Last month the Washington, DC metro system started installing new gates at some of its subway stations. As I described here, the new gates are much taller and make it a lot more difficult for people to simply hop over them to get on the trains. Here’s a graphic showing the original gates on the left and the new ones on the right.
Here’s a photo of the new gates installed:
We've launched new, higher faregate doors to prevent fare evasion. Here's what to know: https://t.co/henJcPt1eh #wmata pic.twitter.com/bfvUI3fVXf
— Metro Forward (@wmata) July 24, 2023
Today, WMATA, the agency that runs the DC metro announced that the new gates seem to be working:
The transit agency is in the middle of a project installing the tall plexiglass doors at all 98 Metrorail stations in an attempt to cut down on people jumping over or sliding by the fare gates without paying…
Metro began adding doors to fare gates in March, a $35 million project expected to take months to complete. The gates are nearly five feet tall and made of polycarbonate, which transit officials said is 200 times stronger than glass, but lighter and more durable. Metro workers also have added stronger hinges for the swing doors and a more powerful motor to withstand people who try to push their way through.
Preliminary data collected at Fort Totten, Pentagon City, Bethesda, Vienna, Mount Vernon Square and Addison Road — the first six stations completed — show that the new fare gates have collectively led to a more than 70 percent drop in fare evasion. The biggest change occurred at Mount Vernon Square in the District, where Metro said 15 percent of people had been evading fares. That figure is down to 2 percent, Metro said. At Addison Road, where 39 percent of riders were not paying fares, now just 11 percent are evading.
A few points about this. First, it’s good that fare evasion has dropped. Second, some of these stations already had very low levels of fare evasion, Bethesda and Vienna are both fairly well-off suburbs so fare evasion was pretty low there. The real drop is happening at a few stations like Addison Road where 39% (!) of riders weren’t paying prior to the new gates going in. That has now dropped more than 70%.
Other stations with even higher levels of fare evasion have yet to get the new gates. At the moment, the cheaters may have just decided to get on or off at the next nearest station which doesn’t have the new gates yet. We’ll have to see how things work out once the gates are in place everywhere. Still, it’s a promising start.
As I pointed out here, all of this was self inflicted. DC decriminalized fare evasion and stopped giving out tickets. There were 15,000 fare evasion tickets given out in 2017. Last year the number was 300. Lots of people came to believe paying was optional or at least that there were no consequences for not paying. So fare evasion spiked even as ridership was going down thanks to the pandemic and people working from home. In a matter of just five years you had a system that far fewer people were still paying to use.
WMATA spent $70 million replacing all of the gates a few years ago to make them more technologically advanced but the style of the gates was the same, making it easy for fare jumpers. Now they’re spending another $35 million to do what they should have done in the first place.
I grew up in this area and have taken these trains into and around DC many times. Hopefully, they can pull this back from the edge because without the metro DC will be one more major city headed into a doom loop.
