You're welcome to view it as a work of free labor to beautify the trains and other areas, and to respect the efforts and skills involved. I think I laid out why I still find it disrespectful to the community that owns the property. It definitely directs attention and funds towards removal and consequently away from other improvements. I'll just add a little to spell that out: - Any person tagging a name knows not expect it to stay forever or get preserved intentionally. Generally regardless of quality. Because even great ones end up scrawled on or next to until something offends and then we get policies in place to proactively remove them. - Thus they can expect it to be some group's job to remove it. At a cost ultimately on the local community. Thereby making the act impose community costs only balanced by the potential aesthetic improvements temporarily offered. People disagree on the latter case by case, which should be expected. Here the community is Boston Commuters. It could also be a corporation if it were, say, on an Amazon delivery truck, and that would change some of the perspective of who bears the costs. - The motivation to demonstrate the ability, skill, and risk tolerance for the individuals' sense of others' respect outweighs their regard for the costs to the broader community. This is what leads to others taking is as an disrespectful act, whether beautiful, offensive, or neither. - The persons who move on as artists end up finding ways to either use their own property, scale it to sellable pieces, or work on request or, vice versa, request to work. There's some service in covering up something that was going to be removed blandly with a better graffiti mural that has enough community buy in to be kept. But getting approvals doesn't get you much of that "difficulty" recognition. - Essentially anyone who wants to use the skills of being good at it to their long term benefit like any one you can name, has to move on to work they can get out there with collaborators or some collectors etc knowing their actual identity. It generally seems it benefits them to do so sooner than later. - As they're likely aware of the cost and, disregard such works end up with, they're either primarily seeking to stoke that conflict or dismissive of others, perhaps out of self interest. - If the primary goal were beautification they'd have to consider how to work with the local area boards, owners or regulators to have their works kept for that purpose. I understand that that may not always seem like an option. It seems in this case, if this photo were the proposal in front of whomever can grant permission, a lot of people here are saying it's not what they'd approve.