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Comment by thejteam | Hacker News Reader

Is this legal on the NYC subway? On the DC metro, eating is forbidden and enforced. I remember a story from years back about a little girl being led away in handcuffs for eating a few french fries. Hopefully this story won't get him into too much trouble.

And hopefully it won't spawn too many copycats either. The last thing this guy (not too mention the other riders) need is for the number of people peddling sugar to multiply.

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Wow.

(http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=94999&page=1)

> *Seventh-grader Ansche Hedgepeth was handcuffed, booked and fingerprinted for eating French fries in a northwest Washington subway station.

12 years old?

They take it seriously. In fairness, it works-- the DC subway system is way cleaner than NYC. The good side of fascism, I guess.

On the other hand, the NYC system is not particularly dirty. I'm not from NYC and so haven't ridden the subway a lot, but I've never seen a single seat unusable because of filth. That shiny plastic stays pretty clean.

I think the DC subway system is cleaner than the NYC subway system, but I don't think it has anything to do with the food policies. For one, I have never seen food refuse in the NYC subway. I think the biggest difference is scale and number of riders: the DC metro has about 700,000 riders on a weekday, while the NYC subway has about 5.1 million. (From Wikipedia.)

Eating isn't illegal on the NY subway, though unlicensed selling is (but that's enforced sporadically).

Chances are that on any rush hour train there are at least one or two people busking, selling candy or begging. It's a near daily sight for me.

""" On the DC metro, eating is forbidden and enforced. """

It cannot be both forbidden and enforced, can it?

OK, I'm being pedantic.

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