Fare Evasion

Erica Barnett notes the release of a Metro report on fare evasion, which apparently costs the system $62,000 per week. The whole report is pretty interesting, but I’ll sum up some of the main findings:

• The number of evasions in the sample includes 53,000 non-payments and 35,000 underpayments
• Metro’s fare evasion rate is 4.8% of boardings, which compares with Toronto (0.7 percent), Vancouver, BC (2.5 percent), San Francisco (3.3 percent), Los Angeles (5 percent), and Portland, (8.2 percent), though one assumes different methodologies may have been used to calculate the rate in all those cities.
• The routes with the most evaders are the busiest routes (7, 15, 358, 3/4, 1, 36), though they’re all about average in terms of the evasion rate.
• Leaving through the back door does not seem to be a significant method of fare evasion, which surprised me. I would have assumed otherwise.
• The three strategies recommended by drivers for reducing evasion are: eliminating the Ride Free Area, providing more transit police, and eliminate fare confusion. You have to wonder how much of this is related to fare evasion and how much of it is transit operators’ general grievances. If I were a transit operator, I’d want all of those things done regardless of fare evasion.

Overall, we’re talking about only 2.5% of Metro’s farebox revenue, the report estimates. Still, $62K per week translates to $3.2M per year, which would go a long way towards, say, paying for new electric trolleybuses.