Should People Who Blast Their Music in Public Receive Fines, Or Be Slowly Tortured to Death?

The only two reasonable options

Imaged generated by Pixlr image generator.

This week, congestion pricing went into effect in New York City. It’s just one policy in one city, but it’s an important milestone in the normie liberal project to build a better society by annoying the fuck out of people.¹ The early returns are good: Travel time through the Holland Tunnel went from 27 rage-inducing minutes to nine merely-a-tad-frustrating minutes. Plus, congestion pricing advocates got a boost when the case against it was made by The Least Sympathetic Man In America:

This guy lives on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, a.k.a. the most expensive real estate in the country. His kids apparently live there, too, even though they’re presumably at the age when their New York experience should involve living with six roommates in an abandoned dog kennel in Crack Pipe Heights. It’s true, though: This guy happens to live on one of only two blocks in all of Manhattan that require him to dip into the congestion pricing zone in order to go north. Which means that his only remaining options to get to 79th street are:

• Walk 0.9 miles;

• Bike 1.3 miles through the bike paths in Central Park, which are beautiful;

• Take the Q train or the 4/5/6;

• Take the 1, 2, 3, or 4 bus, all of which run by his front door;

• Take one of the billion cabs or Ubers in that part of town, which (I checked) would cost about $15 (and BTW, it costs about $700/month to park your car in his neighborhood);

• Just pay the $9, which should be possible because he appears to be a big-shot real estate developer (no link because I don’t want people to gang up on this guy, but he has a Wikipedia page and appears to be extremely successful).

Still: Maybe the preferences of this one rich guy in a highly unusual circumstance should override the needs of the entire metro area!

New York’s congestion pricing will help fund public transit. It will also lead to more people riding trains, which is how most people get around the city, anyway: 55 percent of households in New York City don’t own a car. Making sure that commuter trains are a safe, efficient way to travel is crucial. And that’s why stories like this are a gigantic problem:

The good news is that the victim survived, and the attempted murderer was caught. But the incident is being highlighted by congestion pricing opponents who are saying: “You expect us to ride trains when they’re like this???” And my response to that (not unreasonable) question is: 1) About five million people ride NYC trains and busses every day, so let’s keep these incidents in perspective; 2) I rode Metro Transit Authority almost every day for the ten years I lived in New York, so I don’t expect anyone to do anything that I didn’t do; and 3) No, I don’t expect you to ride trains in which antisocial assholes hold sway; there are rules, and those rules should be enforced.

I was shocked to learn that it’s already against MTA rules to listen to your phone without headphones. You could even be fined a whopping $25 — here’s the rule in black and white:

In fact, there are several MTA rules that seem to cover “Forcing my two year old son and me to listen to the hit new song ‘Pussy Cunt Fuck Fuck (Racial Slur)’”. “Sound production device” is a $25 fine — “excessive noise” is $25, too. “Breach of Peace” might get you a handsome $50 fine, and so might “unnecessary noise”. I’m frankly stunned to learn that these things are forbidden, and similarly shocked to discover that littering, vandalism, and “sleeping where hazardous” are also out-of-bounds. Most surprisingly, “seat obstruction” is a $50 fine, so it turns out that those assholes who create a Zone Of Solitude by putting their bags around them while everyone else stands are actually breaking a punishable rule.

The reason I’m stunned to learn that these are rules is because in the thousands of MTA rides I took, I don’t think I ever saw a cop enforcing them. And I mostly rode MTA pre-2020, before the risk/reward ratio for a police officer approaching a possibly insane person who is breaking MTA rules drastically changed. I’m sure the rules were enforced sometimes: Riding the train was usually fine, so periodic enforcement probably kept people in check. Though, anecdotally, things have gotten worse in the last few years.

This is hard for me to track, especially because I moved, first to LA, and then to DC. But it seems like the number of times I’ve gotten on a train and someone has eaten a seven course McDonald’s meal and thrown the wrappers and sauce packets on the ground has gone up. It seems like the number of times I’ve seen a drugged-up guy practicing karate moves two inches from a toddler’s face has gone up. I blame much of this on LA, which has decided that public transit is de facto housing for the violent and insane, and I’ll note that things seem to have gotten much better in DC since they cracked down on fare jumping and increased security on trains and in stations. But I remember being shocked in 2012 when I got on the C train late at night and found a (frankly quite impressive) turd. These days, I’d just say “Whoops — I got the turd car” and move down.

The music without headphones thing is a constant annoyance. This isn’t just a subway problem, of course; I’ve encountered people forcing noise on people in parks, on airplanes, and in even in restaurants. It’s common enough that people are writing about it — here’s Andrew Sullivan’s take. I’ve actually approached people on the subway and very politely asked them to please turn their music down or put on headphones, to which the most common response is a courteous “go suck your own dick you faggot motherfucker.” Which is a bad situation all around; it shouldn’t fall to bystanders to enforce the rules, and we shouldn’t want bystanders enforcing the rules. I’m not thrilled to learn that the Guardian Angels have decided to start patrolling trains again in response to high-profile incidents; unless we want beret-wearing self-appointed faux-police enforcing the rules, the real police need to step up.

The argument against enforcing the rules is that you don’t want to ruin someone’s life over a minor infraction. And I agree, you don’t, but that seems like a strawman: Does a $25 fine ruin someone’s life? But in the interest of steelmanning this argument: A totally indigent person might not have $25, which could lead to a citation for failing to pay a fine, which could — theoretically — lead to jail time. My response to that argument is threefold: 1) In this instance, the person has a phone and maybe a bluetooth speaker, so they definitely have $25; 2) If a person is so compromised that they won’t accrue $25 even over a long period of time, then the $25 fine is not the real issue; and 3) If all punishment is disallowed, then rules don’t matter, which leads to public spaces being unusable, which hurts poor people most of all.

And of course, loud music was just the incitement to this latest incident, which is one of several recent high-profile and horrifying incidents on the New York subway. These events collectively give the impression that order has broken down, and nobody wants to commute to work on a playground for the antisocial and insane.

Which is to say: I think MTA and other transit authorities should enforce their noise pollution rules. Whatever number of MTA cops are needed to make the rules meaningful is the number of cops that should be on the trains. Those who argue that society should accommodate antisocial behavior aren’t just wrong: They’re harming poor people by degrading public spaces. Public transit has worked for centuries and can continue to work as long as disallowed behavior — like playing Scarface at max volume in front of 20 girl scouts — is actually disallowed.

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1. Jokes aside: I strongly support congestion pricing. If everyone tries to drive into Manhattan, it becomes hard for anyone to drive into Manhattan, so if you want to do it, that’s fine, but you should pay the actual price of doing so instead of being able to shift that cost onto the people around you.