Good on the MTA for trying out new entry-gate designs aiming to frustrate farebeaters, but the real answer is all about law enforcement — and restoring law-abiding expectations.
That is, reversing the progressives’ erosion of the city’s social fabric.
It’s criminal justice “reform” — that is, retreat — that sent fare beating soaring, to cost the MTA almost $700 million in 2022 and likely top that in 2023.
It’s hard to fault the MTA for doing everything it can to stem the massive losses this pernicious form of theft has inflicted on the agency’s already-parlous fisc.
But fare beating does not stem from technocratic failures, and it demands solutions far more serious than new subway entrances.
As agency head Janno Lieber memorably put it to The Post, the crime of fare beating “tears at the social fabric.”
Not only does it effectively steal from public coffers (and any theft from a public agency is a theft above all from the poorest New Yorkers).
Dennis A. Clark
It also means that more and more dangerous people end up in the transit system.
People who fare beat often have rap sheets and open warrants for more serious charges; if someone’s willing to jump a turnstile (or haul themselves over a gate) they’ll be more likely to act out on a far worse impulse once on the platform or onboard a train.
Unpunished, widespread fare beating also signals to law-abiding folks that they’re suckers for paying at all.
Former NYPD commish Bill Bratton understood that by cracking down on fare beating, he was cracking down on overall crime — and laying the foundation for the historic safety gains the city saw starting in the 1990s.
Progressive former Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance refused to see this, and stopped prosecuting the practice in 2017, a policy followed by his even worse successor Alvin Bragg and other DAs.
And now there’s effectively zero penalty for many of the more serious crimes farebeaters graduate to, thanks to the state’s disastrous criminal justice reforms.
The results — higher crimes of all kinds in the subway, including murders — were utterly predictable.
These new gates won’t do anything about the wider culture of lawlessness.
Only Albany Democrats and the city’s DAs can address that.
Until they do, expect New York City’s social erosion to continue.
