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December 3, 2007
Honor no more. Metro to install ticket gates.
Our trust and honor system on the subway, at the light rails and over at the Orange Line has been stripped away. Last Thursday, Metro voted to install the first phase of gates at stations, 275 to be exact (what's going to happen to those TAP Here machines that are everywhere?).
The original intent behind the current honor system is "to buck East Coast practices and reduce operating costs," according to the New York Times. Today, if you were to ride Metro, you buy a ticket, get on the train and present it to a Sheriff or civilian ticket inspector, a rare sight for many unless you are a nine-to-fiver.
A study found that 5% of people rode for free, costing an estimated $5.5 million annually. The new ticket gates will cost $30 million with $1 million in yearly maintenance, yielding an anticipated $6.77 million extra.
With an expected $75 million deficit in next year's $3 billion budget, Metro board member and former California Assemblymember Richard Katz was the only vote to oppose the plan. In addition to financial woes, he is also concerned with emergency evacuations.
So much for going "barrier free," the Daily News has won this time.
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it's about damn time. i think they should have been there from the start. wish we could do re-loadable swipe cards like nyc's metro system. what were those TAP machines all about, anyone? i've never known who used them, how the cards worked, or how they were purchased. it was nice of the mta to update the machines to take credit cards, except, in my experience, none of them ever were able to take anything but cash or tokens. wtf?
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What is going to happen to the guards who randomly went in the trains to check for tickets? Is it just going to be assumed that everyone has paid for a ticket?
I think this is a long time coming, but for the blue line at least, the fences surrounding lots of the stations are short - 4 to 5 feet tall. I don't think someone who doesn't want/can't pay for a ticket will be stopped by them, which opens up up some safety issues. Some stations don't even have any fences - you can walk right over the tracks to the platform.
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Not a big surprise. The first time I took the Metro I was wondering "who checks to see if I even bought a ticket" Sorry to say but you can't trust most people any more.
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How hard would it have been to hire a small group of people to actually patrol the subways and ask folks for "tickets or passes please"?
Invest the $30 million in omg People, shake up riders into believing that there would be a higher probability that they might get popped for a $250 ticket, and make that investment back in no time via increased ticket sales and increased revenues through citations.
Or quit being pricks, be more creative in subway sponsorships, and let people ride free. There are far worse things that could happen to this city than having more people off the freeways and on the subways. But people just loooooove to throw money at (perceived) problems while putting a barrier between would-be commuters and the public transportation that they actually want to use.
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I was wondering about this.
I caught the blue line out of Long Beach and changed the green line to get over to LAX. It wasn't really clear if I had to buy another ticket to ride the green line to LAX.
At the very least, gates like this will make it clearer.
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Well I hope this will at least get rid of the pay for each leg of a transfer bit. Its absurd to pay your fare then have to go back up to a ticket machine to buy another ticket, only to go back down to the line youre transferring to. If I understood correctly, this is what they expected people to do to if they wanted to follow 100% of the rules.
Hopefully now itll just be a turnstile to enter the station, like everywhere else.
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I don't imagine this will get rid of the pay per leg aspect of things, although instead of having to go to a ticket machine, you can just TAP on your way during the transfer.
In case it isn't clear to anyone, Metro requires a separate payment for each segment of your trip, or a Day Pass, which pays for itself at 4 segments in one day.