If anyone is getting on my bus - straight up, honestly - my job is to get you where you need to go as safe as possible. People evade fares it’s a daily occurrence. I’m not enforcing a fare that can lead to me being hurt.
Why would they put us in a situation where we could get literally assaulted? We don’t know who’s coming on, who has weapons. This memo went out asking us to politely state the fare. The transit authority, they try to present this notion that we’re the reason why, or part of the reason why, there’s such low fare collection. As someone who’s been doing this work for close to ten years, I’m not saying a thing. You can make any kind of policy you want, but people are going to pay what they want to pay. This interview has been edited and condensed. He and many other bus operators see this back-and-forth as an escalation: “They want us to state the fare, but that leads to potential situations where a person may feel threatened.” So he says he stays quiet rather than potentially endanger other passengers - and himself. Things aren’t always that simple in practice, says Damien Lois, a ten-year veteran of the MTA.
According to a memorandum sent by the MTA’s chief transportation officer in May, if a passenger doesn’t pay, a bus driver - the official title is bus operator - must “politely state the fare.” If the person still refuses, the operator is supposed to log the skipped fare and go on boarding the bus. A recurring thread in all of it is the idea that MTA workers should be actively getting people to pay up. City officials have a lot of ideas about fare evasion, both why it happens ( entitled latte drinkers, open doors) and how to fix it (blue-ribbon panels producing questionable wordplay, closing those doors).
0 kommentar(er)
