Stout provided consulting services to the Center for Policing Equity (CPE) in its effort to assess the potential financial impacts related to Bay Area Rapid Transit’s (BART) current fare evasion enforcement operations.

Fare evasion (using public transportation without paying the required fare) is often characterized as lost revenue for transit agencies. However, for a portion of transit riders, fare evasion is the result of financial hardship experienced by low-income residents who do not have the means to pay for public transportation. In response to fare evasion, BART invested in additional fare enforcement mechanisms, such as hiring police / fare enforcement officers and installing station-hardening gates.

Our work consisted of analyzing fare evasion citation and ridership data from BART to estimate lost revenue from evaded fares, conducting in-depth research on fare evasion and the responses from transit agencies across the country, reviewing BART Police Department budgets to estimate the direct costs of current fare evasion enforcement operations, quantifying potential fiscal impacts of fare evasion citations in Bay Area communities and local governments, and evaluating the potential financial impacts of alternate fare evasion enforcement strategies for the BART PD budget and the potential fiscal impacts to local governments and Bay Area Communities.

Read CPE's report and recommendations.