Dominique Davenport was waiting for a ride after getting off the MetroLink light rail in East St. Louis, Ill., when he heard an argument followed by gunshots on the station’s platform.
A teenager had been killed, the latest act of violence for a transit system with a reputation for crime and where anyone could board without even showing a ticket.
“You could just be getting off work and somebody gets an attitude,” Davenport said. “Big drug addicts, drug dealers, you’ve got so many different personalities, so many different types of people who go through things. And everybody catches the train.”
As transportation hubs try to win back riders who haven’t returned since the pandemic — 26% down as of September 2023 — one obstacle is the sometimes inaccurate perception that transit crime is rising. Many systems are bulking up enforcement and targeting their efforts on people who try to ride without paying, the Associated Press reports.
MetroLink has begun adding 8-foot gates to ensure customers can’t enter the platform without a fare card. That’s a major change from the honor system the light rail had used since its inception in 1993, with fares only enforced through onboard spot checks and the threat of fines for repeat violators.
Transit systems in other metropolitan areas such as New York, Chicago, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia and San Francisco, required upfront payments, but lately they have been fortifying the entrance gates to curb the temptation for riders to simply hurdle a turnstile.
Does cracking down on ticketless riders help eliminate violence? Janno Lieber, CEO of New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority, said, “not every fare evader is a criminal” but virtually all criminals “evaded the fare.”
The new gates being installed at the St. Louis-area MetroLink stations are commonly known elsewhere as “fare gates.” Kevin Scott of Bi-State Development, the agency overseeing transit, calls them “security gates,” stressing that the $52 million purchase, which also includes 1,200 regularly monitored cameras, is less about catching fare-skippers than improving safety.
“We’ve seen it time and again where something plays out on the street, then everybody runs for the MetroLink platform and that’s where the shooting happens or that’s where the stabbing happens,” Scott said. “We’re really trying to impact the overall perception that the system is unsafe. We could have taken five or six steps forward with security, but if we have an incident play out, now we’re three or four steps back.”
Assaults and homicides on public transit roughly doubled between 2011 and 2023, according to the Federal Transit Administration.
There are few national data about the link between crime and fare evasion. Oeople who didn’t pay a fare accounted for nearly 94% of those arrested for violent crimes on the Los Angeles Metro from May 2023 through April 2024.