Liberal Shocked That Fare Enforcement Dramatically Reduced Crime on Bay Area Transit

It’s fascinating to watch as American cities are forced to rediscover common sense.

An interesting report in The Atlantic of all places on Monday highlighted how the San Francisco Bay Area, like a broken clock, finally hit on a good idea.

The Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system, which for years has been plagued by low ridership and dysfunction, has apparently had a huge turnaround.

The Atlantic’s Henry Grabar noted, with some surprise, that all it took was one simple trick: last year, BART widely installed new fare gates by station exits and entrances.

These new and improved gates made fare evasion dramatically more difficult than it was with the old 1970s-style, waist-high gates. I can’t even count the number of times I’ve seen fare evaders effortlessly hop over those old gates as if they weren’t even there.

The effect of just this one change has been staggering, apparently. Crime is way down 41% since last year according to BART’s numbers—and maintenance costs have plummeted.

“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,” the Atlantic noted.

This while ridership is way up. Revenue is now projected to increase by $10 million a year thanks to the change.

BART General Manager Bob Powers said in January that “infrastructure upgrades” alongside “improved fare gates and station lighting, with additional safety presence and customer-centered service” have made BART a more “comfortable experience for everyone who rides.”

What do you know, they’ve finally dabbled in the most basic steps to improve public transit ridership by making it *gulp* safer. Maybe this doesn’t seem as remarkable to you as it does to me, but I grew up in the Bay Area. The depth of policy idiocy in the land of my birth is typically bottomless.

But lo and behold, the green shoots of sanity in the craziest part of California.

It’s notable that this happened after a study by Yale’s Center for Policing Equity said last May that stopping fare evasion wouldn’t decrease crime or make the system safer.

Furthermore, the study said that doing more to make sure people obeyed the law would disproportionately affect “marginalized groups, including black and brown riders, low-income individuals, people experiencing mental health crises, and individuals who are unhoused.”

The report recommended that additional social workers, less enforcement, and discounted fares for special groups would solve things.

I guess not.

Crime is down and left-wing social engineers suffer most.

It’s in that Yale study where you see the roots of why everything seemingly went to hell following the 2020 Great Awokening. It was ideology, force fed to our society by do-gooder social elites with impressive credentials and an equally impressive misunderstanding of human nature.

The most prestigious institutions in the world convinced Western societies that they had to throw out good sense and good policy to stop “systemic racism.” What followed was more criminality, more dysfunction, and ultimately more suffering for people of all skin colors.

The Atlantic’s Grabar acknowledged that BART’s “success story with lessons for all types of public spaces.” Grabar called it the “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,” he concluded.

That’s funny, because this is hardly a new idea. It’s based on the same set of principles that drove New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s crime-fighting revolution in the late 1990s. The “broken windows theory” essentially came down to policing small crimes to stop bigger ones.

The truth is that most people are not criminals. Most obey the laws and try to do what’s right. Most crime, whether petty or felonious, is committed by the same antisocial people.

A September report by the New York Post illustrated this point.

According to NYPD statistics, a group of 63 people had more than 5,000 arrests among them. Yet, the New York Post reported, only five were in jail as of the piece’s publication.

“The motley crew has amassed a disturbing rap sheet for crimes including assault, robbery, theft, turnstile-jumping and a string of other nuisance offenses—but they largely remain free because the state’s lax criminal-justice reforms bar judges from holding them on bail,” the Post reported.

A later New York Post report in March tracked just five Subway career criminals who had a “whopping 590 busts between them—including more than 100 arrests for violent felonies like robbery and rape.”

Now, most of these folks should be behind bars more permanently. That would keep the whole city safe from their villainy. But it appears that putting up even the smallest barriers to entry could at least keep public transportation safe. And that would be a huge win for the countless people who’ve been victimized and perhaps many others who want to use subway but are too afraid to do so.

Unfortunately, New York is going the opposite direction as the democratic socialist mayor still wants to experiment with his “free bus” idea. It’s a plan that’s both unaffordable and neglects the lesson that BART so recently learned about how fare enforcement keeps the crime away.

There are more and more examples of how increased law enforcement and even minimal prevention methods work. Let’s hope that this trend continues. Enduring increased criminality doesn’t have to be the price for living in or visiting a city.