It's interesting watching the difference in how transit is treated by officials between NYC (where I lived last year) and Berlin (where I live this year). In NYC, we're ramping up enforcement and cracking down on fare jumping. In Berlin, it's the opposite-- less fare-enforcement and more subsidies for people to take the train. I really have a hard time seeing how NYC's strategy could be more effective. It's not even…
As much as maybe fare evasion is a secondary concern, I think the main reason they're cracking down on the subways in NYC is because people weren't feeling safe on the trains anymore. As much as I love a free and open and fair society, you can see why people not my size might be uncomfortable next to people growling, sleeping with trash bags filled with their belongings, drinking out of brown paper bags, rolling and…
you have mandatory baggage x-ray checking and a physcial patdown, both for men and women EVERYTIME you enter the station so you cant have weapons of any sort.
the stations are guarded by trained police (cisf) whole job profile is to only secure highly sensitive operations and they are trained to actually do their job.... you have full CCTV coverage of stations and trains and it is generally safe. for women, the first carriage of every train is mandatory for women only and any men who board that carriage are fined and removed from the train...
you cannot eat or even "sit on the floor of the train" so its very clean even when many thousand passengers ride it every single day...
tickets are enforced so you cannot just freeride the stations and cars. you need a card/ticket to enter and exit and are charged by the time between these two entries so there aren't panhandlers, beggars there...
india has a generally dirty habit of doing chewing tobacco and the city stinks with the stink of red stains on every building, wall, road, vehicles but spitting is an offense in the station/train permises so its also clean by that way.
if you are in india and in delhi, try it once. you will enjoy the ride