San Fran is a joke. Sadly, it does not have a punchline.
“For years, the Bay Area Rapid Transit System has said that a big reason the system has lost revenue and gotten more dangerous is that a lot of people don’t pay fares.
The theory is that people who are more likely to commit crimes are the ones who are also not paying; cracking down on the fare jumpers thus would reduce crime, make them more likely to pay next time, and increase revenue.
But a new report from the Center for Policing Equity, a nonprofit research center based at Yale, has found that the system’s fare enforcement is not actually leading to significant new revenue and it’s not making riders feel that much safer.
“BART’s focus on fare evasion recovers minimal revenue, may be addressing an overstated problem, and is not effective at curbing incidents that make riders feel uneasy in the system,” concluded the report, which was released this week.”
Government transportation in San Fran is a failed system—dirty, disease and crime ridden. No mount of paid security folks will change that. The answer is simple—sell the system to private enterprise==that will solve all the problems and save taxpayers billions.
Cracking down on fare jumpers didn’t make BART safer or increase revenue, report finds
The Center for Policing Equity partnered with BART to produce a report that’s skeptical of the agency’s claims.
by Jose Fermoso, Berkeleyside, 5/19/25 https://www.berkeleyside.org/2025/05/19/bart-fare-evasion-report-safety
For years, the Bay Area Rapid Transit System has said that a big reason the system has lost revenue and gotten more dangerous is that a lot of people don’t pay fares.
The theory is that people who are more likely to commit crimes are the ones who are also not paying; cracking down on the fare jumpers thus would reduce crime, make them more likely to pay next time, and increase revenue.
But a new report from the Center for Policing Equity, a nonprofit research center based at Yale, has found that the system’s fare enforcement is not actually leading to significant new revenue and it’s not making riders feel that much safer.
“BART’s focus on fare evasion recovers minimal revenue, may be addressing an overstated problem, and is not effective at curbing incidents that make riders feel uneasy in the system,” concluded the report, which was released this week.
The study was done in partnership with BART, which provided extensive but not all relevant data, as well as Office of the Independent Police Auditor (OIPA), the BART Police Department, and local nonprofits such as All of Us or None and the Monument Crisis Center. It can be read in its entirety here.
BART funded the financial analysis portion of CPE’s investigation through a contractor, Stout, an advisory firm.
The report said that BART has not explicitly defined how fare evasion enforcement actually increases revenue and makes the system safer.
“If BART has other explicit objectives for fare evasion enforcement, it should clearly state those goals and explain the specific mechanisms through which they expect those activities to address their goals,” the report stated. After looking at BART’s data, the researchers concluded that it’s “unclear whether BART has calculated how much revenue will be generated from fare enforcement and what the impact will be on public safety.”
Not having clear objectives for fare enforcement, in the report’s assessment, leads to broad policing mandates that wind up harming the most vulnerable members of the community.
“Rather than producing clear benefits, fare enforcement operations have detrimental effects on the community, disproportionately impacting Black and Brown riders, as well as individuals who are low-income, people struggling with mental health, and people who are unhoused,” the report said.
Focus groups undertaken for the report found that Black riders often feel racially profiled. According to the report, out of the 20,778 people stopped on suspicion of fare evasion, 43.5% of them were Black. Additionally, Black riders accounted for 49.6% of the people who received citations.
For many of the people who participated in the report, the stops took a toll. Several “reported that the stress of their encounters with BPD negatively affected their mental health, reporting increased stress, anxiety, depression, and trauma,” the report said. Some had physical injuries from their arrests.
The BART system has two types of officers who can enforce fares: sworn officers who carry weapons and are allowed to arrest suspects, and fare inspection officers (FIOs), who can issue citations but can’t arrest people. Citations are given to people who don’t pay fares but can also be given for any number of other behaviors, including noise or specific disturbances.
The report noted that, by the fiscal year 2024, 22% of BART operating costs were covered by fares, a sharp drop from 70% in fiscal year 2018. BART has sought to increase fare gate revenues because fewer people used the service during the pandemic, leading to a huge drop in revenue, leading it to rely in recent years on state and federal funds.
But CPE found that fare enforcement doesn’t really bring in much money. Between 6% and 12% of civil proof of payment citations were actually paid in 2017, the last year for which data was available, and between 2018 and 2023, the highest cash amount brought in from citations was $86,613 in 2019.
Some of the other key findings from the report:
— Most arrests from fare checks are actually for old warrants (63.5%) and not violent crimes.
— BART provided no proof for its claim that fare evasion costs up to $25 million a year, with Stout, the advisory firm, estimating that 2023 losses were no greater than $9.5 million. That’s significantly less than the $27.2 million the ramped-up enforcement costs BART in personnel and related fees
— The highly publicized $90 million program of hardened gates didn’t really deal with the main issue of public safety.
In an email to The Oaklandside, Alicia Trost, BART’s chief communications officer, said that “BART leadership has not been given sufficient time to read the report or weigh in on the findings.” She also said BART will continue with its efforts to make the system safer through fare enforcement.
“We have no plans to change our current efforts to replace fare gates and enforce our code of conduct, which includes the enforcement of fare payment and an increase in the visible safety presence in the system,” she wrote. “These strategies are improving the rider experience and are key to our 17% drop in crime last year.”
Trost also said that hardened gates at the 30 stations have been a “powerful deterrent” against fare evasion that has led to other “positive changes” including “revitalized station environments, improved access for riders in wheelchairs, and a 1/3 drop in the number of riders who reported seeing fare evasion on their trip.”
Trost said that the $25 million estimate that’s debunked in the report is not one BART has used in more than six years.
CPE researchers said in the report that BART denied access to some of the data they could have used to check BART’s fare enforcement estimates.
BART started installing new hardened steel fare gates late last year in Oakland that are taller and more imposing than the old retractable orange slice wedges, which could be easily hurdled. The new doors also have metal spikes at the top to prevent scofflaws.
But they aren’t impregnable, as riders have found. People can squeeze in behind paying riders. And that’s to say nothing of the delays caused by the malfunctioning Clipper tagging mechanism, according to users who’ve spoken to The Oaklandside in recent months.
Participants in the 14 focus groups convened for the CPE study still expressed concerns about their safety despite the fare evasion crackdown. Nearly 80% “mentioned having safety concerns while riding BART and/or at BART stations,” the report said. Of those people, 53% “mentioned homelessness and/or mental illness as a public safety concern”; 51% were worried about nuisance behaviour like loud music or smoking; 32% feared a violent act; 23% were concerned about poor sanitation; and 21% were worried about property theft.
One Latina woman the researchers spoke to described an incident where she tried to pay for a BART pass with cash and got her bills stolen. An Asian man described the general increase in violence against Asian people as one reason he didn’t want to go on BART.
Many of the fearful riders expressed nuanced, even self-critical thoughts about crime. Several wondered whether their own internal biases made them think a person would commit a robbery based on their appearance.
“In many cases, focus group participants expressed sympathy for those who are unhoused while also feeling anxious when they are present at the stations or on the trains,” read part of the report summary. “As one participant noted, ‘it’s better that they’re on the train than in a probably worse condition or situation.’”
Focus group participants who were unhoused recounted fare checks “escalating” into full ID checks and “other searches” of their property or self.
To ensure that all types of people who use BART were heard from, as well as those who are usually underrepresented in focus groups, researchers sought out people from marginalized groups that have historically been most impacted by fare enforcement. The study had three Spanish-speaking groups, one Mandarin-speaking group, one youth group, and two college groups.
This is the second major report to emerge the partnership between CPE and BART. The first one, released in 2020, examined the operational issues that led to an increase in racial inequity and use of force. That report led to a commitment from BART to analyze the root causes of those disparities.
CPE recommended that BART staff its system with nonprofit partners that have experience with people facing mental health crises. Such partners could help facilitate, for example, access to housing and medical services and could also help people pay for old fare citations.
