After President Joe Biden signed a $7,500 credit for select electric vehicles into law, some left-wing critics asked why “Amtrak Joe” was expending his political capital on cars rather than rails. Whether it’s Naderites
concerned
about the nation’s unusually high traffic fatality rate or advocates of a pedestrian way of life, public transit fiends have become more and more vocal in questioning why Americans are so addicted to our deadly, isolating, and time-consuming cars.
Well, there’s an answer to that. Namely, the very urban liberals who could theoretically prove the viability of reliable, safe, and efficient public transit cannot help but make excuses for the thieves who are destroying the system’s viability.
It’s not just that a
crime surge
on public transit has mirrored the explosion of violence in the nation’s cities. (
According to
a YouGov poll from this month, nearly two in four public transit users consider public transit very or somewhat dangerous, including more than one in four city-dwellers and nearly three in ten Democrats.) It is also — and this might be even more important — that those disproportionately left-wing urbanites cannot even condemn fare-evaders for robbing public transportation of the funds it requires to serve everyone sustainably.
Earlier this month, Washington Examiner alum Helen Andrews reported observing some 40 fare jumpers in the nation’s capital. The Metro attendant standing by told her that it wasn’t his job to stop fare evasion.
The resulting Twitter ire was not aimed at low-level criminals robbing the transit system or a government employee neglecting his duty, but rather at Andrews for having the audacity to, you know, point out mass lawlessness as a matter of public interest. Many of the quote tweets and responses were even more ungracious than this telling response from the editor of Current Affairs.
solve this problem instantly through free public transit https://t.co/0bSbT9a8HV
— Nathan J Robinson (@NathanJRobinson) January 24, 2023
No public transit system in the world was entirely “free” — which means not actually “free,” but funded solely by taxpayers rather than riders — until 2020, when Luxembourg abolished fares. D.C. and New York are not Luxembourg, however. In the rest of the world, if you want a city with the walkability and functionality of, say, Paris, you have to do what they do in Paris — heavily punish fare evasion. In Paris, passengers who fail to produce a single-use paper ticket or Metro pass upon request are fined at least 35 euros, and this is aggressively enforced through a system of checkpoints.
I would love to live in the very sort of city these climate change warriors claim to want — and in D.C., I almost do. I live in a studio apartment blocks from where Joe Biden illegally stashed classified documents. I haven’t owned a car in almost a decade. I almost exclusively use public transit.
But fare evasion
costs about one-fifth
of the budget deficit of New York City’s Metropolitan Transit Authority. This means that, even if the violent crime abates, fare evasion alone is defunding the public transit dream for which anti-car, anti-carbon leftists ostentatiously advocate.
Maybe one day, politicians will consider proposals to phase out the national automobile addiction. But until the biggest backers of public transit start defending their own transit systems from mass theft, why should Biden or anyone else take them seriously?
