Harger: Sound Transit is bleeding money while Seattle debates fare gates. San Francisco just showed us exactly what they do

Let’s start with a number: 61%.

That’s the share of Link light rail riders who actually pay their fare. San Francisco looked at numbers like that and built fare gates. Seattle is looking at numbers like that and scheduling more meetings.

Roughly four in 10 people riding Sound Transit’s light rail right now are riding for free, on your dime, while Sound Transit stares down a $34.5 billion funding gap and prepares to ask you for more money.

Sound Transit employees I’ve spoken with are skeptical whether that number is even accurate. They think the real share of non-paying riders is higher.

King County Metro fare enforcement: 30 officers, 40,000 hours, eight citations, zero fines

Sound Transit and King County Metro are different agencies. But they share the same political environment. And that environment just showed us what happens when a transit agency tries to get serious about fare enforcement.

In a recent commentary, I told you how King County Metro restarted fare enforcement last spring. Thirty full-time officers. Nearly 40,000 combined work hours between May and December. Eight citations issued. All eight voided. Not one rider fined. Three million dollars spent on a program that produced zero consequences.

Why? Because the King County Council designed a system where enforcement officers aren’t really there to enforce. They’re there to educate. To connect riders to resources. To build, in Metro spokesperson Jeff Switzer’s words, “a culture of riding right.” The Council’s concern, documented in its own report, was that actual citations and real consequences might not be equitable. So nobody got cited. Nobody got fined. The program produced awareness.

That story generated a lot of reaction. Ryle Goodrich posted on X, “The best hiding spot for every bad decision in this county is right behind an equity defense.” Longtime Democratic consultant Sandeep Kaushik pushed back on the broader pattern, saying equity applied bluntly, where any policy that produces different outcomes between groups is automatically disqualified, becomes a destructive idea.

Sound Transit’s Board should understand what it’s walking into. The instinct to soften, to educate instead of enforce, to find an equitable reason not to act: that instinct is alive and well in this region. BART ignored it. Look at what BART got.

Sound Transit fare gate pilot: five stations, $34 million, board decision expected this quarter

Sound Transit is now studying whether to install fare gates at its five busiest stations: Westlake, Capitol Hill, University of Washington, University District, and Northgate. A pilot could cost around $34 million. A board decision on a proposal is expected by Q2 2026.

That number is worth context. Sound Transit promised voters that fares would cover 40% of the agency’s operating costs. The agency has since revised that down to 17%. The actual number today is 12%. Fare gates at five stations won’t close that gap alone. But an agency that can’t collect fares from 4 in 10 riders doesn’t get to ask voters for another dime until it’s tried the obvious thing first.

The pilot payback period, based on recovered revenue, is roughly two years. Meaning the gates pay for themselves. Then they just keep generating money for a system that desperately needs it.

While Seattle studies the idea, San Francisco already ran the experiment.

BART fare gates cut crime 41%, saved nearly 1,000 maintenance hours, generate $10 million a year

BART, the Bay Area Rapid Transit system serving San Francisco and the surrounding region, spent $90 million installing new fare gates at all 50 stations. The new ones are 72-inch polycarbonate units with sensors that detect tailgating. You either pay, or you don’t enter.

The results, reported by The San Francisco Chronicle and confirmed by BART’s own data:

Recovered fare revenue: $10 million a year. That’s actually the smallest number in the return.

Corrective maintenance dropped by 961 hours systemwide in the first six months alone. That’s graffiti, vandalism, heavy soiling: the kind of damage that needs a crew, not a janitor. At several stations, it dropped to zero.

Overall crime fell 41%. The share of riders who reported witnessing fare evasion dropped from 22% to 10%.

BART had tried everything else first. More police. Blitz operations. Increased patrols. None of it moved the numbers. What the gates did that enforcement couldn’t was change the math for everyone who walked in. Pay or don’t enter. That changed the behavior of everyone who followed. The people smoking on the platform, sleeping in the elevator, harassing other riders: most of them weren’t paying either. Fix the front door, and you change the whole station.

Ninety million dollars sounds like a lot. It is a lot. It’s also about one-quarter of one percent of the $34.5 billion hole Sound Transit is already in. For that price, they could make them nice gates. Heated. With a little chime. Maybe a recorded voice that says, “Thank you for paying.” And, according to Sound Transit’s own consultant study, they’d still pay for themselves in about two years.

The street-level engineering challenge is real. It’s not a reason to delay

A significant portion of Link runs at street level, particularly through the Rainier Valley. Street-level stops present real engineering challenges for fare gate installation. Safety, pedestrian flow, emergency egress, multiple entry points. These are not trivial problems.

But the five pilot stations don’t have that problem. They’re underground or elevated. A pilot there is straightforwardly achievable. The street-level question deserves its own careful study in parallel, not as an excuse to delay action where action is already feasible.

ORCA LIFT already solves the equity argument

Someone will say that fare gates disproportionately affect low-income riders. The ORCA LIFT card already reduces fares to $1.00 per ride for income-qualified riders: anyone at or below 200% of the federal poverty level. The first card is free. It works on Link, King County Metro, the Seattle Streetcar, and most regional transit agencies.

The reduced-fare infrastructure is already built. A fare gate doesn’t eliminate access for low-income riders. It eliminates the argument that enforcement is inherently inequitable.

Here’s who pays when fare revenue falls short. Sound Transit cuts service. Trains run less often. Riders who depend on the system most, and who never once skipped their fare, wait longer on the platform for a train that used to come every eight minutes.

Sound Transit has the data. It needs the will

Sound Transit’s fare compliance was above 85% before the pandemic. It’s 61% now. The soft approach has been tried. The ambassadors, the education, the culture-of-riding-right philosophy. It hasn’t worked.

BART spent $90 million and got cleaner stations, less crime, more revenue, and a system that office workers, families, and tourists are willing to use again.

Sound Transit has a $34.5 billion funding gap. It’s heading toward asking voters for more money. Voters don’t approve sales tax increases for transit agencies because they don’t feel safe riding. And they don’t approve them for agencies that can’t demonstrate basic fiscal discipline.

The pilot stations are ready. The BART data is in. Time to stop studying and start building.

Charlie Harger is the host of “Seattle’s Morning News” on KIRO Newsradio. You can read more of his stories and commentaries here. Follow Charlie on X and email him here. 

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