City leaders don’t actually have to surrender to disorder and allow the theft of public services.
When confronted with mass fare evasion on public transit, many city leaders throw up their hands. Some argue that fare evasion shouldn’t be a crime, that enforcing laws against fare evasion is racist, and that transit should be free to use anyway.
The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, under general manager and CEO Randy Clarke, took a different approach. In office since 2022, Clarke has made cracking down on fare evasion a priority for the D.C. Metrorail system, and he has gotten results.
“We believe that since two summers ago, we’ve reduced fare evasion on the rail side generally somewhere between 82–85% on the system,” Clarke told Santi Ruiz in an interview for the Statecraft newsletter.
That’s a remarkable achievement in a city that did, in fact, decriminalize fare evasion in 2018. As a somewhat frequent user of the system myself, fare evasion had become so common that I felt like somewhat of a sucker for paying. Now, I rarely ever see people hopping the fare gates.
Clarke put his foot down in 2023 and did something about it. “We need to gain control of the system back, and we’ve got to bring a sense of orderliness,” he told radio station WTOP. “And we’ve got to get that revenue as well.”
A big reason for the success against fare evasion was that WMATA installed better fare gates. The previous ones were basically asking to be jumped over. They were barely waist-high, and anyone with a reasonable amount of fitness could clear them no problem. The new ones are taller and would require significant effort to clear. Simply making it more physically difficult likely deterred a lot of potential evaders.
That’s a pretty cheap fix to a basic problem of public order. Clarke paired that with greater police presence in the system — which, again, as a rider, I can confirm is noticeably different from a few years ago. He also supported getting the law changed around fare evasion, not to recriminalize it but to allow police to ask fare evaders for identification (it still carries a civil penalty of $50 in the district). That allows police to run background checks on evaders and possibly detain them for crimes they have committed.
“Not everyone who fare evades commits crimes, but almost universally, everyone who commits serious crimes fare evades,” Clarke told Statecraft. So identifying fare evaders, even if fare evasion itself is not criminalized, contributes to greater public safety not only within the Metro system but in the city as a whole.
And it has worked. “Right now, we have a seven-year low in crime on the system, and we’re on pace for the lowest crime year in the history of Metro,” Clarke said.
When you prove you can do little things well, you can build up to bigger things. Clarke has the courage — and it does take courage, public sector unions being what they are — to call for complete automation of the Metrorail system. It was actually designed to be fully automated when it was built decades ago, but progress had stalled.
Clarke said that automated operation would allow Metro to run more trains and “solve all of the capacity needs going through the system.” He understands that the purpose of a public transit system is to provide transportation services, not to be a jobs program or a social justice program. Ridership has been consistently increasing since Covid, and at a higher rate than systems in other cities. This likely has to do in part with a greater perception of public order and genuinely better service.
City leaders don’t actually have to surrender to disorder and allow the theft of public services. It’s better for the public when people pay for what they use.