Transit Fare Gates and Maintenance
Lucia Dolan
Noah Smith had a recent piece about the Bay Area Rapid Transit system (BART). Ridership is way down since COVID, and the riders who remained complained about safety and general disorder on the trains. But when BART installed new entry gates that deterred people from entering the stations without paying, crime plummeted by 54%.
Not only that, but BART employees suddenly had a lot fewer maintenance problems. The chart below shows the number of hours, by station, that employees were spending on corrective maintenance tasks like fixing or cleaning up things that riders break or mar in some way. As you can see, cracking down on fare evasion cleaned up a lot of problems and saved BART employees a lot of time!
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What’s the education equivalent? Teachers I know have been complaining a lot about fights and general campus disorder. Public school systems have an obligation to serve everybody, but how do they make sure their buildings are safe and orderly and true spaces for learning?
Here’s Smith on his takeaways:
Progressives often argue against measures like fare gates, labeling them “carceral” and “racist”. This demonstrates a principle that I call anarchyfare — the idea that eliminating society’s rules serves as a kind of welfare benefit for marginalized people. But in fact, most poor and marginalized people are just peace-loving people who need to ride the train to get to work. They are the chief victims of the tiny number of chaotic individuals who destroy the commons and make public spaces and public services unusable.
BART’s lesson should be applied throughout much of our society. Restraining a very few uncontrollable and chaotic individuals makes life much better for the poor and working class.
Nedeljkovic, Srdjan S.,MD
Sent: Friday, February 13, 2026 12:42 PM
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Subject: Transit Fare Gates and Maintenance
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Lucia Dolan
Paying With Their Time: Increasing Traffic Congestion Erodes Benefits of Boston’s Fare-Free Buses
Fare free transit is great, but reliable services are better
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Michael Halle
I interpret the observation that entry gates reduce crime and maintenance as demonstration that, at least in part, poverty is correlated with anti-social or destructive behavior. (A complementary observation is that they increase the effort to be destructive, but let's split that one out for now). That's one of the many things that makes being poor hard.
What this observation can't show is the impact of fares and fare gates on people for whom fares are a burden but aren't destructive or anti-social. I think it's important to understand that number as well. It's als
"Restraining a very few uncontrollable and chaotic individuals makes life much better for the poor and working class." No doubt that's true on its face. However, that's not the full picture of what fare gates do (positive and negative), nor is restraint the complete picture in addressing "uncontrollability and chaos".
Schools: For exactly the issue that public schools are open to all, I don't see the analogy being parallel. I don't doubt that bad behavior impacts education, but we don't address it by exclusion.
The recent data on school violence is actually more hopeful, though still mixed:
https://www.the74million.org/article/10-charts-that-explain-how-schools-have-grown-less-violent-since-covid/
--Mike
> On Feb 13, 2026, at 9:42 AM, Lucia Dolan <dolan...@gmail.com> wrote:
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> Noah Smith had a recent piece about the Bay Area Rapid Transit system (BART). Ridership is way down since COVID, and the riders who remained complained about safety and general disorder on the trains. But when BART installed new entry gates that deterred people from entering the stations without paying, crime plummeted by 54%.
> Progressives often argue against measures like fare gates, labeling them “carceral” and “racist”. This demonstrates a principle that I call anarchyfare — the idea that eliminating society’s rules serves as a kind of welfare benefit for marginalized people. But in fact, most poor and marginalized people are just peace-loving people who need to ride the train to get to work. They are the chief victims of the tiny number of chaotic individuals who destroy the commons and make public spaces and public services unusable.
> BART’s lesson should be applied throughout much of our society. Restraining a very few uncontrollable and chaotic individuals makes life much better for the poor and working class.
>
> from Aldeman on Education aldemanon...@substack.com
> --
> Lucia Dolan
> 617 775-8609 cell
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