Washington’s beleaguered public transit agency, WMATA, has curtailed service and hiked fares significantly in recent years. (Oh, and it has also killed somebody.) It has recently declared that it needs another $30 million cash infusion from the jurisdictions that subsidize it to stay afloat.
Yet the D.C. City Council is looking to hobble the transit authority even further in what an ACLU apparatchik calls an exercise in “raised consciousness”: The council is debating a move to decriminalize fare evasion.
It’s as crazy as it sounds.
Currently, the maximum fine for turnstile jumping is $300, and includes the possibility of jail time. The D.C. government is considering lowering that (theoretical) max to $100 and eliminating the possibility of jail for people who skip out on paying for the train.
San Francisco and Portland have already taken similar measures. But Washington’s bill is being debated even as WMATA says that the system loses about $25 million a year thanks to fare scofflaws. The agency opposes the current bill because it fears that decriminalizing fare evasion will encourage more free riding.
So why would the city even consider the idea? The argument for decriminalizing fare evasion comes down to worries about disparate impact. The lion’s share of fare evasion arrests are concentrated in specific age and racial categories. And not just in Washington. In Brooklyn, for example, “half of all fare-evasion arrests in Brooklyn involve black men between the ages of 16 and 36, but they represent only 13.1 percent of poor adults.” So even if the law about having to pay to ride public transportation is not, in itself racist, the effects of it are.
Naturally, the idea of decriminalization has split transit activists.
Chris Barnes, who runs the FixWMATA group, opposes the bill, telling me that “the D.C. Council is wasting time on an issue that isn’t an issue. If you can’t afford to pay full fare on WMATA there are programs out there to assist you.” Barnes further notes that the arrests that do occur “aren’t [really] because of fare evasion. The arrests are because someone with a warrant evaded paying fare and was arrested. Alternatively there are some who were stopped and cited for fare evasion who did something stupid like argued with the officer or threw the citation on the ground (littering) which resulted in arrests.” The data seem to bear out this view: According to the Washington Post, only 8 percent of fare citations actually result in arrest.
But David Alpert, a prominent transit activist in D.C. who runs the Greater Greater Washington website, has a different take. He tells me he “think[s] that decriminalization [could] actually could make it easier to enforce paying the fare.” Citing the work of NYU criminologist Mark Kleiman, who has shown that “the key to changing behavior is frequency, not severity,” Alpert argues that, “people who don’t get caught think they’ll keep not getting caught and don’t make an economic calculation about the percentage chance of suffering a really big punishment. For fare evasion, if Metro’s goal is to curb fare evasion it would do better by catching more fare evaders but penalizing them less, than catching very few and sending them to jail.”
The research from Kleiman’s is convincing, but Alpert is positing a false choice: There’s no reason that fare enforcement can’t be stepped up while simultaneously keeping penalties reasonably high.
Fundamentally, fare evasion is a form of theft, and not at all a victimless crime. Turnstile jumpers penalize those who do pay—particularly those of modest means, who have no alternative to public transit—because it results in higher overall fares and reduced service. It’s also an attack on the public sphere. The glory of public transportation is that it serves everybody, for the same price: It’s a truly democratic institution.
Encouraging some groups to ride for free is yet another way that the American social contract is breaking down.
