a minimum payment and enforcement.
Yes, they avoid streets too. That's one of the reasons that San Francisco shopping around Union Square has collapsed. [0] There were other reasons like COVID as well.
Nah, I’ve rode a bus to work most days forever. It’s my calm place when I go home.
Tragedy of the commons is real, even a nominal stake in a service, thing or place impacts behavior. If you’ve ever shopped at Aldi, they make you put a quarter in each shopping cart. Most people wouldn’t pick a quarter up from the ground, but they almost always put their carts back at Aldi.
Personally, I could care less if a dude smells or is poor. We’re all the same. But I have tolerance for boorish behavior that scares people who are trying to go about their business.
> The people who can't/aren't going to pay that some people "don't want" on public transit are always going to not pay and still use it, so why not make it free for everybody?
Why? We are excluding non-paying passengers from planes just fine. Why not busses and trains?
And over in many other parts of the world, they also manage this just fine, too. It's not exactly rocket science.
> I live in an area that had outdated payment systems on their bus network. They determined that the cost to upgrade the payment systems would be higher than the revenue of fares, so they just made the buses free.
I'm strongly in favour of free transit, but this boggles my mind. If your payment system is just a box where people drop in tickets/change, it's pretty low cost, never gets outdated, and pretty high compliance.
Selling tickets and collecting change from thousands of boxes is actually quite expensive in terms of manual labor and machines. The boxes themselves are expensive, as they have to be able to sort and count coins. And then the vending machines for the tickets.
And it doesn't raise compliance at all. Why would it?
Main reason normal people do not use public transport is this attitude and police giving up on enforcing basic public order on transport. Personally I am voting against any public transport funding until all homeless/druggies are kicked off public transport (even if they are willing to pay). You have to pass certain very low behavior bar to use public transport (no intoxication, no aggression to other passengers, no smell, no shouting random things).
It's not rocket science and other countries figured out how to do it.
It's not a policing problem, it's a homelessness and mental health problem.
You'll never have enough police for regular enforcement on buses. The numbers don't add up, not even remotely.
Other countries do a better job when they're able to keep people off the streets in the first place. Which then becomes a much more complicated question about social spending and the civil liberties of mentally ill people who don't want to be institutionalized.
Car-related taxes (vehicle sales, gas tax, yearly registration fees, in some cases tolls) have historically covered the majority of roadway infrastructure costs. I don't think free buses are going to be able to maintain the roadways.
> "Normal people do not use public transit... kick all homeless off (even if they are willing to pay)"
At the risk of feeding the trolls, I have to object to this ignorant, callous, brutal bs. Please, read this account^1 of NBA player Chris Boucher staying alive by riding public transit, and try to put yourself in his shoes for a moment.
> Personally I am voting against any public transport funding until all homeless/druggies are kicked off public transport (even if they are willing to pay).
That's a bit silly. I have sympathies for your views, but you can't have a policy of literally 0. Even spotless places like Singapore don't achieve that, even though they come pretty close.
I kind of agree. I grew up with a well-funded, well-staffed railway which has suffered slow managed decline, so I've got pretty good frames of reference.
A big problem now is people playing loud music, loud TikToks, phonecalls and videocalls on speaker phone (almost the default), feet on seats, vaping, bags on seats etc.
There are now no staff who enforce the norms and laws (Yup some of that legally could land you a prosecution if the railway chooses that).
Yes, society was less anti-social 20-30 years ago but IMO with strict enforcement of heavy punishment, the issues could be stamped out.
What's interesting is that one fairly large section of the railway does still have lots of staff who enforce anti-social behaviour (Merseyrail – they operate somewhat independently) and from what I've read and heard is that there tend to be far fewer issues in that network than the rest of the network. It's interesting to have the two areas to compare.
Unfortunately this governments want to continue defunding the railways, and so are happy with the cycle of managed decline and people opting to drive instead.
I used to be extremely pro public transport but it's fighting a losing battle. Trains are overpriced, delayed, cramped and anti-social
> Personally I am voting against any public transport funding until all homeless
Statistically you're just a few days of bad luck from being both homeless and carless. What's your plan for getting to work to not be in that situation?
> Statistically you're just a few days of bad luck from being both homeless and carless.
What makes you think so? The poster you replied to might be sitting on a decent nest egg, have supportive friends and family, and insurance against all contingencies.
And some people are willing to bite the bullet and even say: 'Well, in that case, I shouldn't be on the bus, either.
Though it's fairly clear from context that the commenter you replied to doesn't want to check every person's home address before they are let on the bus. They want to ban anti-social behaviour on the bus, and 'homeless' is just a short hand for that, unfortunate as it is.
And a few days of bad luck might make you lose your home, but won't necessarily turn you into a drunk who shouts a lot.
I don't know the commenter specifically - that's why I said statistically.
> Though it's fairly clear from context
Ah, the classic "didn't mean the well presented part of group X when I said X". That's a cliche way to mask prejudice. No, if they didn't actually mean homeless, I'm calling them out on writing "homeless".
> Yeah comments like the parents are typical from people that don't use public transit. The people who can't/aren't going to pay that some people "don't want" on public transit are always going to not pay and still use it, so why not make it free for everybody?
Huh? I never owned a car and taken public transport all my live, and it's never been much of a problem kicking non-paying people off. What kind of lawless hellholes are you guys living in?
(I lived in Germany, Turkey, Britain, Singapore and Australia.)
The bus driver's union doesn't want drivers engaging in fare enforcement -- they're hired to drive, not to get into physical altercations. This was especially after a bus driver was stabbed to death in 2008 in a fare dispute.
There are fare enforcement teams that partner up with cops to catch people evading the fare, that are trained for this kind of thing. But obviously the chances are miniscule you'd ever encounter them on any single bus trip, and all that's going to happen is you get a summons with a $50-100 fine. So it's quite rational not to pay.
And I mean, as a bus rider, the last thing I want is my bus being delayed by 15 minutes while the driver stops and waits for the cops to come to evict someone who didn't pay. I just want to get to where I'm going.
So how do they handle it in the cities you've lived in? How do they kick them off without putting the driver in danger and without massively delaying the bus for everyone else? (And to be clear, we're talking about buses, not trains where monitoring entry and exit turnstiles is vastly more realistic.)
In the subway in NYC I see some people go out the emergency exits (alarm sounds but who cares?) while other people are queued up waiting for somebody to come out the emergency exit so they can come in. It’s a kind of antisocial social behavior like torrenting pirate files.
No it's not, because the cops get there and the bus already left. Or the cops wait around but the bus is stuck in traffic and another call comes in so the cops give up and leave. Trying to pick some arbitrary bus stop somewhere between 10 and 30 minutes ahead based on how fast they think the bus is going and how long some cop (and which one?) will take to get from where they are to that bus stop depending on traffic is just a recipe for missing each other. And cops are a scarcer resource than buses.
Like, if there's a serious crime is being committed in a moving vehicle then sure they'll have someone constantly monitoring and redirecting in order to intercept. It's possible, with high enough priority. But someone not paying a fare does not have that priority.
And the point is the person refuses to get off the bus right away. They stay on it till they get to their destination and then get off.
The most visible enforcement I’ve seen was in Rome. They have people issuing tickets on the bus at random.
It was noticeable in that as a tourist, it seemed like a chill place, but there are lots of police of various stripes and they seemed very serious when enforcing things.
I live in Italy and this is common on the trains and busses. I ride the train a lot and have my ticket checked maybe 1:10 times. The tickets are cheap (~2 euro) and the fines are high (50-200 euro), so it makes sense to buy them. I have seen people get fined though.
What level of punishment should somebody who is trying to move between place to place receive for their lack of paying $1-3? The service was already going to operate, regardless of their lack of payment.
Some public transit has a much more rigid fare collection structure - trains are typically much more controlled entry points. But buses? It's in their best interest to get everyone on as quickly as possible and get everyone off as quickly as passive. Are you going to have gates that block you if you don't scan your card/phone from exiting? Same for boarding. Do you dedicate policing resources to ensuring the collection of what is certainly less than the cost to employ the police officer? Seems wasteful until you hit a very high ridership.
> What level of punishment should somebody who is trying to move between place to place receive for their lack of paying $1-3? The service was already going to operate, regardless of their lack of payment.
In Germany it's typically something like max(2 * regular fare price, 60 Euro).
I know you asked a 'should' question and this is an 'is' answer, but I hope it's still useful.
It's fascinating seeing your questions about something that's an everyday thing in all of the places I lived.
So in Germany it's typically the (public) companies running the transit systems that have teams that check that you've paid. Gates are almost unheard of for neither bus nor train. (I couldn't name one place in Germany that has gates for public transport at the top of my head.) The police would only get involved, if a passenger is getting violent or threatening to get violent, or won't get off the bus.
In Britain (and Singapore etc) you board the bus at the front, where the bus driver checks your ticket and otherwise will kick you off the bus. The bus driver itself won't get into a physical fight with you. But the bus driver can definitely call for backup and will (presumably) stop the bus and refuse to drive until a recalcitrant passenger has been dealt with. The social contract seems to that all the other passengers will blame the would-be fare evader for the stoppage and back up the driver. But I've never actually seen that acted out completely.
Trains in Singapore and many parts of Britain have gates, and there are usually either some people monitoring the gates for jumpers or at least cameras.
> Do you dedicate policing resources to ensuring the collection of what is certainly less than the cost to employ the police officer? Seems wasteful until you hit a very high ridership.
It's all pretty similar to how parking regulations are enforced: there's some dedicated people who write tickets (not police officers), and the tickets are typically a few dozen dollars.
When I was last in London, I took the tube. Officers were at the exit gates, I presume to arrest anyone jumping the gates. I didn't see any fare evaders.
I suspect people want fare enforcement basically because it helps keeps the aggressive/crazy/assholes off. Not because they want to collect more money.
Anecdotally, the bart gates seem to have improved the riding experience.
Some data from LA:
> Of the 153 violent crimes perpetrated on Metro between May 2023 and April 2024, 143 of them — more than 93% — were believed to be committed by people who did not pay a valid fare and were using the transit system illegally.
> I suspect people want fare enforcement basically because it helps keeps the aggressive/crazy/assholes off. Not because they want to collect more money.
Well, it's also a matter of fairness: I'm a law-abiding citizen, and I pay for my bus fare. It's the Right Think to do. But if I'm paying, I want the other guys to pay as well.
I get that; the cost of enforcement makes that likely negative (possibly even very negative) to the system.
My claim is letting trash act like, well, trash and street people wild out on the system drives lots of commuters off. And ime, the worst riders are disproportionally fare thieves.
I can't tell if you're feigning not realizing the thread about San Francisco under a post referencing "Iowa City" is probably referring to the US.
Feels like a coy way of getting to say something as inflammatory as "the US a lawless hellhole" on HN: which is fine enough... but there's also a reason YC isn't a Singaporean or Turkish or British or German institution.
It very well might be genuine surprise. Most people from other countries have an extremely hard time understanding why most U.S. cities allow people to openly break the law in front of authorities with zero consequences.
The U.S. is a pretty far outlier in this regard. It's strange how many people in the U.S. don't realize this at all, and become appalled at when foreigners are shocked by the way things are done in U.S. cities.
Well I now I think it might be genuine ignorance because you managed to read my pretty clear comment ("everyone is mentioning US cities, so obviously they're talking about the US") and contort it into whatever you're on about.
Once might be a coincidence, twice might be me overestimating how carefully people read other comments before jumping into conversations.
You clearly haven’t used MUNI. Homeless are already riding the buses without paying, and I’ve rarely seen them camp in them. Most bus drivers know these people on a first name basis and very few of them are actually do anything beyond going from place to place.
And if you’re from San Francisco and use MUNI, you’ll also know that half the people don’t pay anyway. There’s no reason to make people pay.
I see a lot of homeless people on the 14 and they’re just chilling going from place to place. 38 however can have some very mentally ill people on it. My friend saw this guy on the 38 who was yelling about how much he hates the Japanese. Funny enough that guy got off at Japantown.
Rambling aside, I think it’s unfair to give people shit because they’re homeless. The real issue is we don’t commit people to psychiatric care when they’re clearly a problem in our society.
> The real issue is we don’t commit people to psychiatric care when they’re clearly a problem in our society.
I’m old enough to remember when we did that. The homeless population absolutely skyrocketed, after all the mental institutions were closed in the 1980s and 1990s.
That said, many of them were hellholes. It’s sort of arguable as to whether the patients were worse off, but one thing’s for sure; the majority of city-dwellers (the ones with homes) are not better off, now. I’m really not sure who benefited from this.
Here, on Long Island (NY), we have some of the largest psychiatric centers in the world; almost all completely shut down, and decomposing.
The campuses are gorgeous, but can’t be developed, because they would require hundreds of millions of dollars in cleanup.
> The real issue is we don’t commit people to psychiatric care when they’re clearly a problem in our society.
Where do you draw that line though? Are you really okay with committing people, i.e. imprisoning and medicating people, because society seems to find those people inconvenient?
Personally I've never understood any justification for committing a person without their consent. The line between being committed and being extra judicially imprisoned seems indistinguishable to me.
> Where do you draw that line though? Are you really okay with committing people, i.e. imprisoning [...] people, because society seems to find those people inconvenient?
Well, that's what prison is, for some value of "inconvenient".
The problem is that at some point, if someone refuses to abide by laws/social norms, and can't be coerced via fines, etc., then the only options the state, and society has are either imprisonment, or allowing those people to ignore laws/social norms. Clearly some social norms (e.g. serious crimes) we aren't okay with ignoring, so it's really just a question of what the threshold is where we do something vs. allowing people to disregard said laws/norms.
> Personally I've never understood any justification for committing a person without their consent. The line between being committed and being extra judicially imprisoned seems indistinguishable to me.
Presumably the process to commit someone can involve the judiciary, so it wouldn't be extra-judicial.
Prison isn't for people that society finds inconvenient and, if on a jury, I hope you don't view it that way.
Prison is for those convicted of a crime by a jury of their peers. There must not only be a criminal law on the books, you must be found guilt by trial.
Involuntary committal involves no laws being broken and there is no jury. I don't know every detail of that process though I am familiar with the general flow, I know multiple people that work in related roles, and my understanding from them is that it is generally not down through a legal proceeding.
Part of the surge of mass incarceration was that people who would have been hospitalized in an earlier time now get warehoused in a place that isn’t equipped to treat them.
What scares me about deinstitutionalization is that there are ways that people can ‘exit’ as in: move to the suburbs, drive instead of take public transportation, order a private taxi for your burrito instead of go to a restaurant. If public spaces can’t protect themselves we’ll have nothing but private spaces.
> Part of the surge of mass incarceration was that people who would have been hospitalized in an earlier time now get warehoused in a place that isn’t equipped to treat them.
Puts a different spin on the System of a Down lyrics, "The percentage of Americans in the prison system (prison system) has doubled since 1985" (Prison Song, Toxicity, 2001).
This further reinforces the other complaints (in the song) about drug offences landing people in jail, some of them from self-medicating a mental illness they can't or won't get treatment for
More fear mongering about the 'other'. Not immigrants or religous groups or racial groups this time, but unhoused and addicted people.
The dangerous people are the ones spreading fear - that leads to horrible things. I've had no problem with unhoused people who I am around almost every day. Why would I?
All the fear mongering is wrong. You have nothing to fear but fear itself.
