OUT ON A LIMB: Fare Gates Can Stop Transit Crime.
Transit officials report that serious crimes are committed overwhelmingly by people who evade fares. In the Los Angeles Metro system, 97 percent of people who committed a violent crime didn’t pay. In Washington, D.C., 99.5 percent of those who committed a “Part 1” crime (homicide, rape, robbery, arson, or motor vehicle theft) had dodged the fare. In New York, MTA CEO Janno Lieber says that “virtually all” crimes are committed by fare evaders.
These crimes are possible because legacy fare gates fail to prevent people from entering the system if they haven’t paid. That’s because older, full-height fare gates, like the revolving doors in New York, have substantially lower capacity—they can process fewer people per minute, which can cause crowding if a train drops off lots of people at once. Modern designs fix that problem. Cities that have installed new, full-height fare gates have seen crime and disorder plummet. San Francisco’s BART found that systemwide crime fell 41 percent after new gates were installed. Even more impressively, across the ten stations with the most corrective maintenance needs, staff time spent on in-system maintenance fell 96 percent, which suggests that fare evaders also cause most unreported crime, like littering, vandalism, and graffiti.
Other systems report similar findings. Washington, D.C.’s WMATA found that, following its own modernized fare-gate installation, fare evasion fell by 82 percent and crime by nearly 40 percent. L.A. Metro reports that a pilot program for modernized fare gates reduced passenger reports of security concerns, uncleanliness, and vandalism and graffiti by 69 percent at affected stations.
Flashback to last month: Viral Video Shows Woman Learning the Hard Way That BART’s New Fare Gates Are a Real Pain in the Butt.
Who would have thunk?
Well, actually, the folks who came up with the “Broken Windows” theory, which asserts that overlooking small crimes inevitably leads to lawlessness. The concept was used successfully to tackle crime in New York City in the 1990s under then-Police Commissioner William Bratton, who served under former Mayor Rudy Giuliani, but California lawmakers have found it to be too big a pain in the butt to apply in the Golden State.
Although this lady’s plans may have gotten rear-ended, she also just proved that San Francisco may just be making sense for once.
To boldly go where Rudy Giuliani went in the mid-1990s:
