Laissez fare

Free riders are about as endemic to BART as broken escalators. The transit system figures about 22,000 people a day, or 4 to 5 percent of passengers, skip the fare. That deprives the perpetually strapped agency of up to $25 million a year, contributes to a sense of general disorder and alienates honest commuters.

BART officials this week announced a $3 million plan to crack down on fare beaters by fortifying physical barriers and increasing spot checks for proof of payment. It’s an appropriate investment that seems likely to turn a profit.

Though public transit should find ways to accommodate those who can’t afford fares, general non-enforcement is not the answer. To its credit, BART tried to plug some of its worst leaks by battening down misused emergency gates in December, when a Chronicle reporter watched “more than a dozen people ... sneaking out of one end of Embarcadero Station in less than half an hour.” San Francisco’s fire marshal intervened after hearing complaints from passengers (all of them no doubt concerned about public safety, not free rides).

New York City famously cracked down on turnstile jumpers with fines and arrests starting in the 1990s, discouraging all kinds of subway crime and reducing the fare-evasion rate to near 1 percent — albeit, more recently, provoking a backlash against heavy-handed enforcement. On the other end of the spectrum, San Francisco’s Muni and some European systems have downplayed physical barriers and upfront enforcement, which can slow travel and become obtrusive, in favor of random checks of passengers’ tickets and passes, which can be equally or more successful in discouraging evasion.

BART’s trouble is that it hasn’t pursued either enforcement philosophy with much vigor, yielding predictable results. Here’s hoping its long-running experiment with optional fares is coming to an end.