Airport TSA Coming To A Subway Station Near You

Get ready to take your shoes off when getting on the subway. Well not really, but the TSA employees that demand it of travelers at airports will be coming to New York's subway stations to replace some of the NYPD officers that make random bag searches. It's bad enough that the cops are allowed to randomly (and ineffectually) stop straphangers without probable cause or reasonable suspicion.

Now it'll be even worse:

MYFOXNY.COM - EXCLUSIVE: The New York Police Department is shrinking, and the department can't hire the number of cops it would like to. Fox 5 News has learned that help is coming from security screeners at the area airports. They'll be replacing some police officers in the subway who do bag searches. But some critics say this is just another clear example that the economy has affected security.

Within the next two months, Transportation Security Administration bag screeners from Kennedy, LaGuardia and Newark Liberty airports will be replacing most NYPD cops in the subway that screen bags for explosives.[...]

This is how it would work: About 30 TSA screeners a day will be pulled from the three area airports Monday through Friday to inspect bags at various subway locations throughout the city. At each location they'll be teamed up with one police officer instead of the two or three officers you currently see at inspection sites.

The Patrolmen's Benevolent Association is blasting the plan, saying despite the city's financial crisis the city needs to hire more cops. According to the PBA, the city has 4,000 fewer cops on the street than it did in 2001.

Hiring more cops is another issue but the idea of putting the TSA at subway entrances is a terrible idea. They're bad enough at the airport, at worst abusing travelers and at the least acting as if they really made the airports secure. There is no way thirty of these people can keep the M.T.A. secure. Their presence, like that of the NYPD's current bag searchers is an act that either makes people think they're safe or simply that they have to trade their liberties so that it appears law enforcement is doing something to combat terrorism.

Seriously, leave the TSAers at the airport and put the cops on the trains where they can actually be of some assistance.

Corporate Sponsor Coming To A Subway Station Near You?

With threats of two more fare increases in two years (on top of this year's hike) looming over straphangers' heads, the MTA is looking for more sources of revenue. One way to do that is to let corporations (and their ad agencies) take over stations throughout the city and coat each with light, paint and whatever material it takes put more messages of mass-consumerism into New Yorkers daily grind.

From AM New York:

Sponsorship, little more than a sketch on paper at this point, could become the most visible component of the agency's aggressive push to increase advertising revenue, which currently brings in a little more than $100 million a year.

Marketing firms "have contacted us to say that they have ideas and we're in the process of reviewing those," Sander said.

MTA officials would not provide further details on station sponsorships.

"There are a dozen people that would jump on this," said MTA board member Norman Seabrook, who called for the agency to rent subway stations to Disney several months ago. "There are thousands of people losing their jobs everyday and we cannot sit by and continue to raise their fares."

When the MTA makes it a choice between raising fares and plastering our subway stations with advertising, it isn't hard to decide on which the great majority will go with. However, the problem is that the situation was allowed to come to this, where we must be subjected to more consumer crap stuffed into our eyesockets. Sure, the stations are dilapidated and anything new would be an improvement, but again, the thing is we are forced into choices that let the corporate world push farther and farther into our lives, as opposed to just having a well-run MTA that doesn't experience hundreds of billions in yearly deficits.