Paging Franz Kafka: The MTA has rolled out its latest anti-farebeating measure, spiked metal railings meant to discourage turnstile-jumpers from levering themselves into the system.
Debuting at the 59th Street/Lexington stop, the railings have a cyberpunk-dystopia look that still manages to be highly comical — think “Blade Runner” meets “Brazil.”
Which is all too appropriate, since anti-farebeating efforts in Gotham are both insane and darkly funny.
Maybe the railings will make some small difference; maybe they’ll go down as yet another screwup, a la the new turnstile models the agency tried in 2023 that proved to be easier to cheat your way through.
But let’s get it straight: The MTA is not to blame for the farebeating crisis.
New York’s pro-crime Democrats, the ones who made and keep farebeating effectively legal (starting with then-Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance in 2017), are the culprits here.
The MTA’s technocratic efforts to do something, anyway are desperation measures from an agency at wit’s end over a problem that simultaneously crushes its fisc (farebeating now costs it hundreds of millions a year) and erodes the social fabric above and below ground.
Again and again, history has shown that stopping farebeaters tends to keep violent crooks out of the system and to create an atmosphere that stifles disorder.
And tolerating it fosters chaos.
When otherwise law-abiding folks see people riding for free, they feel like suckers.
And letting small crimes pass without response demolishes respect for the law as a whole.
The result?
A subway system in which murders are at a historic high, where illegal immigrants burn sleeping homeless people to death and menaces with long rap sheets shove straphangers off platforms.
You can’t beat farebeating with railings or new-model turnstiles or AI-powered drones or cyborg rats or any tech, fanciful or feasible, ancient or bleeding-edge.
It takes actual, hard-line enforcement of the law.
Something far too many electeds in New York city and state are allergic to.
