Fare dodgers. They’re the worst. Imagine a city where people were even sporting shirts celebrating the art of dodging public transportation. The nerve!

Anyway, let’s run some new numbers published by Gothamist in an article about Subway crime.

100,000 dodger tickets are said to have been issued at $100/each, which would mean $10,000,000 in fines gathered for NYC.

Wow. I mean 10 MILLION is a lot of lettuce. Who could argue with this tough-on-crime position (that seems to be targeting very specific neighborhoods with some very particular attributes)?

Who wants to guess whether NYC used the poverty map to deploy police officers, like handing out fines for being poor?

Now let us now see how much the city spent on this program…

Oh. Oh no.

No, this can’t be right.

More than 1,000 additional police officers were deployed in the subways each day as part of the plan, which Gothamist reported cost the city and state an additional $151 million in overtime.

Ok, so NYC lost $141 MILLION dollars to chase fare evasion. Doesn’t that seem incredibly, even for NYC, stupid and backwards?

Howabout putting $141 million into infrastructure upgrades instead? Make payment options easier even and offer a monthly multi-system package covering all rail? Maybe then people would gladly pay to ride? Just some basic economic nudge theory.

That’s a good theory but here comes science to the rescue!

It turns out NOT chasing Dem Bums is the right thing to do according to the actual numbers. Here’s some ground-breaking research from 2016:

Ignoring Fare Evaders Can Make Mass Transit Faster—And Richer

More and more cities are emphasizing ease of access over making every last rider pay.

The article goes on to state the obvious, although they call it counter-intuitive for some reason.

“Essentially what we were trying to do is keep the honest folks honest,” says Julie Kirschbaum, who oversees the agency’s modernization efforts. And do just enough to keep the bandits on their toes.

It worked. In tourist-heavy areas, the system’s bus and streetcar dwell times per stop dropped 13 percent. Before, each person getting on or off needed 6.8 seconds. Now, they take 3. 5 seconds. Multiply those moments of savings by every rider boarding and alighting at every stop on every bus line, and you’ve got hundreds of hours of extra time per year. All from opening up the back doors.

The cheaters are still along for the ride, according to Muni’s latest data. But the agency’s surveys found fare evasion dropped from nearly 10 percent in 2009 to 7.9 percent in 2014. The resulting estimated loss in revenue fell from $19.2 million to $17.1 million.

That tracks with Oslo’s experience, where the public transit system also liberated all metros from fare gates. By making it easier for riders to pay for tickets through their phones, the system halved its fare evasion rates, to five percent. Trains are moving faster, too, which encourages more people to use the service. The agency has calculated the cost of slower operations versus what it’s losing through fare evasion. It makes more financial sense to let the cheaters cheat, it says.

It makes more sense to open the pod bay doors so people can get where they need to go? Color me surprised.

NYC seems to be trying so hard right now to look like a HAL 9000 in charge, they seem to have forgotten how the plot turns out for an autocratic enforcement-obsessed robot.

Guess who today wants you to believe his lies and ignore what you see?

Not a door fit issue because it can be addressed by a 5 minute door fit repair so severe it changed door fit in production.

The use of speech 2024.

File this along with “not a rust issue”.

With good reason, given so many Tesla crashes in 2023, Americans now don’t trust a Tesla to be on shared public roads.

…68% of Americans are afraid of self-driving cars…

It’s literally a reaction to Tesla Autopilot failures and fatalities, and arguably getting worse over time.

…last year’s surge in anxiety [was] all the more notable.

“We were not expecting such a dramatic decline in trust from previous years,” stated AAA director of automotive research Greg Bannon. “Although with the number high-profile crashes that have occurred from over-reliance on current vehicle technologies, this isn’t entirely surprising.”

Tesla has been an obvious fraud since 2016, killing hundreds of people. It’s just becoming a question of why any government allows Tesla to continue to operate, and why that CEO isn’t being lined up like he runs the Enron of cars.

This comes on the heels of people realizing that a robotaxi will ruin cities while making passengers easy targets with few to no security options. It feels more like being subjected to a moving dystopic single-cell jail than offered any conveniences.

[SF riders describe being helpless and terrified.] If we were outside walking we could’ve walked away, run away. If we were driving, we could make sure we locked the door. In this instance, we literally had no control.

“We had no control” sounds awful, like a taxi of Soviet Russia Развалюха-style design.

Robo-taxis are shaping up to be the most anti-city anti-democracy concept possible. Sensible and proven public transportation solutions (trains, subways, buses and bicycles) are being threatened by already unworkable and toxic swarms of anti-public robots controlled by opaque unaccountable private and probably foreign agents. What’s next, someone with their finger on the swarm algorithms commands 40,000 road robots to rampage and destroy an American city?

In related news, IIHS has tested and ranked Tesla the most unsafe driverless. Their assessment should surprise exactly nobody.

The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety said: “Some drivers may feel that partial automation makes long drives easier, but there is little evidence it makes driving safer.”

The evidence continues to prove the opposite of what Tesla promises. Their designs and engineering, always rushed and poorly tested, make roads far less safe.

Interesting update to the WorldCoin ban last year, as Kenya calls out the U.S. government for signs of corruption by billionaires of Silicon Valley.

Kenya has rejected a push by the United States government to revoke the suspension of activities of the cryptocurrency project WorldCoin, legislators heard on Thursday.

Interior Cabinet Secretary Kithure Kindiki told Parliament that the government will not lift the suspension it imposed in August 2023 on the activities of WorldCoin.

Appearing before the National Assembly’s committee on Public Petitions, Prof Kindiki said Kenya has been under pressure from the US government to lift the suspension.

“The United States has been pushing the government on the issues of WorldCoin, but we have remained adamant and firm,” Prof Kindiki said.

“They (US) think that they (WorldCoin) still have a case to set up their activities here. We have remained adamant and the decision we took will remain. We are not going to review the suspension.”

Notably, WorldCoin was caught violating rights of people with some clearly criminal behavior. I’d even say it was a case of being very openly and obnoxiously illegal, basically intoxication with science fiction that led to public digital defecation.

It was like some young clueless tech-bros from America thought parachuting into Africa wearing big “white savior” pants would magically mean no Black person there would enforce laws, let alone stand up for human rights.

Prof Kindiki on August 2, 2023, issued a directive suspending the activities of WorldCoin pending the conclusion of inquiries that were aimed at establishing the safety of the data being harvested.

At the time, Prof Kindiki said the suspension would remain in effect until assurances of the safety and integrity of financial deals are provided.

“The government has suspended forthwith activities of WorldCoin and any other entity that may be similarly engaging the people of Kenya until relevant public agencies certify the absence of any risks to the general public whatsoever,” the statement issued by Prof Kindiki said.

Absence of any risks to the general public? That’s a basic requirement of engineering, and a code of ethics concept common across industries. If American tech companies aren’t removing risks to the public in product design and development, they aren’t really engineering and deserve a ban.

WorldCoin infamously and criminally rolled out the worst possible security in Nairobi, Kenya. Like, I mean, the actual worst. It is hard to imagine a less safe roll-out plan for a product.

The ministry of the interior has launched an investigation into Worldcoin and called on security services and data protection agencies to establish its authenticity and legality. In a statement released on Thursday, Worldcoin says it is planning to implement crowd-control measures and collaborate with the government before resuming work. It added that Kenyan regulations are adhered to. In one of the pop-up registration centres in the capital, Nairobi, where hundreds had been lining up for the registration, many had been locked out of the process on Wednesday after the large crowd was termed a “security risk”. “I’ve been coming here almost three days to line up and register. I want to register because I’m jobless and I’m broke, that’s why I’m here,” Webster Musa told the BBC. “I came here yesterday. I waited until my phone died. So I came again today but I’ve missed the registration again. I really like Worldcoin because of the money. I’m not worried about the data being taken. As long as the money comes,” added Dickson Muli. Worldcoin says it cannot say how many people have had their eyeballs scanned in Kenya.

Because of the money… as long as the money comes?

That does sound like corruption, along the lines of “if they pay it must be ok“.

Boeing, Tesla… WorldCoin.