Beyond fare evasion: the everyday moralities of non-payment and underpayment on public transport

Abstract

In attempting to understand and prevent fare evasion, existing research and policy have often categorised fare evaders based on passenger ‘types’ or profiles. However, such categorisations of ‘malicious’ or ‘virtuous’ behaviours rely on underlying moral claims which often go unexamined. In this paper, we study how different actors construct such moral claims as part of everyday interactions. We demonstrate that the everyday moralities of not or under-paying are diverse, locally occasioned, and emotionally charged. Drawing on social media and video data from Chile and the UK, we examine interactions between passengers, by-standers, transport workers, and transport operators. We highlight the diverse resources that actors draw upon to construct moral claims around fare evasion, including the mobilisation of alternative moral categories; attempts to produce exceptions to formal rules; and the foregrounding of moral emotions. The paper engages with an interdisciplinary body of work which reassesses existing policies and societal responses to fare evasion, while also contributing to a nascent literature on everyday morality and mobilities.

Keywords:

• Public transport
• fare evasion
• morality
• social media
• video analysis
• Chile
• UK

Ethical approval

The research supporting this article was granted ethical approval by the University of Edinburgh’s Research Ethics and Integrity Committee (School of Geosciences), approval reference 2016-063; and by the University of Oxford’s Central University Research Ethics Committee (CUREC), approval reference SOGE1A2020-199.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The principal investigator of the research in Chile obtained permission from the bus company to record on a specific day and bus route. Throughout the route, the researcher and a representative of the bus company were inside the vehicle prepared to answer queries about the purpose and scale of the study, and to stop the recording if anyone requested it so. The researcher had printed handouts with information about the purpose of the study as well as their contact details. The researcher could be later contacted in order to obtain more information, as well as to request a person’s removal from the collected video data. Only the researcher has access to the unedited video data. People’s facial features and any visual indication of the bus route or streets have been obscured.

2 Hashtag: The addition of the ‘#’ sign in front of keywords (e.g. ‘#oystercard’) is a convention developed by users to categorise subjects.

3 Jobsworth: Informal, derogatory term used to describe an official who draws on (a typically small amount of) authority to uphold petty rules, or as an excuse for not being helpful.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Chilean National Commission for Science and Technology (Conicyt), PFCHA/DOCTORADO BECAS CHILE/2015, under grant number 72160153; the University of Oxford John Fell Fund, under grant number 0011326; and the University of Oxford John Fell Fund under grant number 0009651.