Increase fines and capture rates until the expected benefits of fare-dodging are negative.
Nobody needs to run to catch the evaders. Periodically, ticket inspectors need to check everyone on a carriage / vehicle, covering all exits.
$180 isn't much of a fine, especially since it can be covered by 50% of a $15/month membership charge. That implies a catch chance of about 4.2% per person per month. If an unlimited ticket is $120, then the fine should be closer to $3000, if there is no increase in catch rates.
A $3000 fine would be unjust for people who make genuine mistakes, however.
So a different strategy should be followed: crack down on individual routes, greatly increasing the catch rate, combined with a modest increase in the fine; focus on changing behaviour, one route at a time.
Alternatively, fines could escalate for repeat offences.
All assuming anyone is interested in decreasing fraud, of course. It may be a socially acceptable loss for more complex reasons.
$180 isn't much of a fine, especially since it can be covered by 50% of a $15/month membership charge.
$180 is a significant fine, if you're poor. I've always liked the idea that a fine should be generally tied to your level of wealth, perhaps with a floor so it's not pointlessly low. If the idea of a fine is to deter repeat activity, wealthy people should be equally deterred.
I think wealth-based fines should apply to cases when there isn't a specific financial benefit from activity in question.
Ie I can see the argument why speeding fines should be wealth-based (since we can't really quantify what the personal benefit of speeding is).
However in the case of fare-dodging, the fine should be directly tied to the benefit derived by the dodger (multiplied by an estimate of his being caught). Since that number is fixed regardless of one's wealth, I don't see why the fine should vary.
Ie you can only make that argument if you are willing to assert that metro fares themselves should vary based on one's income (and by extension all govt services). The counterpoint is that wealthy people are already paying more via taxes :)
I agree (there was a time, maybe 10 years ago, that ~$60 was my weekly rent and I still ran arrears), but my girlfriend vehemently disagrees for reasons I don't fully follow but do respect (she's an economist by profession, in healthcare microeconomics, not macroeconomic weather forecasting).
It had something to do with maximizing overall welfare / utility for society. She's very touchy about it though, finds it hard to talk to me about it because she thinks I sound condescending when discussing it :) She also rejects the declining marginal utility of money as an axiom. And she rejects the concept of irrational economic actors; economic actors are rational by definition, therefore all their actions are rational, it's just your theory of their action that is wrong. You can imagine this doesn't make discussion easy :)
The general argument against raising fines alongside wealth is that it might actually be "efficient" for people to break the law and incur the fine. If the act you're trying to prevent can only cause, say, a thousand dollars of damage then it doesn't make sense to have the price go much beyond that.
For instance if you're about to make a billion dollar deal but you have to run through a turnstyle to do it, society as a whole might just be better off letting you get away with a modest fine.
That's quite a tortured hypothetical you developed there. In that case, take it to a court and have judge rule on it. Laws are sledgehammers, not scalpels - there's no law that can justly account for outliers without some human oversight, letalone extreme outliers that have likely never happened in the history of humankind.
Nobody needs to run to catch the evaders. Periodically, ticket inspectors need to check everyone on a carriage / vehicle, covering all exits.
$180 isn't much of a fine, especially since it can be covered by 50% of a $15/month membership charge. That implies a catch chance of about 4.2% per person per month. If an unlimited ticket is $120, then the fine should be closer to $3000, if there is no increase in catch rates.
A $3000 fine would be unjust for people who make genuine mistakes, however.
So a different strategy should be followed: crack down on individual routes, greatly increasing the catch rate, combined with a modest increase in the fine; focus on changing behaviour, one route at a time.
Alternatively, fines could escalate for repeat offences.
All assuming anyone is interested in decreasing fraud, of course. It may be a socially acceptable loss for more complex reasons.