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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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.

Southern Californians who’ve long shopped at Daiso, Miniso, Uniqlo or 99 Ranch Market may not be surprised to see the Asian-rooted chains expand across the country.

But that growth is now showing up in the numbers.

The National Retail Federation’s Hot 25 Retailers list ranks retailers by U.S. sales growth from 2024 to 2025. Miniso tops the list, with sales up nearly 53%.

The Chinese chain of gift shops opened its first U.S. store in Pasadena’s Old Town more than nine years ago and is now aiming to grow its American footprint to nearly 500 stores this year.

“If you can make it in Southern California, that's great,” said David Marcotte, senior vice president of global retail and technology at Kantar and an author of the NRF list.

A 99 Ranch market opened in 2023 in Eastvale.

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Marcotte says succeeding in California’s highly competitive retail market can teach chains lessons that translate elsewhere.

“The stone-cold reason is quality. The second one is experience,” he said. “Those are the two things that when shoppers go into any retailer, they’re looking for.”

Daiso ranks third, with growth of nearly 26%, while another Japanese company, Fast Retailing — the parent company of Uniqlo — comes in sixth.

99 Ranch Market, an American supermarket chain founded in Orange County that specializes in Asian groceries, comes in 15th.

Marcotte says Southern California has been a logical landing spot for these companies because of its proximity to Asia. But Marcotte says it can also be an unforgiving place to launch because of the competition, and he often encourages the clients he advises to consider smaller markets.

“I said if you open in Southern California, open one store, get it right,” Marcotte said. “If you get it wrong, you're dead. You'll never recover. You'll have to leave the country and come back in.”

The supermarket industry is particularly tough to break into because customers here, he says, have plenty of alternatives if the quality, selection or experience falls short.

He also emphasizes a retailer in California focused on Asian goods will see more success serving Chinese, Filipino and other Asian customers rather than designing around a particular ethnic group.

“That type of diversity of Asian customers that you have to address in the same store is what really proves to be the difference for an Asian retailer in the California market,” Marcotte said.

That’s part of the business model for 99 Ranch, which was founded by a Taiwanese immigrant who opened the first location in Westminster's Little Saigon in 1984.

Got a taste for ducks cooked the Chinese way? Your quest may take you to a quiet suburban backyard in South Pasadena.

That's where That Peking Duck Guy cooks and sells his birds. His clients, he said, include Phil Rosenthal and Roy Choi.

The guy behind That Peking Duck Guy is Hong Pham, who started the social media account in late 2025 as a way to document his latest culinary obsession: making the perfect duck, be it Peking or Pipa (deboned and flattened into the shape of the namesake Chinese string instrument).

The intention was not to sell. "I have a day job," Pham said. A radiologist, to be precise.

"I was actually making so many that neighbors wanted to claim it and offered to buy it," he added. "So I'm like, 'OK, that makes it easier 'cause I don't have to eat it all.'"

Soon came DMs from strangers asking for the same thing.

These days, That Peking Duck Guy caters events and holds takeout pop-ups where people can purchase and pick up a duck (which comes with sides and duck soup) from his South Pasadena backyard — right where he cooks them.

Peking duck from That Peking Duck Guy served with Chinese sweet sauce, chopped spring onions and cucumber slices.

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Duck is the latest obsession

Duck is not his first rodeo. Pham said he and his wife are foodies who've always been curious about delving into Vietnamese and other Asian culinary traditions. For Pham, that also means replicating some of these dishes at home, from scratch.

He'd gone on a tofu bender — making gallons of the stuff, as blocks, drinks and pudding — and also a bánh cuốn spree, or Vietnamese steamed rice rolls. He landed on duck as his latest subject only because he had wanted to make better heo quay, or Vietnamese roasted pork belly.

It's the oven

Pham and one of his special outdoor ovens he uses to roast duck.

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He researched how to get that extra crisp online and landed on an oven people in Asia use to make roast and Peking ducks.

"It was called the Apollo oven 'cause it looks like an Apollo space capsule," he said.

He bought one and then another. In between, he experimented cooking different meats with the new oven to get a feel before turning to the waterfowl.

He even got advice from Top Chef winner Mei Lin, whom he messaged cold: "She's like, 'Keep it simple. Keep it basic. Keep it traditional.'"

Three Pipa ducks inside the oven.

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Hundreds of ducks later, Pham said he still learns something new. That's one reason why his side hustle has stuck around.

"I didn't create like, you know, That Bánh Cuốn Man," he said. "Yeah, duck's gonna last."

Two Pipa ducks fresh out of the oven.

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Scientists have now gotten closer to understanding how gene mutations may lead some people to develop profound autism.

The clues, they say, lie in the murky space between genes and disease — where key proteins come together and interact.

A team of researchers from UC San Francisco mapped more than a thousand interactions between many proteins that come from certain autism risk genes. This molecular atlas, published in the journal Science, could point researchers toward new and promising treatments.

"It's an unprecedented resource for the field," says Dr. Daniel Geschwind, a professor of human genetics, neurology, and psychiatry at UCLA who was not involved with the study. "A lot of people interested in understanding autism and drug development are going to be using this."

For families affected by profound autism, it offers hope for eventual drug therapies. "This is the kind of scientific advance we have been waiting for and praying for," says Alison Singer, president of the nonprofit Autism Science Foundation, who has a daughter with severe cognitive impairment. "There's still a lot of work ahead, [but] this paper makes the path from genetic discovery to treatment much clearer."

The work builds on progress made in recent years to identify single genes that harbor mutations found in a subset of individuals with profound autism.

Getting past the "wall"

People with profound autism often live with severe intellectual disability and require around-the-clock care. They're nonverbal or minimally verbal, and often have serious medical conditions like epilepsy.

Pinning down the biology behind profound autism has always been a complicated endeavor — while both genes and environmental factors play a role, those factors can vary widely from person to person.

In the past decade or so, some genetics researchers have had remarkable success in identifying high-impact genetic differences in a subset of people with profound autism.

"They've discovered several hundred genes and corresponding mutations that are prevalent in [these] individuals," says Nevan Krogan, director of the Quantitative Biosciences Institute at UC San Francisco.

"But they kind of hit a wall," he added — because scientists haven't been able to turn those gene discoveries into many promising drugs and treatments.

"There was this huge missing piece," says Dr. Matthew State, a clinical psychiatrist and geneticist at UCSF: The genes serve as blueprints for making proteins that drive brain development, but researchers lacked visibility into how those proteins do the work.

State has been a pioneer in identifying high-risk genes, and the mutations in those genes, that are associated with profound autism. Krogan has been at the forefront of using new technology to look into protein interactions.

More than a decade ago, the two researchers were introduced by their mutual boss, the chancellor at UCSF, who encouraged them to collaborate. "[State] had the genes and the mutations. I had the technologies to look at the corresponding proteins," Krogan says.

They focused on filling a knowledge gap. "What we've been missing is the mechanistic understanding of how these mutations [on the genes] are seemingly resulting in autism," Krogan says. "In order to understand that, you need to go to the proteins."

Proteins are the complex molecules that come together to build the body, based on instructions encoded in the genes. "What makes an eye cell an eye cell, and a muscle a muscle, are the proteins and how they work together," State says. "They are the machinery of life."

In this case, the researchers wanted to find the molecular machinery of profound autism — to understand which proteins came from those high-risk autism genes, and how those proteins worked together.

The research was slow at first, but more recent advances in technology — including artificial intelligence — have sped things up.

To start, the researchers went on a "fishing expedition" for protein interactions. They chose 100 proteins from these high-risk autism genes, injected them into lab-grown cells, and then pulled them out, along with the additional proteins that attached to them.

Then, they used an AI system called AlphaFold, developed by Google DeepMind, to help determine which proteins in the clumps were directly touching. "Where AI is playing an important role is being predictive about who's talking to who," says Krogan. "Sometimes they take years to figure out. Now, we can get these insights in an hour." While imperfect, the system has worked well enough to save significant time and money, Krogan says.

Then, they wanted to see what happened to the proteins when the genes got tweaked. They introduced mutations that appear in patients with profound autism, and assessed what changed. "We broke the proteins in the way that they're broken in autism," says State. "That allows us ultimately to answer the question of, when they're going wrong in autism, how are they going wrong?"

They conducted this research in frogs and in organoids, which are lab-grown tissues that model the human brain. In one example, the mutations weakened the connection between two proteins related to which genes turn on and off in a cell. Then, one went rogue, turning on other genes that led to neurodevelopmental defects in organoids.

Molecular convergence

There are hundreds of rare, high-risk autism genes, acting in more than a thousand different ways.

But in mapping more than 1,800 protein interactions, the researchers found that many of them moved along shared biological pathways — particularly those related to early brain development, such as how synapses get constructed, and which neurons develop and when.

The convergence found in this study aligns with other recent publications, adding to an emerging understanding in the field, says Dr. Geschwind of UCLA.

"If we look at multiple mutations and they converge on the same process, that's strong evidence that you're dealing with the things that you want to treat," State says.

Identifying this more limited set of protein complexes that likely contribute to the development of profound autism could change the approach to treatments, says Singer with the Autism Science Foundation. "We've been working gene-by-gene to correct mutations," she says.

And if future drugs could target these shared protein pathways, she adds, "we may not need that separate therapeutic strategy for every autism gene."

Setting sights on new drug-development targets

It takes years to go from a biological discovery like this to an approved drug that treats humans. The findings would need to be translated into drug candidates, then tested for safety and effectiveness.

"It takes time and a lot of persistence and focus," State says. "This [paper] is unlikely to lead to therapies tomorrow — but it lays an important foundation for them."

Most human drugs are made to target proteins, Geschwind at UCLA says, so the newly published map of protein interactions offers an accessible entry point for pharmaceutical development.

And researchers hope to combine recent technological advances in ways that accelerate that progress even more. "When you put together the ability to borrow from successes in other fields [such as cancer treatments], and the development of AI, we're at an inflection point that will hopefully shorten the time cycle," State says.

Last week, Krogan's Quantitative Biosciences Institute received a $46 million grant from the Aligning Research to Impact Autism initiative, funded by philanthropist and Google co-founder Sergey Brin. The researchers are already working on next steps.

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