We Need to Chill With these Subway Fare Hikes
The rides are too damn high!
Reaching for our Metro passes has a powerfully deranging effect on all who observe the virtuosic branding that transit bureaucracies will plaster all over subway stations. Moving this city for over 100 years, these billboards will heroically declare—although questions of where, how many packed into a car, and how long it will take remains suspiciously unanswered. As someone who has drastically cut subway commutes from my overall transportation diet in the name of riding my bike-share whenever possible (and because I detest having some toddler sneeze on my leg while I’m listening to Andre 3000 play the flute for 90 minutes), I was startled by how much an individual fare costs these days. In Toronto, it has recently been raised from $3.20 to $3.30, but other major North American cities like NYC and Chicago have similar rates. As I arrive at the end of the bleak arc of tapping my Metro card, it warrants considering how little these fares make sense; $3.30 is something like the price of a gallon of unleaded gas. This paragraph is getting to be a windy disquisition about the average person getting screwed over by distinctive municipal issues, so I’ll leave this segway at: At least round the price to an even number!
After visiting several European cities, I have wistful internet urban planner fantasies about what a competent subway system could be in our glorious North American rat’s nests. I don’t mind spending money on a piece of infrastructure that would have positive tangible impacts on people’s lives, especially since the alternative is sitting in traffic with pent-up homicidal rage or Elon Musk siphoning tax dollars to build a one-lane underground highway that any five-year-old who has ever played with a Hot Wheels set could tell you is a dumb idea. But if I am going to fork over my hard-earned dollar, I need to see our government rise above its perverse and dysfunctional nature and deliver some improvements.
The price of a subway ride will spike and then a month later, the first “improvement” will be an added feature on your transit authority app that is basically Waze but it lets you know which station is currently infested with the most rats. Every station has too many rats. I could tweet a picture of this every morning and it will save the municipal government millions of dollars. I’d even settle for one (1) conductor who announces upcoming stops in a silly jingle instead of their regular boring voice.
Public transit should be free at the point of service, and I turn my ideology into praxis by entering the bus from the rear door and moving to the back without making a commotion. Unfortunately, there is no sneaking in from the back at the subway station. Any attempt to jump the turnstile is a risk of alerting those cops who hide behind a pillar and play on their phones. We all know they’re just waiting to pounce on a single mom who makes minimum wage.
This past September, the NYPD rolled out these Wall-E-looking robocops to patrol the subway stations, which scans as gratuitous in all the degrading ways that law enforcement’s response to any social problem is gratuitous. All we need from these robocops is an outlet to charge our phones, and a little hatch that opens so we can urinate inside them. These things don’t even come with arms or even handcuffs. If some perv or crackhead was jacking off somewhere on the platform, my specific personality defects would prevent me from doing anything to intervene, especially if they’re the type of characters that have active pigeons nested on their shoulders. However, the robocop and I are equipped to react to this disturbing scene in the same manner: Stand there expressionless and pray that it stops.
Our inner city train stations have banks of free recharging stations, although you're not supposed to pee at them while waiting for your battery to refuel.
Huh! Ours just increased to $10 a day, a nice round number. Or $5 a day for people without a job and without money.