>>1889115Depends on if your transit agency/street parking authority is privatized or not.
If privatized, then yeah, the agency is within their rights to pursue it as "theft under $5,000" (at least what we call it here).
But if the agency is public, then both are stealing a few dollars from the public purse. Money is fungible, and who gives a shit whether you stole that money out of the bag marked "parking" or the bag marked "transit." A dollar is just a number in a spreadsheet.
And the "public space" argument you make here is no less damning.
Yes, a space in a bus/tram/subway is slightly more "expensive" to offer than a space on the curb of the road in dollar figures (though, I would hope everyone pro-transit argues transit is more efficient if we stopped externalizing costs onto other parties).
But the space by the curb has a large, non-monetary opportunity cost. Every space we devote to people storing their private property is space that could have been used for more throughput of vehicles (cagers love this!), or for throughput of bicycles, or for transit right-of-ways or even just an extra transit stop, or just to store snow because my examples are all Canada and sometimes we need a place to keep snow for a few weeks until it melts.
If we value efficient use of our curb space at 3 / 20 the value of our public transit spaces, then why the fuck do we have so bloody much of it?
Anyways, all distractions from what I hoped was the core point of the thread. I want to hear your anec-data! In the spirit of not grifting off other's hard work, here's some more figures:
>New York City, $35/$65 unpaid meter, $100 fare evasion (wow, if we use the 65% that's looking pretty good!)>Paris, France, £35/£50, £50-£180 fare evasion (holy shit, actual parity here if paid on-the-spot)So there's two cities I'll need to look into a bit later and see if there was interesting public debate around those figures. May learn something about advocacy techniques.
