Vandals have done some senseless stuff on Bay Area Rapid Transit. They have removed the fire extinguishers from the station walls and sprayed them all over the place, for example. But what particularly vexed Alicia Trost, the chief communications officer for the train system that connects San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose, was their destruction of map display cases at stations across the system: “You could not see the maps for years.”
Now you can. In August, BART completed the installation of new fare gates at station entrances and exits: Six-foot-tall saloon-style doors, made of plexiglass with metal frames, have replaced the waist-high barriers of the 1970s that were easy to duck or jump. The new gates have compelled more riders to pay their fare—revenue is projected to rise by $10 million a year. They have also led to an enormous drop in vandalism. Workers spent nearly 1,000 fewer hours cleaning up after unruly passengers in the six months following the gates’ installation, compared with the six months before. Crime on BART fell by 41 percent last year. Most fare beaters may be just trying to get a free ride, but most vandalism was apparently committed by fare beaters.
This is a success story with lessons for all types of public spaces. Call it “fare-gate theory”: To protect the shared rooms of communal life, human intervention isn’t always necessary, affordable, or desirable. Instead, physical and technological obstacles—an architecture of good behavior—can keep out bad actors and deter the worst impulses of everyone else.
It might seem obvious that addressing fare evasion is an important priority for mass-transit systems struggling with both revenue and a perception of disorder. But in San Francisco and other cities, the question of how riders access the subway—and how they behave on it—has been ensnared by vitriolic debates about fairness, poverty, mobility, social standards, and policing. One left-wing argument is that fare enforcement of any kind is a waste of money that instead could be spent improving commutes and helping low-income residents access the city. That’s part of the logic behind New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s pledge to make city buses free. Many transit officials, however, insist that fare enforcement is necessary not just to generate revenue but to maintain standards of decorum that make riders feel safe.
The contours of this debate are nearly identical in conversations about bathrooms, benches, and other public facilities. How do we negotiate the ideals of universal access against the needs of the system and the comfort of its users?
BART first tried to design its way out of the problem in 2019, with a pair of retrofit prototypes. One featured metal fins that shot out of the waist-high gate; the second introduced an additional, higher gate at shoulder height. The experiment did not go well: KQED reported that the new gates were panned as “anti-poor, anti-homeless, and ableist” design. Even a BART board member concluded the agency had piloted “a guillotine fare gate that will live forever in some infamy.” Criminal-justice-reform advocates also pushed back on fare-beating enforcement; the state legislature voted in 2023 to decriminalize fare evasion, though the bill was vetoed by Governor Gavin Newsom.
