Plus C'est la Même Chose

The effects of the coronavirus and sheltering-in-place will reverberate for years. They have revealed humanity at its best and worst, mostly the former, thankfully.

One relatively minor behavior that hasn't changed is the occurrence of BART turnstile-jumping, despite a 93% decrease in ridership: [bold added]

2018 fare evader (Chron)

BART’s two morning sweeps at San Francisco’s Embarcadero Station were pulling an average of 238 fare evaders a day off the morning-commute trains.

Many of those ejected for not having a ticket were homeless or apparently mentally ill, BART officials said...

2019: Breaking through after
double gates installed (Chron)

BART had 24,909 riders on Monday, far below the 405,000 average daily ridership before the nine-county order went out for all nonessential Bay Area workers to stay at home.

“You might have thought that a 93% reduction in riders would have meant a reduction in fare evaders as well, but that hasn’t been the case,” BART Director Debora Allen said. She added that the people who jump the gates aren’t just cheats, they are potential health hazards to the other riders and to themselves.

The current crisis has relegated some "problems" (plastic shopping bags, plastic straws) to unimportance. Others that have been festering (homelessness, open drug use) are endangering health and safety by befouling trains and buses.

Maybe this will give San Francisco the resolve, once this is over, to make the hard choices necessary to fix homelessness.