Every minute in the New York City subway last year, 330 riders hopped, ducked or dodged the turnstile.
In a system running around the clock with 472 stations, that added up to 174 million stolen rides — more than a third of the $1 billion lost to fare and toll evasion in 2024, according to the Citizens Budget Commission, a fiscal watchdog group.
As transit ridership continues to recover from a pandemic drop, the cost of unpaid subway and bus trips tripled to $918 million in 2024, from $305 million in 2019, said Andrew Rein, the president of the commission.
That is almost twice the sum that Manhattan’s congestion pricing toll is expected to collect this year. Enough to pay for 180 new subway cars. Or 630 new buses. Or 36 miles of new train signals.
“This is a huge amount of money left on the table,” Mr. Rein said, noting that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the state agency that runs the city’s transit system, could face a deficit as early as 2027. The M.T.A. projects a $21 billion operating budget next year, more than a quarter of which will be funded by fares.
To help stem the losses, the authority has been testing gadgets and strategies to foil the most common ways that riders bilk the system. They include jagged metal partitions, taller turnstiles and a few less obvious changes that alter how fare gates work.
While the subway is not the costliest source of fare evasion — that would be buses — it has become a potent symbol of dysfunction for critics of New York’s mass transit. The Trump administration has called the system lawless, despite near-record-low crime rates underground.
Janno Lieber, the chief executive of the M.T.A., has described fare beating as the subway’s “No. 1 existential threat,” an act that corrodes civility on the train and makes customers who pay “feel like suckers.” Mr. Lieber and police leaders have said that combating fare evasion also helps reduce crime in the system.
The effort may seem futile, but the tide is turning. In the first three months of this year, fare evasion in the subway dropped below 10 percent, its lowest point since 2021.
So far, the M.T.A. has installed all the physical upgrades at more than 110 stations.
The goal isn’t total compliance, Mr. Lieber said in an interview, but to root out “opportunistic fare evasion” — when someone, for example, walks through an open emergency door because five other people already did.
Backcocking
For years, one of the most common fare beating tricks was backcocking, in which a rider pulls back the rotating arms of the turnstile far enough to slide a leg through the gap.
The last time the M.T.A. replaced its turnstiles en masse was 1992, a year before the MetroCard was introduced. But since 2023, transit crews have been quietly modifying the decades-old equipment, one 58-pound part at a time.
“It seems very simple, but it took months of work,” said Steve Ilardi, the authority’s assistant chief officer of automatic fare collection. Mr. Ilardi and Ajay Singh, an M.T.A. superintendent, are credited with the fix.
Over two years, a small team of technicians removed each of the subway’s nearly 3,800 turnstiles and hauled them in vans to a nondescript warehouse in the East New York neighborhood of Brooklyn. There, M.T.A. machinists cut six new notches into the circular plates hidden inside the turnstiles to limit their range of motion and make the gap between the arms much harder to squeeze through.
Sleeves
Subway turnstiles are about 34 inches tall — a clearable hurdle for many riders.
The M.T.A. has bet that adding a four-inch-tall barrier on each arm is enough to dissuade many jumpers. Nearly 300 stations now have sleeves, fins or both, and the entire system should have them by the end of the year, the agency said.
Reviews are mixed.
“I see no purpose in them,” Siopbhan Campbell-Suber, a 39-year-old dog walker, said on a recent commute in Harlem, adding that she had seen plenty of riders vault over the defenses, and that she would rather see the money spent on improving service.
Mitch Schwartz, a spokesman for the M.T.A., declined to share the cost of the fins and sleeves, but said that at stations where they were installed, there was a 60 percent decline in turnstile jumping. The additions pay for themselves “within a few months,” he said.
Fins
Critics say the addition of spiky metal plates between fare gates is an example of hostile architecture, designed to curb bad behavior with the threat of discomfort.
But in the M.T.A.’s view, they are the parapets of subway defense.
“As much as the public laughs at us for things we are trying, they work,” said Chantel Cabrera, the authority’s project leader on subway fare evasion initiatives.
Brandon Jones, 30, a self-described entrepreneur who lives in Harlem, said he sells discounted MetroCard swipes, an illegal practice. Before the new measures, he said, he was making about $30 a day. Since the fins and sleeves were installed, he can make nearly twice as much, partly because some fare beaters are giving up.
“I’ve seen people get hurt” trying to clear the new obstacles, he said. “It’s a safety hazard.”
Delayed Egress
Every subway station has emergency doors accessible to exiting passengers, and they are one of the most frequently abused entry points.
To cut down on the number of riders who sneak through, the M.T.A. has installed devices that delay the opening of the door for up to 15 seconds.
The idea is to reduce the amount of time that the doors remain open, said Demetrius Crichlow, the president of the M.T.A.’s New York City Transit division.
“New Yorkers don’t like to wait for anything,” he said.
About 190 stations now have delayed-egress doors, exceeding a goal set by the governor’s office this year. (For safety reasons, every door modification must be approved by New York’s Department of State.)
The installation costs about $11,000 per gate, or $2 million so far. The M.T.A. says that stations with the modified doors have had an average of 10 percent less fare evasion overall.
Gate Guards
The last line of defense is a patrol of about 1,000 unarmed guards scattered across more than 200 stations.
But their job is not to stop or pursue fare evaders. Instead, they are required to “direct all customers to exit via the turnstiles,” according to a pamphlet provided to the workers.
“We’re not security guards, we’re customer service,” said one woman stationed at an emergency door in Times Square. She declined to give her name.
Last year the M.T.A. budgeted $70 million for the guards, and it expects to spend about the same this year. Allied Universal, the company that provides the personnel, declined to share the workers’ pay, but similar positions on the company’s website range from about $18 to $20 an hour.
Since the initiative began in 2022, stations with gate guards have had a 31 percent reduction in fare evasion, the M.T.A. said.
What’s Next
Over the next five years, the M.T.A. expects to spend $1.1 billion to add modern fare gates with tall doors and other features at 150 subway stations, about a third of the system. The agency will begin testing different models in a number of stations this month.
In Washington, D.C., which began in 2023 to update over 1,200 fare gates, fare evasion on rail has dropped 82 percent since the gates’ installation, according to a local transit authority spokeswoman.
Additionally, the M.T.A. has supported an expansion of Fair Fares, a city-funded program that offers half-price fares to lower-income residents. Some transit advocates want to push the qualifying income cutoff higher, so that fare evasion is never a crime of poverty.
After the MetroCard is retired at the end of this year, the authority expects that its digital replacement, the tap-and-go OMNY system, will help transit workers more easily validate when a rider has paid.
The M.T.A.’s progress is notable, said Sylvain Haon, a senior director with the International Association of Public Transport, a consortium of transit groups. But its rate of fare evasion remains high compared with some other major cities, he said, including Paris, where the Metro and regional rail had an evasion rate of between 4 and 5 percent.
New York City’s new fare gates will help, Mr. Haon said, but there is no silver bullet.
“It’s not one or the other,” he said. “It’s one and the other.”
Nate Schweber contributed reporting.
Stefanos Chen is a Times reporter covering New York City’s transit system.
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