The new electronic fare gates arrived at Boston’s North Station in October 2022 — much to the consternation of many commuters who found the finicky barriers nearly impassable. Then, in March, Washington, DC, began installing upgraded turnstiles in its Metro system. Bay Area Rapid Transit signed off on a similar “hardening” initiative for San Francisco. Philadelphia, too.
The pattern is the latest in a series of efforts to win riders back, transit officials say, as agencies struggle to revive pre-pandemic ridership. How? By stopping riders from not paying.
In New York, Metropolitan Transportation Authority leaders talk about fare evasion as an almost existential crisis — a problem worsened by the pandemic, and now, with operating revenue a fraction of what it once was, Public Enemy Number 1 for recovering lost dollars. Enforcement is up 60%, and the New York Police Department’s fare evasion data shows an increase in arrests and summonses in the most recent quarter. A “blue-ribbon panel” has been convened to address the practice, a phenomenon that MTA chair and CEO Janno Lieber called “a threat to the spirit that makes New York not just a great city, but a great community.” The MTA pegged the costs to the agency in lost fares at $500 million last year, and counting.
Fare evasion is a topic that rears its head regularly; it’s a staple of local TV news and a frequent target of high-profile crackdowns. In 2019, fare evasion made headlines in DC when the City Council vetoed Mayor Muriel E. Bowser’s plan to stiffen penalties further. Amid concerns about racially disparate enforcement, Philadelphia “quietly” decriminalized the practice that year, just as New York’s MTA was hiring 500 new police officers. The methods that accompanied this policing surge brought protests from civil liberties groups who staged mass turnstile-jumping demonstrations.
Now fare-dodging has again found its way into the news cycle, as the MTA has launched a pilot program that deploys private security guards in stations with notorious track records for fare evasion, such as Brooklyn’s Myrtle Avenue Wyckoff. The program is costing MTA $1 million a month.
The battle against gate-crashers in the largest transit system in the US is hardly new: As long as there have been fares, there have been riders who have opted to not pay it. Enterprising evaders of yore once deployed slugs — fake coins — or engaged in a stomach-churning tactic known as “token sucking” to defeat turnstiles. Throughout the 1980s, the New York Times regularly described rampant fare beating. But evasion rates plummeted a decade later, as did crime overall.
In 2023, the stakes of the current war on fare evasion seem higher. Many US transit agencies stare down fiscal cliffs as ridership remains below pre-pandemic levels and relief funding dries up. That revenue gap has also made public transit systems more dependent on state and federal support. Several agencies are also working to allay the concerns of riders rattled by reports of rising disorder. Supporters of enforcement crackdowns say that, like graffiti and homelessness, fare evasion is a very visible signal of dysfunction that can itself fuel lawlessness. As the MTA’s Lieber has asked, “When people start breaking the rules, it very quickly becomes: Why should I follow the rules?”
At the same time, targeting riders with heavy-handed policing in the wake of a deadly pandemic that revealed the inequities of public transit in the US carries with it a tone that didn’t exist before. As does millions of dollars in spending that doesn’t appear to match the cost of the issue it’s trying to address.
“A lot of the programs around improving fare gates and deploying more security to make sure people are paying the fare, it’s usually not so cost effective,” said Chris Van Eyken, director of research and policy at the advocacy group TransitCenter. “It costs more than the increases in revenue they get from cutting down on fare evasion.”
Higher Gates, Higher Costs
On a recent weekday at the Fort Totten Metro stop in northeast DC, commuters streamed past new fare gates that the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority recently installed. The swing-door design of the prototype turnstiles were supposed to be harder to hop over than the standard gates, but dozens of riders seemed to have little trouble making it past; they could be seen shoving through the doors, sliding in behind someone, or jumping over the sides without paying.
This happens about 40,000 times a day during the workweek, according to WMATA; the agency estimates that about 13% of Metrorail trips in 2023 are “non-tap entries.” That’s about $40 million in lost revenue for fiscal year 2022, or 22% of the agency’s current $185 million budget shortfall. The recent surge in scofflaws helped convince Randy Clarke, WMATA’s new CEO, to announce a new enforcement crackdown at the end of 2022. (Still, during the first three months of 2023 transit police have issued, on average, less than three fines per day, according to Metro Transit Police data.)
Without federal aid, WMATA is predicting a $700 million shortfall next year. The story is similar across many other cities. BART predicts that it will hit its fiscal cliff in 2025; LA Metro expects to be more than $1 billion short by the end of fiscal 2026.
Alicia Trost, BART’s chief communications officer, said that customer surveys from the agency show growing concern about the amount of fare evasion, which the agency says accounted for about $15 million to $25 million a year in lost revenue pre-pandemic. In April, BART announced that its board approved a contract to move forward with a $90 million “Next Generation Fare Gate” project, which will install 72-inch barriers that promise to be “very difficult to be pushed through, jumped over, or maneuvered under.”
But technological solutions have been elusive, as dodger-resistant turnstiles can be both expensive to install and difficult to use, slowing boarding, limiting accessibility for wheelchair users and irritating paying riders. As WMATA CEO Clarke said in November, according to local news site DCist, “If we want to have a gate that [prevents] fare evasion, that’s called a wall, and we will never run service.”
Other agencies have invested more heavily in human (and canine) deterrence. The Chicago Transit Authority signed a contract for more than $30 million last year to get up to 100 unarmed guards and 50 enforcement dogs per day. In Atlanta, officer presence is “the number-one thing that prevent and deter any fare evasion,” said Deputy Chief Willie Davenport of the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority Police Department.
Evasive Economics
But it’s New York City where feelings around fare-dodging can be particularly intense — perhaps because so many New Yorkers are transit users, and the MTA relies on fare revenue to cover about 40% of its operating expenses, a larger share than in most cities.
Last year, a video of an older white woman ducking under a subway turnstile on Manhattan’s Upper East Side went viral. New Yorkers are “outraged and demoralized” when they see someone “carrying $7 lattes — and we have this on video — waltzing through the emergency exit gates,” the MTA’s Lieber said then, after the agency shared it widely. (It later came out that the woman did, in fact, try to pay.)
There’s an element of moralism in these stories that’s irresistible both to the media and to riders.
“It’s an everyday thing,” said Harold Stolper, an economist and data scientist at Columbia University. “Most people in New York City take public transit, and most people pay.” He adopts a fake tough-on-crime voice: “Hey, are you paying your fare? Aren’t you upset that other people aren’t?”
Stolper, a former senior economist at the nonprofit Community Service Society of New York, wants to flip the question and direct attention to the economic part of the fare evasion conversation. “People don’t have enough money in their pocket; that’s a major driver of fare evasion,” he said. “Maybe not the only driver, but a major driver, despite what the MTA might choose to center.”
Income-based fare structures can be one solution. In 2018, Stolper and CSSNY helped lead the push for the enactment of Fair Fares, which offers 50% discounts for those living below the federal poverty line. In 2022, the program was made permanent. But it only reaches about a quarter of 900,000 eligible adult riders. The City Council is looking to raise the program’s funding to $135 million, and expand eligibility, potentially reaching 1.7 million New Yorkers.
The city budget is due in June, and the MTA is hopeful that the program will be able to expand. “We applaud the City Council’s proposal to expand access to transit equity, and by proposing to nearly double the funding for the Fair Fares program, more socioeconomically disadvantaged New Yorkers who rely on mass transit the most will be able to pursue education and employment opportunities throughout the city,” Michael Cortez, a spokesperson for the MTA, said in a statement. (The blue-ribbon panel is looking at new ways to promote Fair Fares, the MTA said, and their report is due soon.)
Enacting an income-based subsidy program is one thing. But what’s more complicated, perhaps, for transit officials to tackle — and for those who cover the issue to convey to the public — is the “big picture,” Stolper said. Fare jumping and its enforcement are just very visible manifestations of broader inequities. “I don’t like to use the word ‘redistribution,’ but it’s not just redistribution at the turnstile, right? It’s the systemic approach to reducing poverty.”
Equity Red Flags
Thinking holistically is reminiscent of a line sociologist Eric Klinenberg has repeated in regards to “broken windows” policing, or the belief that law enforcement should focus on stopping low-level crimes, like fare evasion, to prevent larger ones from unfolding: “If you’re concerned about broken windows, fix the damn windows.”
The success or failure of that policing model depends on who you ask, and what your definition of it is. But one result it consistently yields is a disproportionate ratio of arrests for Black and brown men. And fare evasion is no different. A 2018 report from the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs, for example, found that 91% of citations or summons by DC Metro Police were issued to Black people, and with police targeting stops most frequently used by young people of color.
“If there’s a concentration of people jumping turnstiles at one station or in certain communities, then how can we as a government, as a society alleviate these pains so getting from A to B isn’t so difficult?” said TaLisa Carter, a professor at American University who studied the impact to Black riders. “It’s just about reframing our priorities.”
When Stolper and his students at Columbia dissected the data from New York City’s last major fare evasion crackdown in 2018 and 2019 — which the NYPD was ultimately forced to release — they also found that the overwhelming majority of summons were given at stations in low-income communities of color. The same transit hubs that, just a year later, would be home to the frontline workers who sustained pandemic-era ridership.
Now, his team is turning to this latest crackdown. The policy of police on the platform is a hallmark of Mayor Eric Adams and Governor Kathy Hochul’s transit safety agenda. While the full analysis is not yet publicly available, Stolper said the level of “enforcement intensity” far outpaced ridership during certain months: Police were stopping just as many riders as before, though just a fraction of pre-pandemic passengers were using the trains.
“Once you prioritize fare evasion and allocate more officers, they might be doing other stuff, but they’re still going to be stopping more,” he said.
De-Escalate the Gate
Critics of fare evasion enforcement often cite the high expense of curbing it — a Streetsblog headline captured the quandary well, in 2018: “MTA Will Spend $249M On New Cops to Save $200M on Fare Evasion.”
In a report last November, the nonprofit Vera Institute of Justice emphasized another side effect of intense policing. “There’s this basic assumption among policymakers that policing is cost effective — that the benefits that we get from taking this approach exceed the costs,” said Daniela Gilbert, the Institute’s director of redefining public safety. “But that’s not what the evidence shows. Police activity can actually lead to social costs related to people’s health, economic outcomes, education and civic engagement.”
Interactions with law enforcement can also pose physical risks, both to riders and transit staffers: Earlier this week, three members of the New York MTA’s Eagle Team, which works to combat fare evasion, were fired at by a bus rider over an unpaid fare.
Gilbert’s team is interested in alternatives. Newark may serve as a guide, she said. The New Jersey city has put forward a “public safety ecosystem” in recent years, which tries to untangle interconnected issues of poverty, trauma and justice. Community investment and involvement are prioritized, and communication is encouraged.
In Portland, Oregon, the local transit agency has been deploying diversion when confronting fare evasion. In 2018 TriMet launched its “Fare is Fair” citation process. If a rider is caught not paying, they’re given a slate of options instead of the courtroom: Pay a fine over 90 days (a first offense is $75); do community service; or enroll in Honored Citizen, its fare subsidy program. “While fares are needed for using our transit service, skipping fare is not a crime that should have life-long consequences,” the agency declares.
Such less-punitive enforcement techniques have drawn fire from critics like Dorothy Moses Schulz, a retired Metro-North Railroad police captain and adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank. Stepped-up enforcement is fundamentally necessary, she argues, in part to deter riders who are perfectly capable of paying from joining the free-for-all. “If you make it more difficult, fewer are likely to,” Schulz said of fare evaders, pointing to “the people who might normally think about paying but just are evading because everyone else is.”
In a recent op-ed, Schulz connects lax turnstile enforcement to a broad range of ills associated with transit users, from homelessness and drug use to violent crimes: “Refusing to enforce the law on the transit system is a recipe for declining fare revenue, increasing fare evasion, and skyrocketing crime.”
Service Above All
Another way to combat fare evasion is to fundamentally rethink how people pay the fare itself, said Hayley Richardson, the director of communications for TransitCenter. In Pittsburgh, for example, a new pilot program allows users to use an EBT card, otherwise used for SNAP food benefits, to pay for transit.
“It enhances the goals of these programs, by really lowering the barriers people have to go through to access them,” Richardson said.
Others have pointed to the less-police-intensive approaches that many European transit agencies have adopted. The Netherlands
Richardson, like many transit advocates, admits to being somewhat exasperated by the media and enforcement attention that turnstile dodging draws in the US. “We’re in a situation where transit has been underfunded for decades,” she said. “And so transit agencies are constantly underdelivering based on this reality. Instead of focusing on that root issue, it’s become easier to say, ‘Look over there.’”
Derrick Holmes of Riders Alliance, a transit advocacy group in New York, goes further. “Fare evasion is a fake problem,” he declared in a blog post last June. Most riders, when asked, don’t care about it, he argued. (What is important? Getting somewhere safely, and on time.) Enforcement isn’t just a drain on resources — it “increases otherwise unnecessary rider interactions with the NYPD,” he wrote, and slows down service.
Riders Alliance is one of several organizations pushing for “six-minute service” in this year’s state budget, where the MTA’s operating expenses would be baselined through a bevy of new funding mechanisms. New York Governor Hochul also recently proposed several funding methods, including an increase in the payroll mobility tax. Holmes’s hope is that that such measures will alleviate the pressure, and the war on fare evasion can again recede in the city’s collective consciousness.
“In an ideal world, collecting fares wouldn’t be this existential kind of imperative,” Holmes said. “It would be something that could go into providing better service because the operating budget is fine with it or without it. It could be written off as a negligible loss — not necessarily a reason to have to take action.”
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