As someone who ran into the glue at 23rd st while trying to commute home during the protest I can tell you that:
1) there was a sign encouraging you not to swipe or get glue on your card and that
2) the emergency exit door was open so you could either walk onto the platform or hop the turnstile to still access the train
The protesters left you with a choice: become a fare evader (supporting the protest) or leave. But they didn't stop access to the subway as a utility.
I see a lot of outrage in the comments about inconveniencing people on their commute home but consider whose commute under "normal" circumstances -- under police surveillance -- are inconvenienced by police.
Are you upset because you're not someone who usually has to think about if you'll be singled out for doing the same thing as everyone else?
Did the protests make you experience the thing that, oh, they were protesting against?
Hey, then they worked.
And if you don't like it, well, the next subway stop is 5 blocks away. How convenient for you that this impediment was a one day, one stop friction in your life and not a constant threat.
And before anyone complains about how the protest impacted disability accessibility, 23rd st doesn't have an elevator or other accessibility options. Let's start with critiquing the institutional access first, shall we?
Can someone please explain this to me? because all I got out of this was, Protesters vandalized things, causing less money going to fund transit, causing transit prices to rise or causing transit to stop existing, potentially making transit unavailable long-term to people who depend on it, without inconveniencing anyone with a car of their own, meaning this disproportionately fucks over the poor.
Basically what happened is that the Manhattan Transit Authority raised the price of a train ticket by 2.75$. Which doesn't sound like much, but now a large percentage of poor New Yorkers can't afford to get to their jobs, and started jumping the turnstiles.
Now you're right, subways cost money to run, and the fares are there for a reason. But what people are really protesting here is what the MTA did in response to the fare jumpers.
They hired cops to literally just...stand around and watch the stiles, costing the city MORE money than if they just reversed the fare hike. New Yorkers are furious because there's clearly money to pay for these extra cops, but apparently not for maintaining the trains.
Tl;Dr The MTA basically said "we don't have enough money to run the trains so we are increasing the price" meaning thousands of people were faced with either hopping the fare or losing their job, but when people started jumping the stiles they apparently the MTA had enough money to hire a small army of cops.
And some of the context here is that the real reason the subway fares have been rising is because NYC, like many cities, has been slowly shifting more and more of the burden of operating expenses from everyone (including the wealthy) onto the backs of the poor alone. So for example, the developers and businesses involved with Madison Square Garden haven’t paid property taxes in almost 40 years, although the tax abatement was only supposed to be for 10 years. That’s $555 million which should have helped to pay for infrastructure -- but some of the people involved are big donors to the governor, so they get to keep freeloading. And so that he looks like he’s “doing something,” Cuomo has now hired 500 more cops, at a price tag of $249 million, to catch fare evaders... who cost the city only $200 million. He’s happily collecting his chunk of cheese, but the poor are paying more and getting criminalized for struggling, and meanwhile the subways are literally on fire.
So this isn’t really about how much it costs to pay for public transportation. It’s about who pays, and whether that fare is fair.
