Public transit, as the name implies, is public space, and people who use it must rightfully restrain themselves for the comfort of their fellow riders. Justice compels society to penalize littering, screaming, grifting and otherwise menacing people. Not only should such prohibitions exist, they should be far better enforced than they are now.

Laws against smelling are different. Your post here portrays them as a snare for unsuspecting exercisers or manual laborers. But obviously they are no such thing. They are a tool for managing the homeless, who are the only folks who really, really stink.

The fine, thus, is basically meaningless. The threat of jail is merely a tool designed to allow cities to force seriously sick people to accept some of the care they so desperately need.

This is not a ploy to harass the homeless — note that two of the nation’s most liberal cities are the ones mentioned in this article — it is a device to try to undo some of the tremendous harm we did to truly vulnerable people when we “deinstitutionalized” them back in the 1970s.

If you seriously believe that normal people who happen to smell a bit will get fined under this law, you are insane.

If you were joking about regular people but oppose this because the homeless are happy being “free” to pick food out of trashcans and talk to the voices in their heads, you are even more naive than many of your posts suggest.

And if you think either that people have a God-given right to act as badly as they want on public transit — or that better policing of behavior wouldn’t seriously increase ridership — then you are hurting the cause that you profess to support.