The Case for Fare Enforcement

Transit systems need the rules to matter

I used to believe that fare collection was a barrier to good transit service.

The belief was appealing for its counter-intuitiveness; like many people, I’m a sucker for ‘Slate-pitch’ contrarianism, that considers the common-sense view and argues that, Well Actually, the truth is the opposite. That argument, applied to fare collection, went like this.

The purpose of a transit agency is to move people quickly and reliably to their destinations. Fare collection makes fulfilling that purpose harder:

• If buses must wait to collect fares, and ensure every boarder pays a fare before departing, that rules out multi-door boarding and leads to long dwell times

• If subways have faregates, those gates act as bottlenecks, preventing fast entry or exit to the system

• If transit staff must collect fares, they’ll have to respond to fare evaders, perhaps with force; such interactions have great potential for harm for all concerned

So what should a transit operator do, then?

Certainly not go fare-free. Instead, I thought the better way was to remove faregates and allow patrons to pay their fares after entering the system. As Alon Levy has argued, ticket vending machines and farecard-tapping stations would be cheaper than faregates, and much cheaper than requiring every bus and transit stop to have paid personnel supervising and enforcing entry. Sure, there would be scofflaws, but such people could be identified and sanctioned by roving fare-enforcement personnel, who would be appropriately trained and equipped for those interactions, sparing everyone else and leading to the best possible outcomes on net.

This approach, it seemed to me, would minimizes friction, maximize system efficiency, and maintain revenue.

But then the Covid pandemic ran a natural experiment on what happens when you stop enforcing fare payment. And confronting the results of that experiment forced me to change my mind.

Everything Breaks

In March 2020, as governments imposed lockdowns and work-from-home orders, discretionary travel largely ceased. Office workers began working remotely, entertainment venues closed, and educational institutions moved to online instruction. The result was an immediate and dramatic reduction in transit ridership. Many systems saw ridership declines of 70% to 80% within weeks.

This collapse wasn't uniform across demographics. According to the USA’s Federal Transit Administration, ridership declines were smallest among essential workers and those making necessary trips, and largest among discretionary travellers; people commuting to offices that had closed or moved online largely stopped riding, as did students whose institutions went remote. Whereas systems had once served riders making all kinds of trips—commuting, shopping, social visits—they now primarily served those making essential journeys with fewer alternatives.

Even as this was happening, operators modified their fare-collection procedures to reduce the risk of spreading Covid. Many suspended fare enforcement entirely, on the grounds that close contact between enforcement officers and riders posed risks for both parties. Toronto, for example, moved to rear-door boarding on TTC buses, and eliminated fare-payment requirements; New York did much the same.

These two changes had a profound effect. With far fewer people using the system, and dramatically reduced attempts to prevent improper use, new groups of riders came to the fore, including populations that had not been prominent on most systems before the pandemic. These included:

The homeless, who had nowhere else to go. The pandemic dramatically restricted access to traditional spaces where homeless people might spend time safely. Shelters were operating at reduced capacity due to social-distancing requirements; and public libraries, community centres, shopping malls, and other indoor spaces where people could sit (without being required to make purchases) were closed or severely limited. In this context, transit vehicles and stations offered warm, enclosed public space that remained accessible. Whereas fare collection had previously been a barrier (admittedly a porous one) to this kind of use, the circumstances of the pandemic had removed it.

The mentally ill. As Freddie deBoer has observed, the overlap between homelessness, mental illness, and heavy transit usage became impossible to ignore during the pandemic. I have no wish to demonize drug addicts and schizophrenics; there but for the grace of God go I. But it’s not demonization to note that drug use, or drug withdrawal, or episodes of mental illness all tend to discourage or prevent their victims from following the rules. Chronic sufferers of these ailments certainly have different relationships to public authority than the regular commuters and routine users who had dominated transit ridership previously.

Scofflaws. There have always been fare-beaters on public transit, but the presence of routine users and other rule-following passengers created an environment where fare evasion was conspicuous and, at least for some, embarrassing. But the pandemic fundamentally altered that social dynamic. The informal enforcement that comes from being surrounded by paying passengers—the sense that everyone is following the rules—weakened considerably. When most, or all, the riders in a bus or train car didn't pay a fare to board, fare evasion carried less stigma.

Turnstile jumping in the Moscow Metro, courtesy of Wikimedia (CC 3.0)

Thanks to the pandemic, the social mechanisms that had previously sustained fare compliance—determined enforcement, social pressure, and even the ability to pay—were simultaneously weakened or eliminated. Certainly many people continued to use the system as before, but the change in the character of transit use produced empirical results. When agencies resumed systematic fare compliance audits in 2021 and 2022, they found fare evasion had increased, and by a lot:

• Washington D.C.'s Metrobus evasion doubled to 34% by 2021

• Toronto streetcar evasion jumped from 16% to 30%

• New York City bus evasion hit 30%-to-50% on many routes

• Sound Transit estimated that on Link light rail, around 45% did not pay a fare

Nor was fare evasion the only problem on the rise. Antisocial behaviour was up as well: transit crime jumped 41% year-over-year in New York City in June 2022, while Philadelphia saw violent attacks and robberies on its transit system increase by 80% since 2019. And frustration among paying customers was also spiking. In a 2022 MTA survey, only 48% of subway riders reported being satisfied or very satisfied with service overall, while just 33% were satisfied with personal security on trains.

The pandemic taught a harsh lesson: efficiency-focused approaches to fare collection depended on assumptions about rider behavior and social norms.

And those assumptions broke under stress. Proof-of-payment works when you have a critical mass of compliance-oriented riders. The physical presence of these riders poses social pressure on others. That pressure makes fare evasion conspicuous and, for many, uncomfortable. It encourages a baseline level of compliance that allows spot-checking to catch the minority of deliberate evaders. The pandemic made this obvious: it took away the riders who were most inclined to pay (and to judge those who didn’t); and it took away attempts to enforce any requirement to comply.

The result was 45% evasion rates.

The implications of rates like that are stark and predictable. As enforcement becomes gentler and more accommodating, systems increasingly host riders who understand that orderly use of the system is only a guideline, and the result is that the system becomes less orderly. Riders with alternatives—whether other transit routes, driving, cycling, or walking—respond to deteriorating conditions by using those alternatives instead.

The mechanism behind this death spiral is straightforward but relentless. When disorderly behaviour becomes common—whether fare evasion, substance abuse, aggressive panhandling, or worse—riders with alternatives begin to feel unsafe or simply frustrated with the deteriorating environment. As these riders leave, the proportion of rule-following passengers drops, making antisocial behaviour more visible and normalized for everyone who remains. With fewer routine users around to provide social pressure for appropriate conduct, incidents of disorder increase in both frequency and severity. This drives away even more riders who have other options, further concentrating bad actors and making the environment still less appealing to anyone with alternatives. The process accelerates until anyone with an alternative is gone, and the system serves those without them, as well as the populations abusing the system—at which point fare revenue and political support are in ruins.

In other words, over the long term, the only result to expect is collapse: first of ridership, then of public support generally.

Understanding the Breakdown

So what explains this collapse? Why did the pandemic's natural experiment produce such dramatic results?

The answer is that fare enforcement serves a practical filtering function. There's a strong correlation between willingness to pay fares and willingness to follow other rules. People who routinely evade fares are more likely to engage in other disorderly behaviours: from minor disruptions like blocking doors or playing loud music, to more serious problems like harassment, vandalism, or violence. By requiring payment and enforcing that requirement, transit systems naturally screen out many people who would otherwise make the environment uncomfortable or unsafe for other riders… and would stop using the system as a consequence.

More than this, enforcement is not only about preventing abuse of the system; it’s also about demonstrating to all what kind of system it is. When enforcement is consistent and visible, it signals that the transit operator has standards and works to maintain them. This attracts and retains riders who value predictable, orderly environments.

Riders with alternatives provide a transit system with a variety of benefits. They provide the support—operationally through fares, financially through political engagement that values transit (and supports subsidies), and evidentially through ridership volume—that makes robust transit systems possible. Transit systems need riders who can choose to use other modes but elect to use transit; if they consistently choose alternatives instead, the system loses the financial and political support necessary to persist.

This explains why the pandemic's changes were so devastating.

It’s an unfortunate truth that fare enforcement does displace vulnerable populations who use transit for shelter or who cannot consistently afford fares. The homeless and the drug-addicted still exist; keeping them off the transit system doesn’t resolve their problems. It only pushes them to streets, libraries, parks, and other places. The problems of addition and homelessness are real, and pressing… but they’re not ones that a transit agency is well-equipped to address. The problem that agencies can address is moving people quickly and reliably, and tolerating fare-beaters deeply undermines that goal, by creating an atmosphere of disorderliness that drives away riders with alternatives.

So if Covid broke the system, how do we fix it?

The evidence points toward vigorous fare enforcement.

A Tale of Three Cities

Keeping fare evasion low is possible. I’ll spare you evidence from Asia, because there are too many cultural confounders for the examples to be persuasive, but Britain is close enough to North America to be relevant. The London Underground maintains roughly 5% evasion through a systematic approach: physical barriers at entry points, regular inspections backed by meaningful penalties, and prosecution of repeat offenders. (Click on that link to see that in domestic media, 5% evasion is regarded as scandalously high.) In 2023, Transport for London prosecuted nearly 20,000 fare evaders. That represented a 56% increase from the previous year, and a return to robust standards post-Covid. The result is one of the world's most successful urban transit systems with high ridership and strong public support.

New York's recent success follows a similar pattern. After years of deteriorating conditions, the MTA implemented a comprehensive response combining enforcement with engineering solutions. The agency hired 500 new fare enforcement personnel, installed physical deterrents that reduced gate-jumping by 60%, and deployed additional police presence throughout the system. By early 2025, systemwide subway fare evasion had dropped 30%, and fare revenue had increased by $322 million.

The notable confounder here is the introduction of Manhattan congestion pricing in January, but these gains largely pre-date that development; some of the MTA’s success in a congestion-pricing world rests on the fact that they laid the groundwork for it in battling fare evasion. When customers see that rules are enforced consistently, they gain confidence in the system; when they witness widespread rule-breaking without consequences, they seek alternatives.

Sound Transit's “gentler” approach (their word) in Seattle offers a useful contrast, though perhaps not the one its advocates intend. The agency’s shift from $124 fines to a five-strike warning system addressed political pressure about equity impacts, but the results reveal the limitations of this kind of approach: even after implementing the Fare Ambassador program, Link light rail compliance reached only around 70%, meaning roughly one in three riders still travels without paying. 30% fare evasion is a massive failure. As of a year ago, Sound Transit’s goal is to bring fare evasion down to 25%... by 2029.

Sound Transit isn't alone in finding fare enforcement politically fraught. Here in Toronto, on the day before this piece was published, the TTC considered a report on anti-fare-evasion measures… one that is confidential and unavailable to the public. That secrecy is, to me, a telling indicator that even straightforward commitments to halting fare evasion are considered too politically sensitive to make openly. The fact that agencies feel compelled to develop enforcement strategies in secret suggests how difficult it has become to have honest conversations about maintaining basic order on transit systems.

What Success Actually Means

Readers of Changing Lanes will be familiar with my analytical framework for understanding contemporary transit: the Endless Emergency. As I've written before, most transit systems exist in a permanent state of crisis. They perpetually fall short of adequate service, are always seeking more subsidy, but any such subsidy increase is captured by management and labour for their own purposes, rather than improving outcomes for riders. The hallmarks of this framework are institutional dysfunction, poor farebox recovery ratios that require constant subsidization, and a chronic inability to improve service.

The efficiency arguments for proof-of-payment (POP) systems seemed to me to be a tool to keep the Endless Emergency at bay. POP provided a bulwark against bad service: faster boarding, reduced infrastructure costs, and streamlined operations. And they do indeed reduce dwell times access to the system. But I have since come to see that technical solutions like these depend on unspoken norms… and we live in an age where norms get broken. The pandemic proved to be a natural experiment that demonstrated how, when riders with alternatives disappear, taking their compliance norms with them, systems that take compliance so much for granted that they design their infrastructure around them suffer.

That doesn’t mean that the infrastructure choices were wrong; but it does mean that enforcement is going to have to ramp up, to levels we haven’t seen before, to get back to the norms we need. Enforcement maintains an environment on the system which makes riders feel comfortable. Absent that environment, we lose riders with alternatives, and absent them, we lose the financial and political base that makes transit politically and financially viable over the long term.

That may sound callous, but it isn’t meant to be. I acknowledge the displacement effects are real and troubling. Effective enforcement doesn’t solve the problems of our cities’ vulnerable populations: the homeless, the mentally ill, and the drug-addicted. Instead, it merely displaces them into other public spaces, or—through collision with law enforcement—into the justice system. Poverty, homelessness, and addiction are serious social problems that deserve solutions. But expecting transit agencies to do it through accommodation is unfair to everyone involved: the victims of these problems, who don’t actually get the help they need; the agencies, who can’t give it; and the riders, caught between them.

The evidence from successful systems points toward a clear model: physical barriers where feasible, consistent inspection regimes, meaningful penalties for violations, and prosecution of repeat offenders. This approach maintains patrons’ social contract with the transit agency, one that makes voluntary compliance the norm.

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Changing Lanes on the Road

Relevant to today’s newsletter: later this year, on 22 September 2025, I will be speaking at the Ontario Transit Funding Forum in Toronto.

At the Forum, co-hosted by Transport Futures and Toronto Metropolitan University's TransForm Lab, I’ll join other expert speakers from government, business, academia, and NGOs to discuss revenue and funding policies that can support efficient transit operations while increasing ridership. I hope to see you there!

You may register here, but note that Transport Futures has generously offered a 10% discount to paying subscribers of Changing Lanes! If that’s you, and you would like to attend, please contact me via Substack for details.