03-17-2023, 01:38 PM
(03-17-2023, 11:33 AM)ijmorlan Wrote:(03-17-2023, 10:34 AM)SF22 Wrote: There is a tagger that hits the Lexington bridge over the highway about once a month, and then someone comes in and paints over it, and three days later the same tag is back again. If you look at the bridge, there are tons of grey rectangles in different shades where it's been painted again and again. I know we don't want graffiti everywhere, but how much have we paid to have one stupid word covered up again and again for 2 years straight? They could've left it, and I bet the person never would have tagged it again. Instead, it's now an ongoing battle that costs us money.
(That said, I appreciate if the taggers have at least an ounce of artistic ability with a spray can).
My preferred approach to a situation like this would be to monitor problem locations rigorously and clean them up promptly. So in the situation you mention, after a couple of instances, I would have somebody drive by daily and paint it over right away if they saw it tagged. Of course a lot of up-front investment might be needed to make this happen.
I understand this is how they fixed the problem in the New York subway: they started cleaning all the cars often (I thought I read at the end of the line, but I don’t see how that’s possible; maybe it was at the end of every day) so that tags disappeared. Once the thrill of seeing ones tag out on the system goes away, so does some of the incentive to deface it in the first place. So at first they had to do a lot of cleaning but after a while it was much more manageable.
It takes considerably more effort to tag an NYC subway car than a bridge in public. It sounds like we're already cleaning it pretty frequently...and it isn't solving the problem. And for that matter, the "remediation" done isn't particularly attractive.
I think there are other better solutions to this kind of issue. For example, inviting artists to actually create artwork on the bridge.