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Comment by infotainment | Hacker News Reader

Well that’s unfortunate. Fare evasion should be punished, and facial recognition seems like a fairly efficient way to implement it.

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Functional turnstiles seem like a much more robust and effective solution without false positive issues and can’t be that expensive.

Also, one would have to assume that this function would be contracted out to a private party, which would sell the geolocation data of millions, or at least "share it with partners," because there is no US law against that.

Does the NYC subway not have turnstiles?

We do, they are easily hopped over.

More recently people have discovered that if you pull the turnstile backwards a half turn you can squeeze by with very little effort.

In other words NYC doesn’t have working turnstiles.

> More recently people have discovered that if you pull the turnstile backwards a half turn you can squeeze by with very little effort.

This has been going on forever…

Turnstiles are a barbaric solution to a non problem.

People need to get around. Taking mass transit is the best way for humanity for them to get there. Therefore, the fare should be zero.

Even if we feel a fare is needed, plenty of places operate with civilized proof-of-payment systems.

Civilized solutions work in a civilized world.

The civilized solution is making it free and paying for it from taxing the companies and stores that benefit from it(practically all of them).

13% of subway riders and 45% of bus riders don't pay the fare.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-31/nyc-s-tra...

Also, turnstiles are not barbaric, what are you talking about?

Also since when is the rule that "the 'best' way has to be free"?

Londoner here - with our fare evasion stats at this link

https://tfl.gov.uk/corporate/transparency/freedom-of-informa...

None of the articles I've seen ever seen to address why NYC has such a high rate of fare evasion. Is it just an ingrained "cultural" thing now? You could definitely jump over the TfL barriers if you wanted to, but no one does

A very good question! No clue. I do see weirdos on Twitter defending it for dumb reasons, but that can't account for it all.

> facial recognition seems like a fairly efficient way

I feel this is extraordinary dependent on how you measure "efficient" and how many false-positives or false-negatives are too many. (Also the fun problems where it's wrong way more often for certain groups of people.)

If the metric is solely "maximize the percentage of evaders who are punished", then the most "efficient" solution is to indiscriminately fine every single person. :p

It is if your idea of an "efficient" system is one with baked-in discrimination and lots of false positives. Targeting, not so coincidentally, folks in lower income brackets.

I don't understand why officers can't enforce fare evasion in NYC like they do in every other country.

Because the city officials don’t want to draw attention to the racial demographics of fare evaders.

If they actually arrest them, then there would be official numbers that align with the anecdata that anyone who has ridden that system is already familiar with.

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