NEW YORK (1010 WINS/WCBS 880) -- The MTA aims to completely redesign subway turnstiles and exit gates to stop farebeaters, as the agency is on track to lose $500 million this year alone in revenue to the scofflaws.
The idea is part of a sweeping crackdown on fare evasion that MTA Chairman and CEO Janno Lieber said is being attacked "from all fronts" and just getting started, with farebeating arrests up nearly 100% over last year.
“We’re going to rely on the cops, we’re going to bring in gate guards, we’re going to redesign the system, we’re going to work with the district attorneys to have a more consistent pattern of enforcement—we’re on it,” Lieber told 1010 WINS Newsline With Brigitte Quinn on Tuesday.
Lieber put together a blue-ribbon panel earlier this year to study solutions to fare evasion. While the panel has yet to release its findings, Lieber said subway exit gates have become a “superhighway” for fare-dodgers and something has to be done.
“We are going to be redesigning this to make it much less easy to fare evade, especially that gate,” Lieber said. “When a hardworking person swipes their MetroCard or taps their OMNY and they see 10 people go by them through the gate, it makes you feel like a sucker, and I don’t want that to be the vibe in the subway system.”
He said the MTA expects to hear from the expert panel in the next month or so. “In the meantime, we’re hard at work figuring out how do we redesign the fare array, because it’s just too porous and it’s letting a lot of people in, and we have to have a different physical barrier to stop people from doing this.”
“We’ve all seen it and it is demoralizing,” Lieber said of farebeating. “It is destructive to the sense of fairness and fair play that animates New York, because we all share this space, and we all need the MTA to operate and be funded. And it’s also contributing to the sense of disorder in the system.”
“And the turnstiles—frankly, it seems like we’re trying to cultivate a generation of world class gymnasts, because you just put your hands on the side and you vault over them,” Lieber continued. “We’ve got to deal with that, whether it’s raising the height or changing the design so it’s not so easy for people to literally just vault and kick their legs over. We’ve seen people even in business suits. And I don’t want any more latte-carrying office workers to go do the limbo under the turnstile either.”
“Once that gate is open, it’s like Black Friday at Macy’s,” Robert Diehl, the MTA’s senior vice president of safety and security, told board members at a meeting last week.
Any redesign of the subway turnstiles and exit gates would likely require significant financial investment, even as the MTA faces a $3 billion budget hole in 2025, with weekday subway ridership still hovering at 60% of pre-pandemic levels.
San Francisco’s Bay Area Rapid Transit, which operates a system much smaller than the MTA, has budgeted $90 million to replace fare gates systemwide.
The MTA has recently stationed private security guards, some of them armed, in at least 14 stations across the subway system.
Unarmed guards at 12 stations make sure the exit gates stay closed, unless they’re being used for emergencies or by fare-paying riders who have items like strollers, luggage or wheelchairs.
Armed guards at two Brooklyn stations—the Myrtle–Wyckoff Avenues station and Halsey Street station—stand by the MetroCard vending machines to also act as a deterrence to criminals.
At last week’s board meeting, the MTA said the armed guards will save the agency about $100,000 a month in additional fare revenue at the two Brooklyn stations.
“What we’re really trying to stop is that opportunist,” Diehl told board members last week. “It’s that person that once the gates open, sees three people go through and says, ‘Hey, why not me?’ And then you’ve got eight people behind that person coming through.”
Diehl said he’s seen would-be farebeaters give up and swipe their MetroCards as the guards watched the exit gates at the Roosevelt Avenue/74th Street station in Jackson Heights and the West Fourth Street–Washington Square station in Greenwich Village.
“People come up, they queue up, they’re waiting, they’re waiting, and the gate doesn’t open,” Diehl said. “And all of the sudden, they pull out MetroCards and they go through the turnstile.”
It's not only the guards that are cracking down on fare evasion. The NYPD's fare-evasion arrests are up 97% this year compared to 2021, according to the department.
The city has begun treating fare evasion with new urgency, as the crime has grown even more rampant during the COVID-19 pandemic and is expected to cost the MTA some $500 million in revenue in 2022 alone.
The MTA is also looking to tackle farebeating on buses, which is far worse than in the subway. According to the MTA, 29.3% of bus riders skipped the fare between July and September, compared to 13.4% of subway riders in that period.
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