Last November, 72-time arrestee Lawrence Reed poured gasoline on a CTA Blue Line passenger in Chicago and set her on fire. The incident was so egregious that the Federal Transit Administration got involved, threatening to withhold $50 million in federal funds unless the CTA enhanced systemwide security. The CTA implemented its plan in March, but the benefits have been hard to detect so far.
Congress is poised to repeat the FTA’s ineffective intervention. The Surface Transportation Reauthorization—the government’s five-year approval of road and rail funding—features several similar attempts to improve public safety.
Finally, a reason to check your email.
Sign up for our free newsletter today.
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.
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.
These crimes are possible because legacy fare gates fail to prevent people from entering the system if they haven’t paid. That’s because older, full-height fare gates, like the revolving doors in New York, have substantially lower capacity—they can process fewer people per minute, which can cause crowding if a train drops off lots of people at once. Modern designs fix that problem. Cities that have installed new, full-height fare gates have seen crime and disorder plummet. San Francisco’s BART found that systemwide crime fell 41 percent after new gates were installed. Even more impressively, across the ten stations with the most corrective maintenance needs, staff time spent on in-system maintenance fell 96 percent, which suggests that fare evaders also cause most unreported crime, like littering, vandalism, and graffiti.
Other systems report similar findings. Washington, D.C.’s WMATA found that, following its own modernized fare-gate installation, fare evasion fell by 82 percent and crime by nearly 40 percent. L.A. Metro reports that a pilot program for modernized fare gates reduced passenger reports of security concerns, uncleanliness, and vandalism and graffiti by 69 percent at affected stations.
While new fare gates are a proven anti-crime policy, the House’s version of the Surface Transportation Reauthorization package doesn’t include them. The bill requires jurisdictions to have criminal or civil enforcement mechanisms for fare evasion but doesn’t specify how those requirements must be enforced.
And while the bill adds a tiny amount of anti-crime funding, the provisions are generally nonspecific. Transit systems are partially funded by federal block grants, and the previous iteration of the surface transportation bill, from 2021, mandated that transit agencies spend 0.75 percent of that on rider safety. The current bill strengthens the share to 1 percent and makes mandatory a previously optional recommendation to spend another 1 percent of block-grant funds on crime prevention or security. In Chicago, which receives a total of $444 million in federal funding, the combined 2 percent operating requirement amounts to only around $9 million. That’s far less than the cost of a fare-gate replacement program and much less than the CTA’s actual security expenses.
It’s entirely possible to spend money on other security measures without getting results. In April, Chicago cancelled a $44 million contract with a private security contractor after widespread criticism that the arrangement failed to make the CTA safer. In 2024, L.A. Metro also canceled contracts with local police departments worth $194 million, and brought policing in-house, after local police failed to keep criminals off transit. Both contracts would have been eligible for, and vastly exceeded, Congress’s new 2 percent combined safety and security requirement.
Congress can effectively reduce crime and disorder on American mass transit systems by creating a dedicated program for fare-gate replacement. But as the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act showed, a funded program doesn’t guarantee results. To minimize procedural delay and uncertainty, Congress should specify exactly which types of systems and gates are eligible for funding. It should also set deadlines, both for opening applications after the law passes and for maximum time from application to funding award or rejection. To speed things up even further, Congress could pay for the entire cost of the program to avoid further political fights at the local level: at BART’s $1.8 million per-station cost, replacing gates at all 753 remaining heavy-rail rapid-transit stations in the U.S. without funded replacement programs would cost only $1.4 billion out of the $580 billion apportioned by the bill.
Criminal and disorderly conduct is one of Americans’ biggest complaints about mass transit systems. The issue is solvable—but Congress should expedite the solution before we needlessly lose more lives to the criminals plaguing America’s public transit.