Apples to hand grenades: Why transit fare evasion is an untimely distraction

One neat trick to detract attention from an urgent but complicated crisis is to wave around evidence of a different problem that seems easier to solve with a ready-made culprit. That’s how a new WMATA campaign targeting fare evasion, amidst a slew of recent stories, will sap limited public and political attention away from serious transportation issues in the Washington region and keep us from solving more urgent problems—like WMATA’s budget gap and reckless driving.

We do not have a clear picture of how much fare evasion costs, but we do know both are small compared to WMATA’s budget, and nothing like the $185 million budget gap WMATA needs to fill due to lower ridership during the pandemic and mechanical woes. We also know that tickets racked up by drivers in private vehicles are far more costly from the point of view of both safety and actual revenues. These pressing problems, not fare evasion, are ticking away. If you’re holding an apple in one hand and a grenade in the other, you’d better keep your eye squarely on the grenade.

Good bait, bad data

On the face of it, fare evasion seems like an easy story to tell: People doing it are breaking the law and taking advantage of our already cash-strapped public transit services. But Metro itself acknowledged that the $10 million in the first half of last year (against a $2 billion annual operating budget) it originally ascribed as being lost to fare evasion was inflated because many trips are pre-paid by the District. Today Metro released different estimates of $40 million for next year, but that doesn’t really fit the earlier suggestion that even half that much was inflated. Take the Kids Ride Free program, for which every District student from age 5–21 is eligible. Distribution of SmarTrip cards for Kids Ride Free is poor, estimated at 38% last year by DC Policy Center, compelling many riders who are eligible for these cards to simply bypass the farebox.

Any regular bus rider knows the fare boxes are broken at least some of the time. My own broken-farebox experience rate on the 90 and 92 buses is probably about 20%, a rate echoed by other anecdata; even when the farebox works, drivers wave me by to keep the line moving about half that often. But WMATA hasn’t historically made public hay over its data on how many boxes are broken, or how much money that problem costs. Is WMATA tackling that low-hanging fruit? Does it attract the kind of resources this campaign will dedicate to stopping fare evasion, or is that reserved for problems where individuals can be blamed?

Until WMATA tightens up on equipment, data, and technical problems like these, centering farebox evasion as an issue might assuage the concerns of some commuters who don’t like seeing “scofflaws.” But the fact that fare evasion upsets folks is a function of observation (by Metro’s own account related more to rider complaints than actual data) not of a comparatively meaningful problem, or at least one we have the data to ascertain. And addressing it doesn’t amount to a solution.

Who’s really free riding?

There is a more salient example of not paying the public purse that we know a lot about: drivers who do not pay their traffic tickets! When the District Department of Transportation reported on the Automated Traffic Enforcement (ATE) program in late September, observers quickly noticed that more than a third of the $81 million owed in camera-originated tickets for October 2021 to March 2022 simply goes unpaid.

That’s not just out-of-state drivers; DC drivers owe $4 million of the $28 million total in unpaid tickets for that six-month period. Advocates and councilmembers have been asking for ticket reciprocity agreements with Maryland and Virginia, whose drivers flout DC’s traffic laws with a greater volume of impunity. This data suggests even solving our homegrown enforcement problem of $4 million in six months (likely around $8 million in 12 months) would approach the amount Metro—we think—is owed to it in bus fare evasion.

So, based on twice the six-month amount of $28 million, drivers who haven’t paid their tickets could be costing the District as much as $56 million a year in lost revenue alone. That figure is huge for one single jurisdiction (unlike the region-wide, estimated, and probably overstated, $20 million WMATA reported for fare evasion last year). And it doesn’t touch the tremendous toll that dangerous driving exacts on public life and welfare.

More than 25 people have been killed by drivers in the District this year, and 173 have suffered major injuries, due to the activities that tickets—however poorly—are intended to discourage. The National Safety Council estimates that car crashes cost anywhere from $4,700 (property damage only) up to $1,750,000 (for a fatal crash). If we keep up this rate, the financial costs of fatal crashes alone will top $65,000,000 just in DC.

If it’s stewardship of the public purse at stake, by all means, drivers who haven’t paid tickets they’ve received, rather than fare-evaders, are the obvious bad actors to focus on. In response to the DC Council’s questions about efforts to recoup these payments, the executive branch seems to be increasing capacity for the Department of Public Works to boot and tow the cars of offending drivers, but is evidently fresh out of ideas on the fake and illegal tags that make many tickets unenforceable.

Dollars and sense: we need both

Across the board, drivers cost the public far more than people taking the same trip via transit, walking, or biking. It’s 2022, and past time for leaders to talk publicly about what behaviors constitute free-riding at the cost of others. Road (or congestion) pricing is one way of redressing these imbalanced costs, the revenues of which could apply directly to WMATA. It would take several years to get a road pricing policy in place, assuming we can beat NYC’s multi-decade record: that grenade of WMATA’s budget deficit is still sitting there.

Meanwhile, at Tuesday’s council breakfast, councilmembers and WMATA’s General Manager Randy Clarke discussed the campaign to stop fare evasion, during which Clarke expressed a hope to find “no enforcement and no violators.” That would be nice.

Each of these leaders knows that many of those unpaid trips—remember, we still don’t know how many there are!—are taken by low-income riders who can’t afford to take transit otherwise. (As for unpaid tickets: Drivers are disproportionately wealthier than transit riders, and the council has begun to explore a switch from fines to points so as to not unfairly burden low-income drivers.) Keeping the poorest riders off Metro will do nothing to fill WMATA’s budget deficit. WMATA’s pilot program to allocate free transit to low-income bus riders is a better direction to pursue.

The District’s public coffers aren’t the same as WMATA’s. But, programs like Kids Ride Free and, soon, Metro for DC (plus other sources like our meter revenue) fund the District’s share of WMATA’s capital budget year over year. During the pandemic, federal funding filled the gap in WMATA’s budget left by fare revenue as well as DC’s own gaps. Going forward, no one can rely on that.

To pay its share of WMATA’s capital budget, the District can and should tighten up on collecting what it is owed by dangerous drivers captured by automated traffic enforcement cameras, rather than circling the drain on fare evasion.

Bigger fish to fry

Fare evasion is an unserious, ill-defined issue for a serious time, when we have plenty of well-defined problems to solve. WMATA’s financial difficulties are real, and cannot be solved by cracking down on fare evasion. There are other good ideas on the table. Let’s talk about those.

Clarke is right to note that transit systems carry significant costs, and fare revenue is part of the current funding model. But how much, realistically, does WMATA anticipate recouping with this approach versus simply discouraging rides? Every hour spent by staff working on this campaign is an hour that could be analyzing and socializing longer-term solutions, like road pricing, which will soon fill a similar gap for the MTA in NYC.

Scolds may love a bogeyman to blame; it’s a very human instinct. But the public and our leaders don’t have to take the bait.