Are BART's fare enforcement efforts totally misguided? and other questions SF Gate didn't ask

Today the SF Gate has an article on fare evasion on BART, not so different from similar stories you've probably seen recently. The highlights are always about the same: Fare evasion is a massive problem, riders who pay resent those who don't, BART is trying to make up the money they've lost, but it's really difficult. Every time I hear this, I get a little more skeptical of this narrative, although it never seems to change much. Since the Gate started their headline with a question, I thought it would be fun to list some of the questions on my mind, that they didn't ask, and try to answer a few of them.

You say you saw 56 people skip paying in 1 hour. How many did you see who did pay?

This is perhaps my biggest issue with this reporting, and similar stories I've seen about BART fare evasion. They will often include numbers from BART officials, about how much fare evasion is costing the agency. In this case, it's "up to $25 million" which sounds like a lot, but doesn't mean much without a little more context. For one thing, the actual estimate is somewhere between $15 million and $25 million, but SF Gate (like the SF Chronicle article they got that number from) focuses on the higher end of that range. More importantly, the total revenue from fares in FY 2019 was about $485 million, so that $25 million represents only 5% of passengers.

If we assume that BART's $25 million estimate is correct, and that the hour when SF Gate was watching was representative, then over 1,100 people walked through the gates and did pay their fare, during that same hour, which makes the stat of 56 people seem a lot less significant by comparison.

Who failed to pay? Locals, or tourists? What else can we find out about them?

It would be hard to know exactly without interviewing everyone, and of course that might skew the results, since people are presumably less likely to squeeze through the closed gate if they think they're going to be interrogated afterward. But even based on the video, they could make some rough estimates, which could drive BART policy.

For example, if many of the evaders are commuters, BART could work with employers to provide discounted BART passes to their employees (which might have the nice side effect of getting a few more out of their cars). If they're tourists, maybe clearer signage and more staff at the SFO and Coliseum stations would help.

Are people failing to pay out of laziness, or to save money, or some other reason?

If they can't afford the standard BART fares, maybe they'd be eligible for the low-income discount that was approved last month, and would be more likely to pay if that option were publicized more widely. Or perhaps they find it too difficult to reload their clipper card, because the machines in the stations are all in use, or are broken. (If you've ever tried to reload using a credit card, did it work on the first try? I didn't think so.) If that's the case, making it easier to reload clipper cards online, or at locations besides BART stations, could make a big difference.

In general, BART reporting seems to focus on what BART is doing, rather than on the motivations of the riders who are skipping paying. If we heard more from the people actually riding BART (who, by the way, are usually paying for it indirectly through sales taxes, even if they don't always pay their fare), we might come up with solutions that focusing more on what riders can do, rather than criminalizing them and punishing them for what they shouldn't do.

What do BART employees think?

This is probably my favorite part of the article:

"Oh no, I'm not going in there," a passenger with a bike told the station agent. "I just saw a guy get chopped in the head."

The agent let him through the swinging side gate.

My first thought was, did the agent ask him to tap his card first, or did they just let him through, implicitly condoning his not paying the fare? More generally, what do station agents, BART drivers, janitors, engineers, and other workers, think about fare evasion? Those fares are part of the money that comes into the system so they can get paid, so maybe they'd want to work to increase the number of people paying. But on the other hand, maybe they care more about making the system being convenient and comfortable for riders, and consider the financial questions to be someone else's problem. I hope the next article about BART fares includes interviews some of these workers. We might get a very different take from the people on the ground doing the work to keep the system running, than we do from the BART board and senior leadership.

Is more police and more enforcement the only solution?

As I alluded to earlier, BART's solutions tend to lean more on criminalizing people, punishing them for not paying, rather than encouraging them to pay. More fare checkers, more police, taller and scarier gates, and even signs threatening people with fines simply for asking their fellow riders for spare change. What if they went in the complete opposite direction? Try taking out the gates entirely at some stations, and just make the tap targets easy to find (like at Caltrain stations). Even if the only enforcement is the honor system, would the 95% to 97% of riders who pay their fares now, still pay? If so, there's got to be a way to make up the difference without further criminalizing people and making BART feel more and more heavily guarded and policed.