Show your ticket

“The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.”
― Ernest Hemingway

Trust sometimes proves unjustified.

Sound Transit's light rail line between the airport and downtown has been running for nearly four years.  Fares are enforced by a modified honor system.  You buy a ticket, or click your prepaid card, before boarding the train.  Occasionally, enforcement officers board the train and check to make sure everyone has paid his fare.  The fine for being on the train without proof of payment is -- as I recall -- $144.

I love the airport line, and use it regularly.  During the first year or so, officers frequently boarded the train.  More recently, not so much.  I suspect that most travelers from the airport itself -- many of them visitors from other cities -- pay their fare.  I'm less sure about local residents who board at intermediate stations.

Sometimes I leave a baseball game at Safeco field and take the light rail to downtown -- just four stops away.  I virtuously click my card getting on board. The machine beeps loudly. I don't hear many other beeps. Hoards of basefall fans ignore the fare. 

The system isn't working. 

I note that Los Angeles has had the same problem.  They switched several months ago from an honor system similar to ours to the turnstile system used by most other subway systems.  As the New York Times wrote, back in May:

“A lot of people — if not the majority of people — are not paying their fare,” said Zev Yaroslavsky, a county supervisor and a member of the board of the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority. “There is no reason for them to pay. The odds of them getting a ticket are slim to none.”

My concern does, I admit, concern me.  It's been less than a month since I blogged my lamentation at how easily and irrationally I became irritated at drivers who didn't display current license tabs.  But it's difficult to finance an expanding rapid transit system, and to persuade voters to subsidize it.  If we want to provide free transit to everyone -- one possible approach -- the system should be sold to voters with that understanding.  Instead, voters have understood that a significant proportion of light rail's costs would derive from passenger fares.

And the problem goes beyond lost revenue to the issue of fairness.  As Mr. Yaroslavsky was quoted as saying, in the Times article:

“It’s not fair to those people who pay to have a significant percentage of people who don’t pay,” he said. “The credibility of the enforcement system is undermined. It’s human nature to say, ‘If he’s getting away with it, why should I pay?’ ”

Reconfiguring stations to include turnstiles and ticket readers will not be cheap.  But cost savings in the long run, both in fares and in renewed public confidence, justify the initial investment.

And the transformation should be undertaken before 2016, when the two new stations of the University extension open for business.

Sound Transit has tried trusting transit riders.  We've learned we can't trust them.