Even in San Francisco and the broader Bay Area, there are moments when the excesses of progressive wokeness collide with reality and public safety.
The regions Bay Area Rapid Transit system, or BART, has been bleeding riders for years, in no small part because of widespread concerns about crime, disorder and the basic safety of using public transit. According to Western Journal, officials finally tried something both simple and unfashionable in left-wing circles: enforcing the rules by installing fare gates that could not easily be jumped.
The results were immediate and striking. Once the new turnstiles were in place, maintenance related to fare evasion and associated vandalism plummeted by an astonishing 96 percent, a clear indication of how much damage fare cheats had been causing to the system.
BART officials confidently predicted that the tougher gates would generate an additional $10 million in revenue by forcing would-be freeloaders to pay and by encouraging paying customers to return to a system that at least appeared more orderly. Whether those rosy projections have actually materialized is far from clear, however, as BARTs detailed financial data and any internal estimates of how many fare jumpers started paying or how many riders came back because of the gates have not been made public.
What can be verified is that ridership, after collapsing during the pandemic, has been slowly but steadily recovering, even as BART remains in a deep financial hole where $10 million would barely register as more than a rounding error. That broader fiscal crisis reflects a familiar pattern of mismanagement and bloated bureaucracy that has come to define much of Californias public sector, from transit agencies to the states perpetually delayed and over-budget high-speed rail project.
The more concrete metric, and the one that should matter to riders, is the dramatic reduction in time and money spent repairing fare gates and other station infrastructure. Simply by making the gates harder to defeat, patron-related corrective maintenance a bureaucratic euphemism for vandalism and similar misconduct within the paid areas of stations dropped by 96 percent, and the benefits extended beyond the gates themselves to other station fixtures.
Predictably, this modest step toward accountability and order provoked outrage from the activist left. According to The Oaklandside, a May 2025 report from the Yale-based nonprofit Center for Policing Equity argued that the new gates failed to boost revenue and claimed its not making riders feel that much safer.
The groups explanation for why riders supposedly do not feel safer reveals a very different set of priorities than those of law-abiding commuters. BARTs 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 stated, downplaying both the financial and safety implications of rampant fare evasion.
The report went further, framing basic fare enforcement as a social injustice rather than a necessary condition for a functioning transit system. 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, effectively arguing that enforcing the rules is unfair if some violators fall into favored demographic categories.
Under this logic, the comfort and security of the paying rider the worker trying to get home without stepping over drug users or dealing with aggressive behavior becomes secondary to the feelings of those who refuse to pay and sometimes use the system as a shelter or a drug den. The implicit message is that if unhoused people are jumping the turnstile to smoke some high-grade fent at the platform and nod off on a Green Line for a few hours, especially if they are Black and Brown, then the fare-paying public should simply accept the chaos and feel guilty for objecting.
Yet the evidence from BARTs own maintenance records suggests that enforcing basic standards of conduct does, in fact, change behavior and improve conditions for everyone who follows the rules. When even the Bay Area a stronghold of progressive ideology can acknowledge that fare enforcement works and that secure gates reduce vandalism and disorder, it underscores a broader truth that other American cities would do well to heed: public systems cannot survive if they are run on ideology instead of accountability, and a functioning society depends on the simple expectation that everyone pays their way.
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