The Brief

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass surprised some transit advocates during a speech at Union Station last month when she proclaimed she wants a "long-term financial strategy and plan" to make public transit on L.A. Metro free for everyone.

The announcement was met with hesitant applause.

This week, the mayor elaborated, saying free transit won’t be accomplished anytime soon.

“I will be introducing meaningful motions to keep us moving forward,” Bass told LAist’s Larry Mantle on Wednesday. “But right now we are not at a place where I can say this is going to happen in the next year or so.”

It’s unclear when Bass will introduce the idea formally. Any steps to begin free transit would need approval from the Metro Board, which she chairs, to move forward. Bass said she wants to also expand use of Metro’s existing low-income programs, which she hopes will move the agency in the direction of a universally fareless transit system.

Bass’ recent push for free transit comes just a few years after Metro executives said eliminating fares would cost more than $1 billion annually for the region. At the same time, the agency, which is facing mounting political pressure to strengthen fare enforcement, is pouring tens of millions of dollars into taller faregates that are designed to make it harder for riders to skip out on paying.

Bass’ history on a fare-free Metro

Bass’ July speech, which she made to outline her priorities for her second tenure as Metro Board chair, isn’t the first time the mayor has signaled support for a fare-free transportation system.

When she campaigned for mayor in 2022, Bass told StreetsblogLA that she believes fareless transit “will give people the freedom of mobility with no barriers to entry.” She reiterated that she supports a move to a fareless Metro in a 2023 interview with the L.A. Times. 

Mariana Luna leads the fareless transit campaign for Strategic Actions for a Just Economy, or SAJE, which has long advocated for a fare-free Metro. Luna said Bass’ speech in July reaffirming support for fareless transit was unexpected, but exciting nonetheless.

“We would really love to see some sort of action and not just leave it as a promise during her campaign season,” Luna said.

On the other side is the rider advocacy group Enforce the Fares. Alex Davis, a Metro rider and member of the group, said going fare-free is the opposite direction the agency should be heading.

“It will distract and even set Metro back from tackling the stuff that will actually improve the lives of transit riders,” Davis said, adding that ensuring fares are collected can lead to improved service reliability and system safety.

Bass’ opponent in this year’s mayoral race, former ally and current L.A. City Councilmember Nithya Raman, does not include fareless transit as part of her publicly available transportation platform, which calls for Metro system expansion and service reliability improvements. Raman’s campaign did not respond to requests for comment about her thoughts on fareless transit.

Metro says fareless transit would cost region $1 billion

Though not a novel concept, support for free transit in L.A. County gained momentum during the pandemic, said Brian Taylor, a research professor of urban planning and public policy at UCLA.

“There was concern with contact between operators and passengers,” Taylor said. “So there was a public health aspect to it that led not to go fare-free, but actually to stop enforcing fare payment. That sort of revived the fare-free movement.”

Days after stay-at-home orders began in March 2020, Metro temporarily suspended bus fare collection and permitted rear-door entry to minimize contact between drivers and passengers.

In response to the financial challenges imposed by the pandemic, former Metro CEO Phil Washington assembled a task force that studied the possibility of a universally fareless transportation system.

In February 2021, when Washington announced he was stepping down, Metro touted his support of free transit for the county. 

A few months later, the idea didn’t seem so possible.

According to a September 2021 staff report, a fully fareless rail and bus network was estimated at the time to cost $1.1 billion annually for Metro and local transportation agencies that rely on the same TAP payment system.

Revenue from fares has decreased since the report was published. Last fiscal year, Metro brought in $175 million in fares, and the agency is projecting $25 million less in fare revenue this fiscal year. That’s compared to the $250 million Metro was, on average, collecting annually in pre-pandemic years, which the agency used to come up with its 2021 estimate.

The 2021 Metro report also detailed that a fareless system would require changes to how the state allocates transit funding, since state funding is dependent on local fare revenue.

In 2024, the Metro executive who oversaw the push toward fareless transit said the agency’s analysis was verified by an outside auditor.

“To be fiscally responsible, we can’t offer a completely fareless system,” Devon Deming, the deputy executive officer of fare programs, said at a July 2024 Metro Public Safety Advisory Committee meeting.

While a fully fareless approach never launched, the initiative resulted in providing K-12 and community college students free rides on Metro and fare capping, which establishes $5 as the maximum a rider pays per day.

It also resulted in making it easier for people to enroll in Metro’s assistance program for low-income riders, which offers 90 days of free rides after sign-up followed by 20 free rides per month.

Metro riders load their tap cards at Union Station in Los Angeles.

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Samanta Helou Hernandez

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LAist

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Metro invests in stopping fare evasion

As Bass is pushing for a free system, Metro officials have been moving in the opposite direction by making it physically more difficult to catch a free train ride.

In response to customer feedback about improving fare compliance, Metro began installing taller faregates in 2025. The 7-foot-tall plexiglass, paddle-door gates are designed to be more difficult to jump over or duck under and are equipped with motion sensors. So far, they’ve been installed in 26 rail stations across the Metro system.

Metro spent more than $14.7 million installing the faregates in the last fiscal year and has budgeted $15.5 million to continue installing additional faregates throughout the system.

“We’ve seen a tremendous increase in the fares and the taps where these investments have been put in place,” Chief Bill Scott, who oversees Metro’s Department of Public Safety, said, referring to the statistics that the agency has shared with its board about the taller faregates.

The faregates were highlighted several times during Metro’s State of the Agency event in July, where the mayor announced her fare-free initiative.

Before Bass spoke, L.A. County Supervisor Kathryn Barger said the gates support a safer system.

“Our new faregates have significantly increased paid ridership while reducing reported issues,” said Barger, who is also first vice chair of the Metro Board. “There is a correlation.”

In a written follow-up statement to LAist, Barger said that any potential changes to Metro’s fare policy need to be weighed against the “important reality” that “fare enforcement and access control measures are associated with reductions in crime across the Metro system.”

Does it make sense to go fare-free?

According to Taylor, the UCLA professor, there’s a good economic case to be made for transit systems to go fareless when a large share of its riders are low-income and when the percentage of operating costs covered by fares falls below roughly 10%.

Both conditions are there for L.A. Metro, he said.

SAJE made a similar argument in a 2023 report.

Luna, the assistant director of organizing and advocacy for SAJE’s fareless transit campaign, said she hopes Bass will push to offer a pilot program that would make transit free for those who already qualify for the agency’s low-income assistance.

Making Metro free will negatively impact customer experience, group says

Last year, the rider advocacy group Enforce the Fares launched a campaign to push Metro to restore the number of fare checks transit security officers perform on trains and buses, saying that the physical fare infrastructure investments cannot scale to all parts of the system.

Fare enforcement is tied directly to safety, the group says. Following a surge in violent crime on the system in 2024, Metro reported to its board that 96% of those apprehended for committing a violent crime on the system between April 2023 and March 2024 did not pay fares.

According to the group’s accounting of Metro data, the agency's contracted law enforcement and security officers verified riders paid their fares hundreds of thousands of times per month between 2014 and 2018. That number plummeted to an average of 5,000 verifications per month in 2025.

There’s also been a drop in the amount of fares that pay for the day-to-day operations of the system. In fiscal year 2016, Metro could reinvest the fares it collected to pay for 22% of its operational expenses. In the latest fiscal year, that figure dropped to 6%, according to agency financial reports.

In a report to its board, Metro staff attributed this drop to the “expanding rail system and the declining fare revenues.”

Fare checks have increased in recent months. In May, Metro reported conducting more than 19,000 fare checks. 

Scott, with Metro’s Department of Public Safety, said Metro’s security officers conducted 20,000 fare checks in July and that “it’s trending that way in August.”

In a statement, Bass’ office said she does not support transit security officers performing fare checks and wants them focused on ensuring public safety.

Longer wait times for graffiti removal and streetlight repair. Fewer police officers per shift. Completely eliminating school crossing guards.

Those are just some of the service cuts the city of South Gate made earlier this year as it stared down a $9.4 million annual budget deficit and a looming fiscal emergency.

But none of that was enough to convince South Gate voters to approve an 8% utility user tax that would have been tacked onto a wide range of utility bills, including electricity, water, cable and phone service. Now, the city is gearing up for more cuts, including closing sports fields and the city pool for the winter months.

South Gate’s utility tax was just one of the many ways Southern California cities asked their residents to give them more money via local tax initiatives this November, with proposed taxes on everything from hotel stays to cannabis businesses.

And those early results suggest South Gate is an outlier: Of the 32 total local tax measures on the ballot in Los Angeles and Orange counties, all but six appear poised to pass, according to early results. (There are still several more days of vote counting to come.)

Eleven transient occupancy tax measures, which tax overnight stays in hotels or short-term rentals, passed in cities from Burbank to Los Alamitos. Most cities sought to increase their existing hotel taxes by anywhere from 1 to 5 percentage points, while Lynwood residents voted to establish a hotel tax for the first time.

Business-related taxes, such as taxes on business licenses or on certain businesses, also mostly passed, as did most parcel taxes in cities including Pasadena and Culver City.

But sales taxes saw more mixed results. Cudahy, San Gabriel, Orange, Santa Ana and Los Angeles all approved sales tax measures, while voters in Diamond Bar, Hermosa Beach and San Clemente all voted down their local sales tax proposals.

Most of those sales taxes focused on maintaining basic city services in communities facing big budget deficits, driven by the rising costs of insurance, maintenance and infrastructure projects, and employee pensions, among other factors. But in San Clemente, the proposed 1% sales tax would have specifically funded sand replenishment and other beach projects, along with wildfire prevention work. That measure appeared to be headed for failure, with just 36% of voters in support as of Wednesday afternoon.

Voters in San Marino approved an extension of their utility tax, and increased it from 5% to 6%. Last year, the tax provided almost $2.2 million in revenue.

City officials in South Gate had hoped for a similar boon, and projected the utility tax would bring in an estimated $10.4 million per year in general fund revenue, while raising total utility costs by about $39 per month for a typical household.

Leading up to the election, the city of South Gate pointed to other neighboring cities that have their own utility taxes, including Downey, Lakewood and Norwalk, where the tax mostly hovers around 5%. “South Gate is the exception, not the rule,” noted one city presentation that pointed to these other taxes in a bid to coax voters to go along.

Voters weren’t convinced. “I’m extremely frustrated that you now want to do electricity, water, sewer, cable, cell phone, gas. ... That hurts us. You’re passing that on to us and that is absolutely not acceptable,” said one resident at a City Council meeting on the measure earlier this year.

LAist has reached out to the city of South Gate about what’s next for the city.

The city of West Hollywood has approved an ordinance to create a domestic partnership registry for people in polyamorous relationships.

The domestic partnership registry extends certain legal protections for people in the city, including visitation rights to hospitals and jails in West Hollywood and some tenant protections. The registry doesn’t replace the state’s marriage or the state’s domestic partnership laws.

“It's a landmark ordinance and really puts and continues to elevate West Hollywood as a city that is here to support queer people and queer families as they evolve in their needs,” said Chelsea Byers, a West Hollywood City Council member. “I think that's a real joy that we can bring to people — that they can live in a greater sense of being seen and understood.”

How it works

To file, people in a multi-partner relationship will submit a form in person that will be provided by the City Clerk’s office — all members of the relationship will have to provide identification to the clerk.

The ordinance also offers an option by mail, if the signatures are notarized.

The ordinance builds on historical precedent

In 1985, the city became the first city in the nation to create a similar domestic partnership registry for same-sex couples. Similar to that registry, people outside the city can also register.

“This new law not only gives polyamorous unions legal recognition, it also gives people permission to imagine a future together and to plan their lives openly,” said Christina Fialho, president and founder of Rewrite the BiLine, an advocacy group for bisexual people and nonnuclear families, who advocated for the ordinance.

Several cities in Massachusetts have also passed multipartner domestic partnership laws.

Among the sweeping victories by Democrats on Tuesday were wins in several congressional districts that Republicans had redrawn explicitly to boost their party ahead of the midterms.

Republicans were bracing for some losses this election cycle, so last year President Donald Trump urged his party to take the extraordinary step of engaging in mid-decade redistricting efforts.

As of Tuesday night, many of those efforts had failed.

That included in Florida, where multiple Democrats — Kathy Castor, Pia Dandiya and Jared Moskowitz — won in redrawn districts, according to race calls by the Associated Press.

In North Carolina, Democratic Rep. Don Davis held on to his 1st District seat, even though Republicans in the state redrew it to be more competitive for the GOP. Trump would have won the redrawn 1st by nearly 12 percentage points, according to the Downballot.

Trump would have won by even more in Alabama's redrawn 2nd Congressional District, which Democratic Rep. Shomari Figures held on to, according to the AP race call.

Republicans in Alabama redid the state's congressional map after the U.S. Supreme Court further weakened the Voting Rights Act earlier this year.

And in Texas, which was the first state to redistrict at Trump's urging, a few of the redrawn districts had gone to Democrats.

Republicans redrew their maps with the expectation that the coalition of voters Trump won over in 2024 would support them this cycle. In Texas, Republicans were banking on gains made with Latino voters in new maps.

But many of those voters shifted their support to Democrats this year.
Copyright 2026 NPR

Nationwide election results came at a relentless pace Tuesday night, each more of a Democratic upset than the last. But you may not have known if you were attending the California Republican Party's election night event in Garden Grove.

In the dimly lit Hyatt ballroom where gubernatorial longshot Steve Hilton and his supporters gathered, the news channels were off, the music was turned up and “Don’t Stop Believin’” blasted throughout.

Minutes after the polls closed at 8 p.m., the Associated Press called the governor’s race for Democratic favorite Xavier Becerra.

Around the room, the occasional person glanced at their phone to sneak a peek at the growing GOP carnage. More of the crowd instead looked at each other or toward the empty stage, where a lectern stood in front of a photo of the Golden Gate Bridge at sunset.

Not long after, Hilton took the stage to concede the race — which had always been heavily favored against him in a state where Democrats outnumber Republicans 2-to-1.

“Maybe this isn’t the best year to be running for office as a Republican,” Hilton told his supporters, alluding to the election results that would soon lead the Democratic Party to win so big in the House and the Senate that many dubbed it a blue tsunami. “We see what’s going on around the country.”

Hilton knew the odds were long. He’d tried a number of tactics to win over California, including a suggestive advertisement suggesting voters should “Just Try” voting for him. He’d done his best to separate himself from President Donald Trump, who backed his campaign. He also attacked Becerra for staying largely out of the limelight since making it out on top of a chaotic primary.

None of Hilton’s appeals made a significant mark on the result, which trailed at around 36% of the vote as of Wednesday afternoon.

Standing outside the ballroom, Matt Shupe, a spokesperson for the California GOP, conceded it was challenging terrain for Republicans this year across the country — and always in California.

“It’s pretty typical that the party that's not in power gains some seats, so I think that was pretty expected for the most part,” he said. “We'll plan on bringing the fight more intensely than ever in 2028.”

By 9:30 p.m., people were headed to their cars to go home.