Even San Francisco and the rest of the Bay Area realizes that sometimes wokeness can go too far.
Take, for instance, the region’s subway system — Bay Area Rapid Transit, or BART. BART has long been hemorrhaging ridership, in part because of the perceived safety of the system.
So, the city put in turnstiles that couldn’t be jumped. And — wouldn’t you know it? — maintenance dropped 96 percent. That’s how much fare evaders were causing problems.
In case you need to know what the new gates look like, here’s a handy explainer:
BART officials promised that this would raise $10 million in additional revenue by forcing people to pay and getting more people to ride the system.
Whether or not this is true is a bit nebulous; BART’s financials and estimates of how many fare jumpers actually paid or how many people came back to the system thanks to the program, if they exist, don’t appear to be public.
What is clear is that ridership is slowly but steadily rebounding after a sharp decline beginning with the pandemic, although the system is still in a black hole financially, and $10 million would pretty much be a rounding error in terms of that.
That, however, is more a matter of a certain type of mismanagement endemic to Californian bureaucracy in general. (How’s that high-speed rail project going, Gavin?) The measurable statistics here are how much time had to be spent repairing the new fare gates.
And, wouldn’t you know it? The time dropped dramatically:
And there are other real benefits such as fewer corrective maintenance requests and time spent cleaning and fixing things. pic.twitter.com/MhP1uMyxtK
— BART (@SFBART) February 9, 2026
In other words, simply by making fare gates more difficult to drop, “patron-related corrective maintenance” (translation: vandalism and other stuff of that insalubrious nature) within the paid area of stations dropped by 96 percent. We’re not just talking about the gates, but other damage, too.
You won’t be shocked to note that wokeistas weren’t happy about this.
According to The Oaklandside, in May of 2025, a report from Yale-based nonprofit Center for Policing Equity said that the gates didn’t make any difference in revenue and that “it’s not making riders feel that much safer.”
Its reasons for why riders might not feel safer, however, may be a bit different than yours.
“BART’s focus on fare evasion recovers minimal revenue, may be addressing an overstated problem, and is not effective at curbing incidents that make riders feel uneasy in the system,” the report read.
“Rather than producing clear benefits, fare enforcement operations have detrimental effects on the community, disproportionately impacting Black and Brown riders, as well as individuals who are low-income, people struggling with mental health, and people who are unhoused,” it added.
In other words, sure — you, Mr. or Mrs. Paying Rider, you may feel safer. But what about those “unhoused people” jumping the turnstile so they could smoke some high-grade fent at the platform and nod off on a Green Line for a few hours? Especially if they’re black or brown. Boy, bet you feel like a jerk now.
Or not. Point is, fare enforcement eventually works. When even the Bay Area can figure that out, it shouldn’t be that hard for the rest of America to follow suit.
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