If you ride LA Metro, you’ve already seen the omnipresent signage and announcements telling you to be ready to present your TAP card for inspection. You may have also seen news or social media clips about Metro’s efforts to curb fare evasion. So you can imagine our shock when, this summer, we discovered that LA Metro quietly stopped enforcing fares years ago.
As we document in our 15 page report, Metro’s roughly 200 Transit Security Officers (TSOs) typically issue under ten citations for fare evasion per day system-wide (as of the most recent data). According to Attachment D of this month’s public safety report, the average TSO issued roughly 1.4 fare citations per month over the last year. Sadly, this isn’t because fare evasion is rare. In fact, roughly 46% of riders don’t pay, with some routes seeing an evasion rate above 60%. That’s 12 million unpaid boardings each month. And because (according to Metro) over 90% of those who commit crimes on the system enter without paying, it’s no surprise that onboard issues related to crime and antisocial behavior have persisted ever since the pandemic. As of last year, according to the USC Barometer Survey, roughly two thirds of riders believed LA Metro was unsafe. So how did we get here?
The short version is that after 2017, when LA Metro transferred Code of Conduct enforcement duties from the Sheriff’s Department to in-house security, enforcement levels collapsed. Fares were then suspended for two years during the pandemic, leaving riders accustomed to not paying. And while Metro has successfully convinced the media and political leaders that fare enforcement is back, riders aren’t fooled, and they aren’t happy about it either. As shown in our report, riders consistently rank security and cleanliness as the highest priorities in surveys (even above service and reliability) and strongly support existing fare collection initiatives like higher faregates.
In response to our report, Metro security leadership told us that TSOs are busy doing other important work. If so, they at least appear to be doing very little of it. Over the entire summer, Metro issued only 19 combined citations and written warnings for Code of Conduct violations not related to fares. Metro leaders have also told us that TSOs are providing “deterrence” by their mere presence, and it’s true that code enforcement is more than just issuing citations. But with no chance of having your card actually checked, what exactly are fare evaders being deterred with?
It’s time to get real about fare enforcement. Our proposal is to retask the TSOs to conduct onboard proof-of-payment validations of TAP cards across the system. At a modest rate of 20 cards an hour per TSO, we believe Metro could check over 20,000 riders a day with existing staff.
We think this new strategy would dramatically increase fare compliance while making TSOs more likely to stop crimes as they patrol the system. And with the ever-present chance of a random inspection, TSOs can ensure Metro is only being used for its intended purpose of transportation, even when they aren’t present.
Instead of excluding low-income Angelenos, fare enforcement will give them the dignified transportation they deserve. Anyone making under $53,000 a year already has access to 20 free rides a month through Metro’s LIFE program, and fare citations do not create a criminal record.
For the last five years, LA Metro has inadvertently become America’s largest free transit experiment. According to the majority of riders, it hasn’t gone well. It’s time to turn the page.
Alex Davis is a transit advocate who has worked three years in the transit sector and studied urban planning at Rutgers University. Nimesh Rajakumar is a primary care physician organizing Angelenos for a more walkable, healthier LA. Erica Solis is a linguistics PhD student at UCLA advocating for safer commutes on LA Metro.