I debuted this column in January 2023 with a flippant defense of car ownership in New York City. It felt liberating to be an auto apologist. But for every carefree joyride, there is a killjoy speed bump, most recently a $720 charge to fix my 2010 Toyota Prius’s AC filter—clogged with debris left over by the rats living under the hood—and a $192 civil penalty for letting my insurance lapse due to an expired credit card.
If I was an armchair partisan in the war on cars then, the heated response to Governor Kathy Hochul’s torpedoing of congestion pricing and the multifront battle being waged by rodents in my Prius’s engine have forced me to reexamine my position. Or at least they have refocused my attention back on a familiar foe in my quest for freedom: the subway.
While I could never fully quit the system, an ongoing lag in subway ridership suggests around 25 percent of prepandemic commuters have simply opted out. Service, anyone who relies on riding the trains will tell you, has never been worse, and station maintenance appears to be nonexistent. Police officers seem to outnumber working card kiosks. The cops are there to enforce order, which in most instances means patrolling the fare gate. Last year, New York Times journalist Ana Ley reported that the MTA had come to doubt that strategy’s efficacy, noting that “even after a dramatic increase in enforcement, the transit system lost $690 million to fare evasion last year.”
The MTA-produced “Blue-Ribbon Panel Report” cited in the Times’ coverage identified numerous categories into which evaders fall: opportunistic, frustrated, economically stressed, student. But evaders weren’t the only ones to blame. A phrase in the report caught my attention: “evasion enablers,” defined as “those who cause or profit from evasion by others.” The alliteration mania continued in a passage about “precision policing” and “equitable enforcement,” oxymoronic-sounding approaches that promise to disincentivize enablers whose actions apparently account for close to half of all lost revenue. The wordplay culminated in the “Four E’s” approach: To enforcement the Blue-Ribbon Panel added education, equity, and environment (design and technology).”
If you were counting on being canonized for connecting your Chase credit card to OMNY’s contactless payment system, it might be time to renounce your subway sainthood.
But what is an opinion column without the buttress of anecdotal evidence? Over the past few years, my local station, the Dekalb L at Stanhope and Wyckoff, has seen an uptick in the number of enterprising (and often visibly high) individuals positioned at the emergency exit door who will wave harried commuters onto the train platform in the hopes of a tip. In this economy of $2.90 fares, there isn’t a sane straphanger (or seatsitter) who wouldn’t go for it.
Curious to learn more about this hustle, I asked a door dealer how much she made in an average day. Anywhere from $40 to $50, she answered, adding that she’ll stick around until she “sees the po-po” who routinely patrol the station. Now on the other side of the turnstile, I watched two girls slip through the open door without tipping. “Next time,” they said upon a polite request for a dollar.
After the turnstile tender left for the day, I took over her gatekeeping duties and tried my hand at playing an evasion angel. I spotted a woman who looked like she wanted me to let her through. But when I obliged, she hesitated, looked at me nervously, and asked, “Is the train even coming?” The station’s digital monitors had gone blank. When the train arrived a couple moments later, she swiped herself in, rejecting my offer of mutual-aid martyrdom. She seemed to have neither trust in me nor in the system.
I don’t blame her. Skipping out on paying my fair share doesn’t make me feel good; that brief hit of adrenaline you get from bypassing the law soon succumbs to a feeling of moral decrepitude. I want to be an upstanding citizen, not a beacon of bad behavior. But a follow-up report by Ley—this one appearing in October 2023, just five months after the original article ran—assuaged my culpability. “The MTA is no longer broke,” went the headline. Federal aid and state funding will help see the agency through for the next five years. Fare evasion wasn’t mentioned once.
Did I really want to be let off that easy? Naturally, on a day I decided to perform my civic duty and pay the $2.90 to get to work, things went south as I headed west. A crackling voice came over the loudspeaker at the Lorimer station and warned riders to “expect major delays.” Exasperated sighs rang out as the doors of the subway car remained open. A police officer descended from the platform onto the tracks. The disembodied voice over the PA suggested finding alternative modes of transportation. After a half hour of patiently waiting, I exited the car and then the station. I was less than halfway to my destination. I was still in Brooklyn.
I grabbed an e-bike from a nearby Citi Bike fleet and headed off in the direction of the Williamsburg Bridge when I felt a few rain droplets on my arm. Soon, the rain hardened, and I had to take cover under an overpass. Forced to idle and accrue a per-minute fare, I began to doubt my alternative transportation plan and wondered if the police investigation at Lorimer had concluded and whether that train had begun moving. Then I ran into a young gay playwright who greeted me cheerfully despite the grim weather. I told him my predicament and my deliberations on fare evasion. “I just helped someone evade the fare over there,” he said, pointing toward the Marcy stop. “It’s wonderful. Evade the fare!”
While I would eventually reach my destination, a standard trip into Manhattan had turned into an hours-long odyssey in, out, under, and over New York’s transit infrastructure. Fare evasion, it seemed to me then, was not a crime but a gift. A collective pursuit of freedom in the face of an inhumane system.
To some enforcers this column may read like an endorsement. I prefer to see it as an “evasion epiphany.” I had initially sought justification for my misdeeds in Augustine’s Confessions, recognizing my own transgression in the saint’s recollection of an orchard theft he and his youthful pals had carried out. “Alone I would not have committed the crime,” he writes, adding that “my pleasure lay not in what I was stealing but in the act of theft.” Finding his 400 AD prose a tad outdated, if still relatable, I reached for another moral authority, the Marxist-humanist philosopher Marshall Berman. Specifically, the chapter in his book All That Is Solid Melts into Air (1982) called “The Heroism of Modern Life.” Modern heroism, he writes, emerges “in situations of conflict that pervade everyday life.” It corresponds to “a desire to live openly with the split and unreconciled character of our lives, and to draw energy from our inner struggles, wherever they may lead us in the end.” It clarifies that our duty as responsible urban beings is “to lose our haloes and find ourselves anew.” In other words, if you were counting on being canonized for connecting your Chase credit card to OMNY’s contactless payment system, it might be time to renounce your subway sainthood.
Near the end of the MTA’s report, the Blue-Ribbon Panel suggests that a fifth E will be needed: experiment. With the indefinite postponement of congestion pricing and no clear consensus on the future of mass transit, I suggest that the city listen to the people, not the po-po. Rather than “precision policing,” what if the city tried evasion enabling? Everybody’s doing it.