The farce that is fare collection on the Green Line

He's not living in a dream world. He's just lying. Fare collection on the Green Line has turned into a joke, and anyone who is doing the honorable thing has good reason to be angry. Grabauskas can't respond to the complaint, so he lies and insists that the complaint isn't justified. I don't think anyone at the MBTA believes their spin. They all know full well that they are lying and the whole lot of them should be looking for new jobs. The entire system at the T is hopeless corrupted and its hard not to think that cleaning house is the only reasonable first step to changing that.

I don't think that Europeans (particularly the French) are necessarily more honest, it's just that they operate in more of a bad faith environment than here.

For example: in France, proof of fare was always required, but there was and always will be a good amount of turnstyle-jumping. When I was a kid, I remember the flics du metro: guys in gray suits who'd come on board and do random checks to see if everybody had a proper fare. If you didn't have a ticket or a monthly pass, you'd get the equivalent of a $20 fine and a good shaming. Of course, there was also a good chance that you'd not get caught and could get a free ride.

Nowadays, a lot more whupa$$ tends to be doled out by the new and improved (but not necessarily kinder or gentler) flics. Plus, these guys are armed, very intimidating, and wont to fine/haul people in because they have quotas, much like I hear that traffic ticket police here do.

Someone who "breaks into" a home whose door was left open is wrong. But that doesn't mean the door should have been left open. Yeah, evading fares is wrong but its going to happen. Happens in Europe, too. The important thing is putting a system in place to make fare evasion difficult and the consequences readily shown. What we have in Boston is neither. The system makes fare evasion massively easier and is often directly encouraged on the Green Line. Moreover, there is no glimmer of a proof of payment system that was promissed to keep the problem in check.

The secondary problem is that a lot of people feel justified or at least not morally revolted by theft of a party they think has wronged them. The MBTA opperates in such a haphazard fashion that plenty of riders rightfully feel that the T owes them. I never received 6 tokens last year that I was owed thanks to late trains. All because the MBTA just stopped fufilling refund requests. I sure feel like they owe me something, because they do. I'm a monthly pass buyer so those tokens wouldn't really have been meaningful to me in the first place (a whole 'nother problem), but if I paid by the ride, you can bet I'd steal from them to get back what they owe me. Others might be motivated by lesser offenses that might not be as justifiable, but is what is going to happen when a service provider engenders so much ill-will from their customer base. No doubt, for many evaders the problem is that they see so many other people being allowed to get away with evasion that they are sick of paying for a system the MBTA allows others to evade.

A third piece of the puzzle is specific to the Green Line where many people are simply used to riding the T without paying a fare going outbound. That was a change in policy that the MBTA deliberately pretend wasn't a change in policy and this bothered a lot of people. Its inconsistant application has no doubt also led to many people not regarding it as something to take seriously. Fare evasion in Boston is a more complicated issue than wishing people didn't do it. Unfortunetly, that does seem to be the official MBTA response and those of us who paid our money are going to be increasingly resentful.