Isn’t it wonderful how urban transit gives people a sense of community as they are collectively yelled at and berated by self-officious transit employees? Case in point: On Thursday morning, April 9, the Southeast Pennsylvania Transportation Authority (SEPTA), Philadelphia’s main transit agency, announced that it “urged riders” to wear masks, but did not require them. (In fact, elsewhere SEPTA’s web site said that masks were prohibited.)
Sometime during the day, SEPTA changed its mind and, without any formal announcement, decided to require riders to wear masks. As a result, we have this video of a maskless SEPTA employee ordering riders (some of whom had masks, but apparently not good enough ones for SEPTA) off of a bus, and another video showing several white police officers dragging a black man off of a bus for not wearing a mask.
SEPTA was right to be worried even if it was wrong in its enforcement tactics. On Friday, New York’s MTA announced that 1,900 of its employees had tested positive for coronavirus (about three times the rate for New York City as a whole) and 50 had died (slightly higher than the New York City rate which itself is twelve times higher than the national rate). Ridership was down 93 percent on the subways, 95 percent on Metro-North commuter trains, and 97 percent on the Long Island Railroad–but bridge and tunnel auto traffic into Manhattan was down by “only” 66 percent. Continue reading
