Sound Transit’s ‘Sophie’s Choice’: Bleed to death or start requiring fares from riders

Cutting service. Bailing on Ballard, West Seattle, Everett, or Tacoma. Eliminating stations. Everything is on the table as Sound Transit looks to fill a $34 billion budget hole. Maybe Sound Transit should rein in its customers and require fare payments.

Light rail riders used to pay nearly every time. Fare compliance was north of 90% for the 2010s. That’s when service started between Seattle and Tukwila, before expanding to the airport, Angle Lake, and the University of Washington (UW).

But during the pandemic, fare compliance cratered. According to the latest numbers from Sound Transit, coming from 2024, about 61% of riders actually pay when they get on board today. That is up from 55% just a few years ago. One dynamic contributing to that low number is that now anyone under the age of 19 is free.

Of course, Sound Transit checked for fares when the service started, but it hasn’t checked for fares in any meaningful way since the “defund the police” movement forced the agency to kick fare enforcement officers off the trains.

The fare ambassadors who replaced them don’t really instill fear in riders. They certainly aren’t checking when thousands of riders pour out of the stadiums after games.

Why is a lack of fare enforcement important?

When your agency is bleeding money and facing a $34 billion budget hole, maybe having paying customers would help. Sound Transit promised voters it would get 40% of its overall funding from fares. The agency has since lowered its expectations to 17% of funding. Today, the real number is 12%. Maybe it’s time to start collecting that money.

And to Sound Transit’s credit, it is considering a pilot project that would install fare gates, or turnstiles as the rest of the world calls them, at several stations to make sure riders are paying.

“What I care about the most is encouraging people to pay the fares and making sure that they do,” Sound Transit Board member Claudia Balducci told me at the opening of the 2-Line last month.

She and several other board members believe that adding fare gates could make a difference.

“There may be some locations where turnstiles are the answer,” Balducci said. “I don’t think we need to do it at every single one of these stations, and what I want to do is be data-based about it.”

The pilot project, if adopted, would study fare gates at five of the busiest stations.

“I am most interested in doing what will get people to pay the fares, and I don’t know that we need to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in retrofitting all our stations to make that happen,” Balducci said.

The million-dollar question is, why did so many riders suddenly stop paying? A lot of people believe it’s due to a lack of enforcement. No matter the reason, Balducci wants to see fare compliance return to its old levels.

“It is a huge part of our funding, and there is definitely something to the fares,” she said. “It’s the way we all contribute to the system that we all benefit from, and it makes people care more for that system because they’re contributing to it.”

Fare compliance has increased over the last few years, but it’s nowhere near where it needs to be.

I remember asking Sound Transit 15 years ago why fare gates were not installed on the front end. I was told that “Seattle is not a turnstile city, that’s not who we are.”

Not sure what that meant then. Still don’t know today.

One of the main reasons turnstiles were not installed is that Sound Transit chose to put a lot of the tracks at grade, or at street level. Imagine turnstiles at the stops along MLK. People would just walk around them, using the road or the tracks themselves. Not exactly safe, and a good reason not to install gates at every station.

But Sound Transit has to make a choice. Force its customers to actually pay for its service or keep bleeding red ink.

Chris Sullivan is a traffic reporter for KIRO Newsradio. Read more of his stories here. Follow KIRO Newsradio traffic on X.

Follow @https://twitter.com/newsguysully