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Swedish Fare Dodgers Organize Against Transportation Authorities
An anonymous reader writes "Every transit network has its fare beaters, the riders who view payment as either optional or prohibitively expensive. Many cities, most notably New York, view turnstile-jumpers as a top policing priority, reasoning that scofflaws might graduate to more serious crimes if left alone. But in Stockholm, the offenders seem to have defeated the system. From the article: 'For over a decade, Mr. Tengblad has belonged to a group known as Planka.nu (rough translation: “free-ride.now”), an organization with only two prerequisites for admission: Members must pay a monthly fee of about $15 and, as part of a continuous demonstration against the fare, promise to evade payment every time they ride. If travelers keep their side of the agreement, the group will cover any of the roughly $180 fines that might result. (An unlimited ride pass for 30 days costs about $120.)'"
It's just an insurance scheme. With heavier penalties, it would not work.
would be charged with criminal conspiracy.
Or the Transit Authority can lower the monthly cost for a full time rider to $14.99, and get the government to covere the difference from tax revenue. It is a socialist country you know.
Just increase the tax on petrol (or whatever is Swedish for gasoline)
This is known as organized crime.
Get the fools to sign up and chip in money, or better, submit a request for reimbursement. Then you have a traceable money trail. to the culprit.
Or perhaps it's a quick Ponzi scheme. If any of the idiots ever tries to file a suit on the basis of not getting reimbursed, what can they do? Take the case to court? At least in the US, you cannot make a contract to do an illegal act.
Scandinavia is different. In Norway prisons are like hotels. Norway hired someone to be a friend for the convicted murderer who killed 79 people. The friend would visit him in jail and play chess with him.
According to TFA, the organization that pays of the fines is currently profitable because it rakes in twice the money as it pays off in fines. It seems simply raising the fines would quickly make that unprofitable.
The mentality of these people, like those who dislike taxes, is that they deserve services from the government for free. They don't care about the specifics about how those services are funded. They just want free services.
They should know that without funding the quality of services declines, and in some cases, services stop completely. Perhaps they do, and just don't care.
In an ideal world I wish public transportation was free. But I know gasoline and spare tires and replacement tracks for the subways don't magically appear out of thin air, and I know that services depend on money from the riders to keep going.
If these people really want to make lasting change, instead of being fare dodgers they should actually research how Swedish transportation is funded, and come up with viable, alternative methods of funding. But that's hard work, and these people are lazy bums.
These people are parasites, and leeches, whose evasion is helping to drive UP the cost for everybody else.
Public transportation is en expensive service, mostly subsidized through taxes, these hypocritical parasites help make it that much more expensive for everybody else.
I hope the Swedish authorities take an idea that was floated when the same was about to happen in Denmark.
The fines the "organization" pay, are to be treated as taxable income.
Because the US "justice" system is such a shining example for the world. Threatening college students with decades of prison for "stealing" public research papers. Approving no-knock warrants resulting in hundreds if not thousands of innocent deaths. Militarization of police forces and the use of SWAT teams for even the most benign crimes. Crushing people pirating a few songs/movies with hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines. Yes, the rest of the world would do well to emulate us.
At $120/month for a pass, you're probably paying less to use transit than you would pay for gasoline. On top of that, you don't have the expense of purchasing and maintaining a car, insurance, or parking.
On top of that, people who cannot drive or cannot afford to drive usually have access to cheaper bus passes. Those who live in walkable or bikeable communities have the choice of paying a single fare when they need the service, rather than having to deal with the full expense of car ownership for the few times that you do need a car. (Well, I suppose there are taxies and rentals -- but those aren't cheap either.)
If you can dodge a fare, you can dodge a ball!
I suspect the people who actually do this are mostly kids who don't have steady jobs yet. Being part of a union to dodge fees on public transit is probably viewed by many in the halls of power as a mischievous phase young'ens go through. According to the article only 3% of rides are not paid for, and most evaders seem to be High School age kids. Joining a fare-dodging union specifically designed to protest that taxes on the rich aren't high enough is IMO exactly the kind of mischief the powers-that-be in Sweden want the kids to be into.
It would actually be fairly simple for the authorities to stop this. They have a dude at the gate watching the fare dodger, he almost always sees the fard dodger, he just doesn't have the time/energy to chase down a High School kid whose got a 50 foot head start.
If they just had a real cop sitting before the entrance to the station platform they could probably catch almost everyone who tries to dodge a fare, which would run the fare-dodging group out of cash quite quickly. You borrow 200-300 police for a couple months and you'd destroy this organization pretty much forever. It would cost money (a couple months of borrowing 1% of the countries police, plus adding more transit police guys to keep the fare-stealers from just going underground for three months and you;re in the $10 million range easy), but according to the article fare-jumpers cost them $36 million a year already so it's be a good investment.
They pay a fee to be a member, but then think it is ok to NOT pay the transit fare?
Literally meaning, I ain't got no money. You may know the concept better as, open source.
Weak troll is weak. People who write OSS are willingly giving the product of their efforts away for free. That's got nothing to do with scofflaws who deliberately steal a service that they are not paying for.
The police has absolutely zero reason to help catching fare dodgers.
To understand why so few fare dodgers get caught it's important to understand that the police has no business being in the metro unless they suspect a crime is going on. The only people in the metro are the metro guards who are explicitly -not- police.
This is important because in Sweden only the police can legally detain you which means that when a metro guard catches you without a ticket, you can simply run out of the metro and the guard can't actually legally stop you.
New York City's crackdown on turnstile jumping was part of the Giuliani Administrations implementation of broken window policing. But reducing low level disorder and misdemeanor crime, broken windows policing makes the law abiding residents of neighborhoods feel safer.
"A government’s inability to control even a minor crime like graffiti signaled to citizens that it certainly couldn’t handle more serious ones."
Stopping and arresting turnstile jumpers in particular frequently turned up wanted felons, parole violators, and gangbangers with illegal guns. Arresting them not only took criminal predators, off the streets, it encouraged other criminals to leave their guns at home for fear of having them confiscated. This further reduced their abilities to commit criminal acts in places like subways, and reduced criminal gun incidents when members of rival gangs would bump into each other.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
If I ran a transport network, I wouldn't bother with barriers - just occasional ticket checks / smart card validation and upon failure it's a £1,000,000 fine.
And is any of this written into the Constitution? Or could a simple parliamentary majority amend the law so that police could stop people dodging fares for the next few months, and then that the transit authority could hire 20-25 guys with police powers? Hell, even if there is a Constitutional bar, why couldn't they just hire 100 more station guards for a few months,m and then station a bunch of police outside the station to nail anyone running out.
I read the article, and it seems like they're unlikely to use their legal powers to crush this little group. It feels like they think of fare-dodging as a socially acceptable form of teenage rebellion, particularly when it's done as part of a political protest, and therefore they don't actually want to force a bunch of rebellious high school age kids into other forms of rebellion. The voters probably wouldn't like it, and the PM himself has a couple kids who should be entering rebellious teenagerdom relatively soon.
But that doesn't mean they couldn't nail everyone's ass to the wall if they really wanted to.
A simple parliamentary majority? Short of mind control powers you'll never get a Swedish parliament to give random uneducated bums police powers. The only non-police with police powers in Sweden are train conductors however the metro is not a train.
Meanwhile the actual police are really expensive and overworked as is due to budget issues and there are consitutional issues preventing the state from giving orders to the police.
Those services are funded by tax payer money
Those services are partially funded by tax payer money
There, I fixed that for you.
Thiefs think others should pay, news at 11.
I'm from Sweden and well aware of the idiots who think they have the right to pay when others do pay.
They simply suck.
I wish they all got caught and I wish everyone reported these idiots when they saw them.
I still hate that I didn't when I saw someone jump in the back of the bus once here in Örebro.
(Supposedly the immigrants in an immigrant dence part of the town have been doing this / (possibly threatening / ignoring the bus driver) here too.)
Ass-holes, nothing to brag about. Shouldn't any idiot understand that everyone should contribute to the society to get the benefits out from it?
You're free to believe that the fares should be free but not paying isn't the way to make it so. Do it politically and pay through taxes (most of these idiots are likely youths or leftish individuals who don't work anyway) and also realize that demand on transports would increase if everyone could travel for free.
if nobody rides, some politician would cut funding to boost his career. "I saved the state $XXXXX a year during my time as a senator!" (and to funnel money into his own pet project)
Typically, these programs are funded to 75% through taxes, and then it is up to the management to set fees and such to make up the difference.
So for example, the train maintenance is covered, and tracks, and new tunnels, but gas/fuel, and wages come from the tickets. (not a informed breakdown on this exact case, but i have family in the accounting side of government, and i base these figures on past conversations with them)
Who said anything about "uneducated bums" getting police powers? Police academies are things that exist, and can turn uneducated bums into police officers.
As for the police, I took my numbers from their actual budget. They have 20k police officers with police powers. 1% of 20k is 200 guys. Their budget is 20.6 billion SEK. 1% of 20.6 billion SEK is 206 million SEK. 206 million SEK is $32 million US. Two months is one sixth of that, which works out to $5.3-$5.4 million. Add a little profit and the transit system spends $6 million or so on borrowing police with police powers, and then spends $3-$5 million a year on police doing the exact same job, with the exact same education requirements, and the exact same powers as the guys who investigate murders. The only difference would be their waiting-for-something-to-happen spot to stand would be in a subway station, and since they're in the station watching the fare-dodger commit a fine-able offense they'd spend a lot of time issuing fines.
Moreover your explanation of how police powers work in Sweden is simply weird. Somebody has to have the power to decide where police officers stand, and whether they grab kids running out of the subways are potential fare-dodgers. If that person is not the parliament of Sweden it's the unelected people who run the Swedish Police. And if the Swedish police have that kind of autonomy they can do this all without even writing a goddamn press release.
It's hard to describe with words how deeply the core principles of the Swedish state would be violated by your proposal. You are essentially proposing breaking down the entire system of government.
SL (The owner of the metro) is a private corporation that is owned by the local county. Having a private company employ police in the capacity of policemen is unthinkable, it can simply not happen, ever. It violates every principle about division of power and oversight of power.
Yes, the Chief of Police has the authority to send all his police down in the metro to catch people dodging fares if he wanted to. But what sort of perverse mind control would you use on him to make him do such a thing and how many seconds do you think he would remain chief of police if he did so? Catching people dodging fares is not part of his mandate and by ordering the policemen to do so, he'd make them unable to actually prevent crime. That sort of thing would force the oversight board to remove him on the spot.
Where the Pirate Bay was started. They seem to have quite a few freeloading idiots who feel they shouldn't have to pay for things, and don't understand how economics works.
Something is clearly being lost in translation here. In the US a "private corporation owned by the County" is a contradiction in terms. Same with any English-speaking jurisdiction I have ever researched.
If a County or Municipal government sets up a corporation, that corporation is by definition a public body. If the County wanted to grant it legal powers (including police powers) it could do that. I live in Cleveland. The local mass transit company has it's own police force. Since those police have been granted jurisdiction throughout the County, they have more powers then almost every policeman who works directly for a local unit of government. Moreover even private companies frequently have police on-premises that they pay for. My local Pharmacy/Grocery Store (a Giant Eagle) had a Deputy from the County Sheriff's Department standing in front of the store for years, now they've switched to local Police. It's a deterrent to shop-lifting, and it makes things go a lot smoother when somebody gets caught shoplifting in the store. Most big public events -- hockey games, for example -- are legally required to pay the local municipality for police to be on-site.
Those guys are public safety officers, with all police powers, and if there was an emergency they'd leave the area; but since police officers spend most of their time standing around waiting for something to happen neither the County nor the local City have a problem with accepting money to have an Officer stand in the lobby of Giant Eagle while he waits for something to happen. If the local transit company didn't have it's own cops on it's train line, and offered to pay 100-200 local police salaries to cover it's stations for fare dodgers for a few months, nobody would bat an eye.
As for your last paragraph, who determines the local Chief's "mandate"? From the Wiki it seems like the Government (ie: the Cabinet) appoints all Commissioners at all levels. This means that if the PM decided that he was gonna crush fare dodging forever, and he had the support of his Cabinet, then fare dodging would be (by definition) part of the local Police Chief's mandate. Any Commissioner who didn't like it wouldn't be a Commissioner anymore. It could take awhile (the wiki does not indicate whether Commissioners have terms, and can be replaced mid-term, so the PM might have to wait until pro-fare-dodging Commissioners terms ended), but the government does not give up on a project just because it'll take five years.
I'm not arguing that this would be a good idea, or that the people of Sweden would agree that it was something the government should do (and the fact that you are saying, flat-out, that fare-dodging isn't a crime despite the fact they can fine you for dodging a fare, seems to imply it would be even less popular then I thought); but I am arguing that if ruling party wanted to do it they could pull it off.
The services are fully funded by taxes
Where I live (Vancouver, Canada) the bus & metro fares amount for about 35% of the operating costs of the transit system. Only 2/3s comes from taxes - So no, the services are not 'fully funded by taxes.'
. Mitt Romney takes advantage of loop-holes in tax laws to hide his money from US taxes by shuffling it around shell corporations in the Cayman islands. Mitt pays accountants and lawyers to set all that stuff up. The whole reason the US produces so many lawyers is to help rich people and corporations walk right up the the often fuzzy line between what is legal and what isn't.
Oh, look, it's a 'Take every chance to blame an enemy of the left whenever possible even though it's not remotely connected to the topic at hand' post. I thought these were confined to fark.com; it appears I was mistaken, and it also appears there are moderators on board. Perhaps your very own sock puppet moderators.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
Police academies are things that exist, and can turn uneducated bums into police officers.
In most countries that's a retrograde step.
You're wrong about planka.nu but assuming that you're not Swedish, I forgive you for not knowing.
First of all, they state that public transportation should be considered part of infrastructure, which of course also costs tax money to maintain. You don't need to pay for walking on the sidewalk now do you? That's their message. Personally, I'd add that the ticket system isn't free either so if public transportation were not paid for through other means than taxes, there would be savings like that. And as proof of viability, I offer the city of Tallinn and the city of Mariehamn because they have indeed gone that route (the latter is tiny with only two bus lines, though).
Second, they really do this as a campaign - maybe not the most noble form of civil disobedience since their cost is smaller than the benefit - but they indeed do advocate that tax revenue should be increased, if necessary, to cover the cost. You can call it leeching or even theft but what they're doing is no more lazy than buying a monthly pass is (and actually the need to dodge inspectors technically makes them less lazy).
In my opinion it's a pretty efficient way to campaign for what they want since everyone (with a monthly pass at least) has an incentive to join them and if everybody does, they will have reached their goal. I seriously doubt that planka.nu would be unable to pay the fines on behalf of people in that scenario since ticket inspectors can work fast when they're just looking at valid tickets but if they must constantly stop to issue fines, they will be a lot slower. Not to mention that when caught, people in this campaign would certainly not dig through their wallets and purses all that fast to check if they really have "forgotten or lost" their ticket.
You might not agree with their political goal but you cannot deny that their method for striving towards it is smart and infinitely more efficient than writing petitions to elected representatives.
If one can't afford a non-essential service, why should one be allowed to use said non-essential service? If those who can't pay, don't have to pay, why should those that can pay actually pay? If no one pays, how is the cost of the service paid?
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
Moreover even private companies frequently have police on-premises that they pay for.
Sounds like a symptom of the sickness of America. The country is run by and for business, not the people.
In Europe, because of a bad experience last century, we tend to steer well clear of fascism. And fascism is an offshoot of corporatism. Allowing companies to buy the right to their own police service is something to be very wary of.
Sweden operates on a different legal system then the US and England does which often confuses Slashdot posters.
When a government entity wants to do something it has two options, either it makes a department for it such as the police or firemen. Alternatively it can create a corporation with a CEO where the board of directors are the elected politicians.
A corporation is legally no different from any other corporation, the only difference is that the owner is the county or the state. A number of major Swedish corporations such as Vattenfall are owned by the state.
Furthermore a Swedish county (Komun) is an administrative body, not a legislative one. While they can create ordnances they have no legislative power to grant anyone police powers, that is something that has to be done by the parliament.
While we a few years ago introduced the system where public events have to pay for the police protection, that is not a system where the public event gets to hire the police, that is a system where the police arbitrarily decides how much protection the event needs and then sends them the bill. Their options are to not hold the event or pay the bill, they do not get to choose their level of protection.
The Swedish police does not ever guard common stores unless they are actively investigating crime (For instance lately they've been standing around goldsmiths as gold robberies have been on the rise for years), if a store wants active protection it has to pay guards which do not have much more legal authority then a common citizen (Largely they're legally allowed to physically evict you).
People commissioned by the Swedish government can't be fired (To protect them from political pressure) however they can be replaced. That is they get to continue with their current salary for the duration of their term while someone else gets to do their job. The cabinet only appoints the top level directors who are then supposed to be able to handle everything else. I'm not sure about the exact hierarchy of the police but I believe there's at-least 4-5 levels between the cabinet and Stockholm City Police not counting the various oversight boards.
The cabinet also has a very limited ability to control the priorities of their departments, this is the relevant bit of law
"No public authority, including the Riksdag and the decision-making bodies of local authorities, may determine how an administrative authority shall decide in a particular case relating to the exercise of public authority vis-Ã-vis a private subject or a local authority, or relating to the application of law."
Essentially while the Cabinet controls the budget of the department, makes the commisions as well as perform various executive decisions. They can't legally tell the department how to apply the law.
For example when it comes to Filesharing it is illegal but it's on near zero priority for the police because it's a non-jailable offence (Like not paying the ticket in the metro). If the justice minister told the police to prioritise that she would go to jail for constitutional crimes, her only option is to either get the Riksdag to change the law so it's a jailable offense or require the police to focus on non-jailable offences in general.
A much shorter version of my post would be this.
You know how people talk about how the US constitution was written to escape Tyranny right? The Swedish state of government was written for the same purpose but with an entirely different approach. After experiencing what government where the executive had absolute power was like, we designed a system where noone has absolute power. Everything has to be executed through the system which requires committees to agree on almost anything and we are -extremely- careful about handing out any kind of government authority.
I searched for "hop the strass" and the only result in Google is this thread.
Which, I have to say, is pretty impressive for Google to have already indexed it.
Congratulations on starting a new meme.
I think I understand what you've been trying to say, and the Swedish system as a whole, a lot better.
It doesn't change my conclusion, tho. It just changes the bad guy who makes fare-dodging impossible to get away with the entire Riksdag, rather just being the PM. Changes in that law would probably include an explicit instruction to prioritize fare-dodging, allowing certain officers to go into the stations and enforce the law, etc.
Note that I don't actually support cracking down on these kids. I'm just saying that if the Swedish government decided to do so they could do it.
Fascism is a nation-wide policy. If you're defining it as Corporatism run amok you guys in Europe have a much bigger problem, because the most successful European economies are strongly Corporatist. The Scandinavian states, Low Countries, Germans, and French all routinely renegotiate their economic deals in back rooms dominated by a couple big companies and their unions. That's a lot more fucking corporatist then a tiny suburb (Bedford is 10-20k) agreeing that a cop should stand in a store for awhile.
Indeed the Riksdag could do it. It's just that convincing 175 people to change the law so that the police in a single city can crack down on mostly high school kids is not a very realistic proposition.
If you had a mind control device installed in the building you could do that and a host of other things (Changing the constitution would be a breeze!) but it's not something I see happening otherwise.
From a realistic perspective there's nothing SL or the City of Stockholm can do. SL can ask the Highway authority to raise the fines, but the Highway Authority will say no. They can ask the Riksdag to change the law, but the Riksdag will say no. They can ask the Police to deal with it, but the Police will say no. From the perspective of all these agencies and departments this is just a minor local issue and they have actual work to do.
To be fair, we should also consider how much of the operating costs are involved in collecting the fares. If it is significant, there would be a stronger case for eliminating it.
The AC is correct. This is mostly an economic crime, not one of addiction.
Consider the organization: From a monthly fee of $15, the organization can afford to cover the $180 fine.
Translation: Out of every 100 subscribers, the organization only expects about 7 to be caught each month. They take in $1500, pay out $1,440, and make $60 worth of profit. More realistically I'd expect only 5-7 hits each month.
Increase the penalties and more importantly the odds of being caught and it'd be possible to raise the cost of fair-jumping to the point that the cost of monthly insurance would exceed the $120 to just buy a monthly pass.
On a different topic; transit systems can be looked at a bit like the road in front of somebody's house. It's a diffused public benefit, much like roads. Maybe if they used properly/sales/income taxes within the city to pay for the transit, in order to encourage people to use it more. Even people who are rich enough to drive everywhere anyways can enjoy the benefits of lower traffic on the roads.
I don't read AC A human right
OSS ideas are based first on rights, not money FYI.
OSS != no-cost software.
AB HOC POSSUM VIDERE DOMUM TUUM
I'm afraid you're wrong on all accounts. The reason for the police to catch dodgers would be that the dodgers are breaking the law. This is usually something the police cares about. There are police stationed in the subway, they even have their own division; the subway police. In Sweden ANYONE can detain (arrest) someone who commits a crime punishable by jail time. The police, the metro guards, my mother.. anyone. (RB 24:7 if memory serves me right). Riding the subway without a ticket is fraud which falls in the "jail time" category. There is one catch though. It is legal to ride the subway without showing our train pass and you can legally enter to enter the subway station by jumping the gates as long as you do have a train pass on you. If you do though, people would suspect that you are committing fraud (riding without a ticket) but the only ones allowed to detain based on suspicion are the police. There are examples of people trying to prove a point by jumping the gates and when they are arrested they show their metro card and try to turn the tables by arresting the metro employees who arrested them since they are illegally detaining someone who had not committed a crime.. nothing came of it though.
1) The subway police are stationed in the subway to handle the safety of the subway, they are not there to catch fare dodgers. They will however catch you if you jump right infront of them.
2) Riding with a false ticket is fraud, riding without a ticket is simply unauthorised access which is punishable by a fine (ordningsbot) not jail. This is regulated by Ordningslag (1993:1617) Chapter 4 paragraph 6.4 and 10.
Important addendum:
It is minor fraud as per Brottsbalk (1962:700) Chapter 9 paragraph 2 to use transportation with the expectation of cash payment without paying.
However SL can not make use for that law for a number of reasons including
A) They don't take cash anymore.
B) The burden of proof is very high as in order to apply they need to verify that someone hasn't paid for their ticket -after- they've already taken the ride -and- confirmed the person is not willing to pay the punitive fee. Essentially the person has to confess.
I don't know where you are posting from, but here in the USA one beer with dinner will not put you over the legal limit. Even for a very petite woman, consuming one beer over the course of a dinner will barely get your BAC above 0.03%. The limit in the USA is 0.08%.
Even if you are in a jurisdiction where one beer puts you over the limit, get real. You are talking about operation of machinery that is highly dangerous when operated improperly. Aircraft pilots are in the same situation, and they are prohibited from any alcohol consumption for 8 hours (or more) before flight. How is your situation as a driver essentially different from that of a pilot? Do you want pilots having a beer with their dinner in the cockpit?
Why don't' these people just pay their fair share? Oh, because fare share (pun intended) for them is someone else paying it. The "other", in this case being those who drive and those who are rich.
British Broadcasting Corporation. Nice try. They do have a commercial subsidiary, though, which is not called BBC.