California’s Bay Area Rapid Transit has completed installation work on its Next Generation Fare Gates at its heavy commuter rail stations. This milestone project is designed to make the system safer and make fare evasion much more difficult for criminals. 

The new fare gates feature a unique door-locking mechanism that makes their swing barriers very hard to push through, jump over, or maneuver under. Overall, the fare gate array forms a 72-inch minimum barrier. Still to come is the full utilization of advanced sensors to make it harder to “piggyback” into the system by closely following behind paying riders. 

Fare evasion has long been an issue, although the number of riders who say they’ve witnessed someone fare evade on their trip has dropped by more than 50 percent in just the last year. 

—Bob Gallegos