Back in the days when I made my living teaching cause analysis and failure investigations to corporate audiences, I used to use an old routine to illustrate the importance of not overlooking the obvious by asking, "How would you suspend hundreds or thousands of pounds of water overhead with no visible means of support?" About one class in five, someone would give the correct answer: "Make a cloud."
Sometimes the obvious answers are the best ones, and that applies to our various cities having problems with crimes on the public buses and trains. Trains in particular are a problem; when you are sealed in an aluminum tube moving at speed, there's not much you can do to evade a turnstile-jumping goblin who is there to prey on the passengers. How to deal with this? Well, there's one obvious solution: Toughen up the fare gates. Make it impossible for anyone without a pass or a ticket to get in.
Fortunately, America’s major transit systems have a better option to reduce crime and disorder: installing full-height fare gates, which keep criminals out of transit systems. Congress should require and fully fund the installation of new full-height fare gates for all systems that don’t yet have them.
This seems the obvious solution. It shouldn't be that hard to design a gate that not only can't simply jump over, but which operates quickly enough to slam closed behind a paying passenger. Exclude the goblins, and you'll exclude most of the crime.
Transit officials report that serious crimes are committed overwhelmingly by people who evade fares. In the Los Angeles Metro system, 97 percent of people who committed a violent crime didn’t pay. In Washington, D.C., 99.5 percent of those who committed a “Part 1” crime (homicide, rape, robbery, arson, or motor vehicle theft) had dodged the fare. In New York, MTA CEO Janno Lieber says that “virtually all” crimes are committed by fare evaders.
Granted, my own experiences with these systems are sparse, except in Japan, where I used trains, buses, and subways regularly, as one does in the Land of the Rising Sun. Japanese transit systems are, like most of Japanese society, clean, efficient, well-maintained, and safe; in Japan, fare evasion is very, very rare, at least by Japanese people.
On the other hand, there was the one time I rode on the San Francisco Bay Area's BART transit system, from Redwood City to downtown, on a clear, sunny Saturday afternoon. The first thing I noticed after getting my ticket and going to the platform was the reek of urine. A 5-year-old could have surmounted that turnstile and entered the system, and there was no law enforcement in sight. When I got on the train, the car was mostly empty (no surprise there, given conditions) save for me, a woman, and her daughter who looked to be about 12, and three obvious goblin types who kept casting sidelong looks at mother and daughter until I interposed myself between them. (BART has since improved their fare gates.)
It's a safe bet those three didn't pay the fare. Later that day, I took an Uber back to the BART station where I had parked.
Sometimes the obvious solutions are the best ones. It wouldn't be easy or cheap, not in a city like New York with a lot of stations and a lot of fare gates to be replaced. But it's become very obvious in recent years that something has to be done about this problem. Hardening the fare gates would help a lot.