Many judge transit rider behavior, some opine on transit management, but few explicitly bring in state politics like Henry Grabar’s San Francisco Solved Metro Vandalism With One Neat Trick in The Atlantic. It is something of a steelman for those supporting fare gates, and as such serves as an edifying example. To get it out of the way, the article is correct that
Transit riders should avoid playing phone audio without headphones, smoking, or more serious deviations from proper behavioral standards.
Transit agencies in the US should collect fares given lack of funding.
Transit agencies should enforce behavioral standards, and not having fare gates will compromise their ability to do so because they lack of funds (2) to hire adequate staff to address behavior directly.
I am writing to try to provide a framework for understanding further elements, such as
Why did the state leave transit dependent on pro-cyclical funding from user fees unlike other public services, such that it couldn’t cover expenses when ridership fell (and might have to close stations even with new state money)?
Given a public agency’s insufficient user fees to cover expenses, why is it that CA’s FAIR insurance for relatively wealthy homeowners living in high fire risk areas gets to impose charges on others to avoid insolvency, but transit agencies serving relatively poor riders aren’t allowed to, e.g., levy charges on drivers in their footprint?
Why did the California state legislature make enforcement a condition of funding for transit? (“The state legislature required the agency to tackle fare beating as a condition of receiving pandemic aid”)
Why does the state not require enforcement of traffic rules by the DOT in exchange for road funding? Drivers kill many more people. Even without any new tolls, automated fines for speeding or running red lights could generate plenty of revenue to help cover costs.
Why does the state perpetuate car dependency generally?
Why does the state tolerate housing scarcity, such that many people lack shelter and might spend time in a transit station for lack of alternatives?
Why does the state not provide more mental healthcare?
Why did this article praising transit fare gates go out of its way to acknowledge controversy about benches and settle on support for excluding people from public space through hostile architecture?
To what extent is this use of transit fare enforcement to selectively limit mobility for the poor similar to the intentional use of roadways for segregation?
Why does the state of California, which is full of billionaires, not do more to reduce wealth inequality specifically?
Why did a prestigious national publication that is at most just left of center enough to be polite, and owned by a billionaire who lives in the metro area in this story, publish an article emphasizing only 1-3?
On a broader level of government policy, beyond transit management, I can't see a principled difference between this piece and advocating for hostile architecture such as getting rid of benches. See The Disappearance of the Public Bench at Places Journal for a great discussion of benches specifically. Grabar acknowledges this toward the end, only to shrug off one solution with
Not every park can be his beloved plaza in front of the Seagram Building; public toilets and subway stations are often empty and in any case would not benefit from being better places to hang out.
This seems categorically inadequate. I suspect many urbanists on Bluesky read and agreed with both pieces without reflecting on the tension. Subway stations should not be places to hang out exactly, but transit could appeal to a much broader ranger of riders if there were not so many subsidies for driving. Subway stations in particular could be much more lively with transit oriented development to concentrate people in the vicinity. To some extent the California state government is encouraging cities to allow more density, which is great. But city governments are legal creations of the sovereign state government and it is past time to no longer ask for their cooperation.
There is not a perfect alignment between the two goals of minimizing misbehavior on transit and maximizing mobility or well being for residents of a city. The billionaire owned Atlantic published a piece all but admitting the obsession with fare enforcement, from the state legislature on down, is on same wavelength as getting rid of public benches. I.e., keeping poor people in their place even if that entails leaving CA. Then many transit experts with email jobs, many of whom are not actively performing childcare or at least not taking kids on transit, are clapping along instead of asking why it's only transit where the CA state legislature is demanding more enforcement in exchange for still-meager funding. Thereby treating poor transit users who have no alternative as the opposition, but not richer drivers who have a choice and avoid transit or politicians who enforce car dependency. To be blunt, the same sort of people who do not see any upside from Mamdani trying to get outside money to return hundreds of millions of dollars a year to NYC’s transit riders if the transit system does not get to build something. The sort of people who, whether they personally own a car or not, think of owning a car as normal and massively expensive but fares as cheap. Even though fares are often more expensive than the marginal cost of driving in many US cities, especially for families. All of this in the context of poverty in America being concentrated among families with young children, rising homelessness among SF public school students, and that pushing unsheltered people onto sidewalks in some neighborhoods does not prevent kids using transit from seeing them if that’s their neighborhood. This is as clear albeit not as harmful of an example of a profession failing to have a deeper set of ethics, in my opinion, as transportation engineers designing deadly stroads and intersections without ever telling their clients or the public how many people their work will kill people.
Professional ethics are important. In particular I agree with Gareth Dennis’ How the Railways Will Fix the Future that rail should be more prominent and that it should be managed responsibly and inclusively. Technology, including the old technology of steel wheels on rail, will not save us without professionals who understand and care how it interacts with people and enables better lives. The point of a metro is not to move trains, it's to help people live well in a city.
Driving in cities is inherently inequitable. But even transit can be co-opted by conservatives to exclude poor people from the public realm and limit their mobility. Car dependency kills a lot of people, but nobody intends that directly. However, policy makers have historically intentionally used roads to segregate neighborhoods and to separate poor people who can't drive from rich people who can. Using hostile design on transit to reduce mobility for poor people is in line with that. For the government, it is at best a way to cover up and avoid dealing with broader issues.
The CA state legislature to a large extent decides to maintain and fund car dependency, without imposing similar enforcement requirements on the DOT. They also oversee economic inequality. It’s possible they are wrong about all that but right about fare gates and not merely extending the same ideology of pushing poor people out of public life. Which, paired with housing scarcity, also pushes poor people out of private space and out of the state. But people who believe all those other things are bad, and also that fare gates are good policy for the state legislature to mandate, should have an explanation.
Relevant commentary often implies a fantasy that if US transit agencies make transit uncomfortable enough for poor people then rich people will flock to it. Not going to happen. Governments have to change infrastructure, land use, and cut massive subsidies for driving to discourage driving and get rich people to mode shift. Observing that most passengers in transit stations are poor and blaming the poor for rich people not riding is a misunderstanding of causation vs correlation.
Grabar at least acknowledges that fare gates can be physically hostile to people, but is careful to note that the current BART gate “does not seem intended to physically harm people” unlike the last one. What a low bar to celebrate! Full disclosure, I have not used the new gates. But I have gone through gates in multiple cities while shepherding small children. It’s a pain to stay together and avoid them getting bumped, or to find a larger gate designed to accommodate caregivers. I’m sure other people have difficulty, whether due to baggage while traveling, shopping bags or items they are taking on their errands, or limited mobility. But in the easiest cases, every adult fare paying passenger without disabilities is still navigating a physical barrier that interrupts their passage, however briefly. Contrast that hostility to traffic enforcement. The piece compares fare gates to speed cameras.
In San Francisco, speed cameras have almost entirely supplanted the old traffic-enforcement fines meted out by the San Francisco Police Department. More importantly, they have a powerful deterrent effect: Speeding on streets with cameras has dropped by 72 percent.
Speed cameras are good and we should have more. But a tiny % of speeders in CA are subject to cameras versus every transit rider going through fare gates. Plus speed cameras only track cars electronically, without the physical hostility of a gate blocking human bodies. Imagine how much worse roads would be for drivers, albeit better for everyone else, if traffic enforcement were performed by retractable bollards.
The Throne Labs example of toilets that are “free but require a phone number or an electronic tap card to access them” shows that payment isn't necessary, at least for toilets, if you have moderate surveillance. Transit has tons of video surveillance even without tracking passengers tapping in at fare gates, they could identify problematic riders that way. Roads, of course, need more surveillance to stop drivers from injuring and killing so many people. Despite how much more dangerous crime by disproportionately upper class drivers is, there is not widespread professional demand for surveilling and excluding bad drivers from the roads from either people who work on transit or on roads.
The resort to using hostile design is grounded on a false dichotomy between physical enforcement versus cops and continuing to ignore why transit agencies do not have adequate funding for better services.
Maybe better design can shift some norms back. Otherwise, if some kind of friction is necessary to keep public space functioning, then the alternative to the cut-and-dried logic of the gate, the lock, the camera, or the case, is the human—which, in most places, means the police. But rarely are police officers a cost-effective, or even policy-effective, solution to controlling subway systems and other shared spaces. “Transit agencies are up against the mathematical impossibility of solving this problem with personnel,” Jarrett Walker, a transit planner in Portland, Oregon, told me. “Most people don’t understand how expensive security labor is, and it is the nature of transit to be open to the world in so many places.”
What makes this even worse is that fare enforcement does not substitute for enforcing behavior on paying riders. To provide better service transit agencies do need to pay staff to tell riders to stop playing audio without headphones, etc. Fare enforcement is insufficient. It is neither necessary nor optimal to have police officers with a badge and a gun do that role. The only reason it “means the police” is that law enforcement is the only form of labor American government is still happy to fund.
That’s relevant to the juxtaposition of arguments based on either having too much money or not enough. The concluding paragraph says that in America “high wages make deploying an army of bathroom attendants or station agents difficult”. Everyone is getting such high wages, yet overall the whole story is about how effective a $1.75 fare is at discouraging people who are likely to engage in some anti-social behaviors. I’d suggest that what the story doesn’t want to say, that the Atlantic as an institution doesn’t want to say, is that labor is not over-priced. Rather we have a government that works to direct too much wealth upward (with San Fransisco’s billionaires being some of the largest beneficiaries) and refuses to direct wealth toward hiring lower income people to do work our society needs. Like maintaining transit. But also childcare etc.
Here is an alternative framing of the facts in this story. BART was dependent on pro-cyclical financing from fares, which is terrible and unlike other services including roads. COVID hit and reduced ridership, thereby cutting funding. In exchange for state funding, the legislature required BART to increase enforcement and raise more revenue from users, again unlike roads. Despite this, some train stations might still close due to lack of funds (“a sales tax to fund public transit is on the ballot. If the vote fails, the agency says it will have to close some subway stations entirely”). This is not austerity, although the state is under-taxing most homes and other wealth, because it is still spending plenty on roads. It is the state perpetuating car dependency while under-funding transit, and selectively requiring user fees and enforcement against transit riders but not drivers who are much more likely to kill and injure people. The state is fine with BART spending money on fare gates from corporations, but unwilling to spend money on salaries for unarmed transit personnel to control behavioral norms. The Atlantic is a prestigious outlet owned by a billionaire who lives in the San Fransisco Bay Area and personally benefits from inadequate taxation by the state of California. This is an article published by The Atlantic praising this method of reducing bad behavior, but also supporting eg removal of benches, which all has the effect of keeping poor people out of public spaces. Private places already exclude people. It is public space where rich San Franciscans might see, or even worse for them interact with, people who make them feel uncomfortable. For all the praise of “friction” that Grabar claims society needs (three references in the story), I would suggest that it is the rich who need more friction in their lives not transit riders needing fare gates. The rich need friction both in terms of higher taxes and more direct observation of inequality. Furthermore it is good actually for their friction to go up with inequality and poverty that the rich don’t experience directly in their private lives.
Repetitions of Woke 2.0 and enforcing good behavior on transit eventually ring hollow when the messages always align with the type of enforcement that capital, through media and politics, wants. Meanwhile the government keeps ignoring other methods of improving conditions on transit, maintains car dependency, and disproportionately marginalized people keep dying on American roads.