The fight against evasion in American subways

In October 2022, new electric gates appalled customers at Boston’s North Station: They failed a lot, they often misread tickets and some said they were “almost impassable”. In March 2023, Washington updated its turnstiles, instead installing high gates that would have opened, to prevent escape.

In San Francisco, Bay Area Rapid Transit signed an initiative to better track escapes on the subway, and the same thing happened in Philadelphia. From the pandemic to today, statistics show that the practice of not paying for the subway has increased in every city in the United States where it exists, and it has become a problem for transport companies and municipalities.

The subway escape became a regular topic in the American media. In 2019, it came to the center of the agenda in Washington DC, when the city council vetoed a plan by Mayor Muriel E. Bowser, with which he intended to increase the penalties for the breach.

New York’s subway company, the MTA, hired 500 police to watch, but that ended up turning the page: It sparked protests from civil liberty groups, that they started to organize big demonstrations with mass escapes. In the other direction, Philadelphia has gradually decriminalized the practice, after a series of controversies over the racial disparity with which police have caught escapees.

Now, the MTA has launched a pilot program that deploys private security guards to stations with particularly high escape records, like Myrtle-Wyckoff Avenues in Brooklyn. This program costs you a million dollars a month, and raises doubts about its price-effectiveness relationship.

In Washington DC, at Fort Totten station, new gates were recently installed to replace the turnstiles and were supposed to be harder to get around than the standard gates. However, dozens of users had very little trouble switching without paying: Videos have appeared on social media where people have been seen passing behind another person, or just jumping.

According to WMATA, the metro company of the American capital, this type of escape occurs 40,000 times a day on weekdays, which represents a loss of 13% of the money of the trip. This, the agency says, this would be a loss of $40 million in 2022, or nearly 22% of the metro’s budget.

Although this prompted the change of gates, the technological solutions have not been particularly effective, apart from the fact that the harder-to-pass turnstiles are both more expensive and difficult to use, causing traffic to slow down in the stations, access problems for people in wheelchairs and general frustration among users. According to Randy Clarke, CEO of WMATA“if we want a door that definitely prevents escape, it would be a wall, and therefore we would not be able to provide our service”.

One of the solutions that have been seen in New York concerns the economic side of the evasion problem: fees based on user income. Harold Stolper, an economist who worked at the Community Service Society of New York, told Bloomberg: “People don’t have enough money in their pockets, and that’s the most important factor when it comes to escapism. Probably not the only one, but the oldest”.

In 2018, Stolper and his foundation helped establish “Fair Fares”, a program that offered a 50% discount to those living below the federal poverty level. This program became permanent in 2022, but only reaches a quarter of the 900,000 eligible adults. For now, the city council is considering increasing the program’s budget, to expand its reach to 1.7 million New Yorkers.

For its part, in Portland, Oregon, the local transit agency used another strategy to deal with the breakout. In 2018, he launched the “Fare is Fair” program, in which if a user was caught passing without paying, the state offered him different options to avoid court: pay a $75 fine within 90 days or perform community service. According to the agency, “even if fares are necessary to fund transit service, escaping cannot be considered a crime with lifelong consequences.”

Using less punitive approaches that involve less expense, both on technology and guards, some transport agencies are looking to examples from European cities. In Berlin, for example, a barrier-free system is used, but with regular inspections in the wagons , in addition to the fact that in such a city, the majority of users use monthly subscriptions, the price of which has recently been reduced to encourage their use. In Dijon, France, people caught without a ticket are encouraged to buy one to avoid fines.

A radical approach that is rarely talked about is completely free, which is the reality in Luxembourg. Many small towns in the United States have experimented with this, but not the big cities yet.