This can be OPRA requested.

Ahhh, cool. Yeah, again, I would not normalize to this since the majority of these people only ride a few times a year. But this is a really cool stat. Thanks for sharing.

This is a good point, but it's more of a safety thing. You're correct that most people will not climb up from the tracks to avoid $1.75. But some people will and some of them will get hit by trains. So we can't create that incentive.

If fare enforcement checks go down, the resulting disorder increases conflict which primarily hurts LA Metro's low income, non-white riders. And that's exactly what has happened over the last decade.

BART gets ~180k weekday boardings. Where are you getting this 1.4 million stat? Is that the number of people who ride it at least once per year? That's not the number we'd normalized to because we're trying to approximate "risk of getting caught" which scales with how often you ride.

Henry Graber is asserting (with basically no evidence) that faregates can replace enforcement, but it's not because he's dishonest or gullible. It's that he (and most Atlantic readers) are ideologically motivated to believe there's this clean, uncontroversial alternative to enforcement. There isn't.

Also, buses exist. Can we plexiglass our way out of evasion on buses? Obviously not, and it's the same problem for streetside light rail stations. This Atlantic think piece doesn't even touch on this issue, even though in most cities, buses carry most riders and account for most of the fare revenue.

Meanwhile, LA Metro offers us an actual test of what high faregates achieve in a near zero-enforcement environment: not much. You can see all my data in this thread here but long story short, the evasion rate at these impressively gated new stations is likely at least half.

In 2025, BART issued 14,843 fare citations and (as seen in my video) LA Metro issued around ~2,800 despite having 5.5x more ridership. So BART is doing roughly 29x more fare enforcement than LA Metro. *That* is the inconvenient truth of why the BART fare gates work.

www.bart.gov/sites/defaul...

This think piece argues that faregates can not just augment but *replace* fare enforcement. Its only real-world evidence is that BART has reduced fare checks since upgrading its faregates. This is true, but that's not evidence that the tall faregates can work without enforcement. Here's why.

The 212 is at least frequent on weekends. The 10 is really the problem. It's lifeline service by LA standards.

"I just want public transit I can use" is the entire mission and the entire struggle

Grand Rapids: "too broke to make themselves truly bad"

Wow, so they must've found like a special discount or something.

Bunker Hill, Los Angeles

🌴🌒

I feel that

Don't worry, we just need the transit agency to do proof of payment checks which they are definitely doing because it's their job.

Yeah, all door boarding does more to prevent *bunching*. But in heavy traffic environments, dedicated lanes do more for speed. Traffic is a huge problem. It just tends to slow all the successive buses down by similar amounts.

The primary cause of the really bad bunching is, unfortunately, passengers. Traffic often gets it started, but slow traffic will delay bus 1, 2 and 3 by similar amounts. However, when bus 1 is right in front of 2, 2 zooms ahead because all its passengers got stolen by 1. Bus 3 then starts dragging.

Yeah, if you have any questions after, put them here.

Love to never be able to have an opinion because of what hospital I was born at

You could say I'm a transit hardliner.

Just learned the Persian word for "rapid" (تندرو) used for BRT is the same word used for political hardliners/radicals.

Can't wait to start texting and emailing people in Iran asking them all about تندرو and how maybe I can get some more تندرو action on my own local transit system! 🇮🇷♥️🚍

So I'm not the only one, haha.

I poked around and this NYT picture is from Enghelab Square (میدان انقلاب). It's the transfer station from the BRT line 1 to metro line 4. Not the easiest to research, but apparently there are 10 Tehran BRT lines and they've all been built since 2008!

Rent, don't own. That way, they can't put a lien on your house. 🧠

I wonder if that spot is really popular because it's right near the entrance so Amtrak cops protect the bikes.

It's because I grew up there.

Philly is the greatest

How LA Metro Accidentally Made Itself Free YouTube video by Alex Davis

The last 6 years, we've stopped making people verify payment "under compulsion" and, not surprisingly, roughly half the riders stopped paying. So the tapping is not pointless *if* you want to collect fares.

I'm happy to argue, but I also think you'd enjoy my video on this.
youtu.be/vTS897tcu6Q

Your argument:
Collecting taxes is more efficient than collecting fares, so just cut out the middleman.
(correct?)

My response:
There's a limited capacity to raise taxes and we have a budget shortfall. Fares are a substantial, existing internal funding source that Metro has essentially abandonment.

Metro's farebox recovery used to be above 25%. Then they paused fare hikes for 12 years and stopped doing fare checks. Fares only look like a pointless funding source because they've been actively sabotaged for a decade. The money we're using to bankroll fare evasion could be used for more service.