Magazine serving the bus and rail transit & motorcoach operations since 1904
Issue link: https://metromag.epubxp.com/i/83643
TRANSIT IMPLEMENTS CONTROL TACTICS TO Los Angeles, Boston, San Francisco and Atlanta are putting an end to 'free rides' with fare inspection crackdowns. L.A. Metro, like Atlanta, is locking its fare gates, ending the unoffi cial honor system. >BY NICOLE SCHLOSSER, Senior Editor IN JUNE, THE NEW YORK METROPOLITAN Transportation Authority (MTA) upped its es- timate of what it loses in revenue each year from bus fare evasion from $14 million to $50 million and may increase police enforcement. The Los Angeles County Metropolitan Trans- portation Authority (Metro) recently discov- ered that riders are often not tapping fare cards and moving ahead through the turnstiles with- out paying. An age-old problem, fare evasion prompts an ongoing struggle to stay ahead of people who are trying to beat the system, says Kim Green, president, GFI Genfare. EVASION TACTICS The most common fare evasion method, says Transit Police Chief Paul MacMillan, Massachusetts Bay Transportation Author- ity (MBTA), is piggy-backing or tailgating: following somebody who has paid the fare through the gates. Other fare evasion tactics MBTA has en- countered include jumping on the gates and climbing over them; pulling the gates apart; 86 < mETRO mAGAZINE SEPTEMBER • OCTOBER 2012 TRANSIT IMPLEMENTS CONTROL TACTICS TO COMBAT FARE EVASION forcing them open and squeezing through, which often damages the gates; and block- ing the outgoing sensor, causing the fare gate to open so people can slip through. ASSESSMENT CHALLENGES What complicates the problem is that fare evasion is diffi cult to assess through data, since there's not a reliable metric to adequate- ly determine if you have a good fare evasion rate, Green adds. "Does your [rate] look good if it's based on total ridership divided by the number of people you issue citations to?" Green asks. "If that's the case, all you have to do to have a low fare evasion rate is put one inspector on [one out of] your 200 trains. You haul 200,000 people, issue three citations a day. It will look like you had no fare evasion, but there are a lot of people on those other 199 trains that are riding for free. You just don't know it." Green adds that there are also jurisdiction issues with proof of payment. Many cities treat fare violation the same way they handle metro-magazine.com COMBAT FARE EVASION SFMTA fare inspectors are placed system-wide, and conduct saturations — boarding a bus and checking every passengers' proof of payment — every day.