Change is underway again at BART’s fare gates — and you may have already heard one of the updates while tapping on during your morning commute this week.
Back in 2024, the transit agency spent a cool $90 million on a massive overhaul of all 700 gates in its system, incorporating a 7-foot-tall polycarbonate barrier to each replacement to help curb fare evasion. So far, the strategy is working, spokesperson Alicia Trost told SFGATE on Monday. Not only are the gates bringing in $10 million a year in revenue that would have been lost to fare evasion, a figure she described as “conservative” as the agency works to claw back its pre-pandemic ridership numbers, but they have also encouraged more riders who may not have been paying before to apply for Clipper Card discounts.
Notably, Trost added, the rollout of the new gates has significantly reduced the rate at which BART service crews have had to clean up vandalism and what the agency internally refers to as “very large messes” — that is, “not your average spilled soda on the platform,” or a cleanup that generally requires staff to pull in larger bins and different types of cleaning products. The data, Trost said, was “shocking.”…