I’ve been riding the subway regularly for almost 40 years, first in New York, where I grew up, and these days in Washington, D.C. When I started doing so, in the 1980s, fare evasion was common.

I saw many people jump turnstiles, and I’ll confess that I cheated once myself: As teenagers, a friend and I squeezed through the gate together at Shea Stadium to save $1. It seemed like a normal New York thing to do.

Until it didn’t.

As part of the city’s crackdown on crime in the 1990s, the subway system became a cleaner and safer place. I saw very few people jump turnstiles in New York in the early 2000s. The same was true in Washington.

It is not true anymore. For the past few years, fare beating has again become a regular part of public transit. I’ve watched people do it just a few feet away from powerless transit workers looking directly at them.

My colleague Ana Ley, who covers mass transit, wrote a story this week focused on buses that quantified the problem in New York City with a jarring statistic: On nearly half of all bus rides in the city, people now skip paying the fare. As a result, about one million riders ignore the bus system’s most basic rule every weekday.