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>Busses became makeshift homeless shelters In the context of NYC: as it is there is little stopping a homeless person from jumping a turnstile and spending all
by rm999 13y ago
>Busses became makeshift homeless shelters
In the context of NYC: as it is there is little stopping a homeless person from jumping a turnstile and spending all day or night on the 24 hour subway system. But it's fairly rare to see this (I believe it used to be much more common). I imagine on a bus, where there is always a city employee monitoring things, it would be even more rare.
- egypturnash 13y agoMost of Seattle's busses are double-length, so there's a heck of a long way between the driver and whatever shenanigans may be going on in the back.
- potatolicious 13y agoSeattle bus drivers (like bus drivers in many places I imagine) do not have enforcement teeth. When I lived there there was an infamous case where several teenagers viciously beat a bus driver. Plexiglass dividers were installed soon afterward to protect drivers from their own passengers. The homeless aren't scared of a bus driver. Nor are passengers - on some routes in the evenings people would jump on via the back doors and refuse to pay fare. The bus driver would refuse to move the bus until they came forward and paid the fare. The bus driver always lost. The reason why these problems aren't endemic in NYC is because NYC has actual enforcement via the NYPD. The police is widespread and available enough that no one tries to fuck around with the system too hard. In Seattle the SPD never show up to these things unless violence erupts. The NYPD also has, for better or worse, a traditionally less soft stance on vagrancy and fare jumping.
- mattmanser 13y agoIsn't that because they famously implemented the broken windows theory? http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory#New_York_City http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory#New_Yor...
- potatolicious 13y agoYeah, it's hard to argue against the results. The broken windows theory, by reasonable accounts, has contributed greatly to making NYC a much better place to live than it was before - even when accounting for the general nation-wide crime reduction that occurred in the same era. As someone who grew up in a very liberal part of the west coast, it's hard to admit, but authoritarianism and ubiquitous police presence has done wonders for this city. It certainly unseats some assumptions. The trouble with the success of broken windows in NYC though, is that it has created a culture where increasingly authoritarian policies are tolerated, and results proving their efficacy often not provided.
- groby_b 13y agoExcept that it's not quite as clean-cut as we'd like it to be: http://www.newrepublic.com/blog/timothy-noah/101318/broken-windows-revisited# http://www.newrepublic.com/blog/timothy-noah/101318/broken-w... Bit more detail: http://blogcritics.org/policing-urban-crimes-the-broken-windows/ http://blogcritics.org/policing-urban-crimes-the-broken-wind... Even more on wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory#Criticism_of_the_theory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory#Criticism...
- lobster_johnson 13y agoOne thing I have noticed is that NYC has a lot more homeless people on the streets than just a few years ago, or at least more such people that are visible in the urban landscape. I don't know why, and my colleagues don't, either, but there seems to be an increase in the number of homeless people in general [1], which may explain it. [1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/05/nyc-homelessness-rises-shelters-50000_n_2812966.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/05/nyc-homelessness-ri...
- jlgreco 13y agoOne problem is that the theory doesn't necessarily help every city. Seattle for instance is not exactly a city that I would consider to have many "broken windows" that need fixing. At least there isn't visible rampant petty crime. I'm not sure what they would crack down on.