SEPTA’s New “High-Tech” Fare Gates Are Astonishingly Easy to Beat

SEPTA’s new fare gates at 69th Street Station are supposed to prevent fare evasion … but will they? (Photo by Victor Fiorillo)

SEPTA general manager Leslie Richards was all smiles on Wednesday at 69th Street Station. She was there to debut six new gates designed to prevent fare evasion, a problem the agency claims costs it as much as $40 million each year.

Some people love to leap over those old-school turnstiles or figure out other ways around them. It’s a jump that doesn’t exactly require the skills of Simone Biles.

The six new gates are part of a $1 million pilot program at 69th Street Station, with SEPTA prepared to spend many millions more on the same gates at other stations. Some of the old turnstiles remain at 69th Street. But SEPTA spokesperson Andrew Busch says all of them will be replaced by the end of April.

Here’s a look at the new SEPTA fare gates in operation:

“Where there’s a will, there’s a way,” one passerby told the news cameras on Wednesday. That was his analysis of whether the new SEPTA gates will actually prevent fare evasion. It turns out the “way” he mentioned is incredibly simple.

Some reporters have described the new SEPTA gates at 69th Street as “full-length.” This is something you don’t need to go to journalism school to figure out is untrue. You can just, you know, look at the gates.

I went over to 69th Street Station with my trusty ruler in hand. And the bottom of each gate — the gate being two doors that open outward when you pay your fare — sits a full 14 inches off the ground. Why is that important? Because you can just slide under the gate, should you be a reasonably fit person.

“I’ve already seen somebody do it,” one SEPTA employee I spoke with at the station told me. “But not me.” The employee laughed and added, “I might not be able to get back up!”

I think I would have been able to get up just fine. But if you’ve ever strolled through 69th Street Station — or, really, any highly trafficked SEPTA area — you probably realize you want to have as little contact with the ground as possible. It can be a bit gross.

The good news for fare-evaders is that you don’t have to filthy your hands or clothes to defeat SEPTA. As a SEPTA employee helpfully pointed out to me, you just have to wait for a paying customer. Customer walks through the gate. And you walk right behind said customer before the doors close — something the doors don’t seem to be in a great hurry to do. At bustling 69th Street, you never have to wait long for a customer you can follow.

In the spirit of truth-seeking, I decided to try this for myself. (Before you accuse me of any wrongdoing, I wasn’t evading the fare, since I had no intention of getting on the train. I also let a SEPTA employee know what I was doing before I did it.) Sure enough, somebody paid the fare, the doors opened, said rider walked through, and I walked through, too. Easy-peasy, as you can see here:

I did so kind of quickly. And I got a bit close to the person in front of me. So I decided to try it again. This time, I left a much more comfortable space between the two of us. And I slowly strolled through the open gate.

“I think you could get two or three people through,” a SEPTA employee said. In fact, you could probably get you and your whole extended family through, since the doors don’t seem to want to close while any movement is being detected. (That makes plenty of sense from a safety standpoint.)

One of the SEPTA employees I spoke to at the station said the old-school turnstiles are better than these newfangled doors, because the turnstiles only rotate enough for one person to get through, forcing any fare evaders to jump or climb over them. (There’s also a handicap access door that some people exploit.) The new gates are actually more inviting for evaders than the old turnstiles, the employee said.

While at the station, I also saw one man attempt to forcefully push the doors open. He pushed on them again and again. Hard. The doors didn’t open. But my impression is that it wouldn’t take too much force to get the job done. And with close to 700,000 SEPTA riders each day throughout the entire system, it’s not hard to imagine somebody is going to do just that.

In a press release, SEPTA touted some “3D imaging technology” that’s part of the upper section of the new gates. This technology allows SEPTA to automatically detect fare “piggybackers,” as it calls them. And then there’s the video feed to SEPTA police that would allow officers to put out an APB for some guy in a mask who doesn’t want to pay two bucks, the fare to ride the train if you’re using SEPTA Key. I kid, I kid; nobody is putting out an APB. But SEPTA is hoping to crack down on fare evasion with the help of technology.

Currently, a cop can give a fare-evader a ticket for $25. Busch says SEPTA is looking at increasing those fines and notes that they were as high as $300 back in the 2010s, though he admits that SEPTA doesn’t seem to have much luck collecting the fine, whether it’s $25 or $300, and that the amount doesn’t seem to factor in as a deterrent. Busch explains that one of the benefits of the new gates is the automatic detection of fare evasion, which eliminates the need for an employee or cop to witness it firsthand before setting enforcement efforts in motion.

“There’s an alarm that goes off when the gate detects evasion,” he says. (I didn’t hear any alarm during my test, but Busch suggests they just aren’t loud enough yet.) So the idea is that a cop on the scene would hear the alarm, realize someone has evaded, and attempt to intervene. SEPTA also has a “virtual patrol unit” monitoring feeds from stations, and if said unit gets an alert from one of the new gates, the unit can contact non-virtual SEPTA police with images of the offender; police might then intercept the passenger a few stops away.

A SEPTA staffer I spoke with at 69th Street laughed at the notion of SEPTA police doing anything about fare evasion. That staffer has worked for many years at 69th Street Station and has never seen a SEPTA cop do anything about fare-evaders. “And if you call them to make a report when somebody doesn’t pay, they act like they’ve got something better to do,” the staffer told me. (Of course, in all fairness, they probably do have better things to do than chase down somebody who skipped out on paying two dollars, less than the cost of a 16-ounce coffee at Wawa.)

Busch says he understands the frustration of SEPTA’s front-line workers over the response of SEPTA police in some cases. But, he insists, the new SEPTA police chief has made it clear that fare enforcement is a priority. Busch expects SEPTA police to complement the new SEPTA technology with additional patrols. And he was quick to point out that while fare evasion may only be a citable offense, there are times when fare-evaders go on to commit serious crimes on SEPTA. That happened with a stabbing earlier this week.

“Fare evasion may seem like a small thing,” says Busch. “But it adds to this feeling of lawlessness and to perceptions about a lack of safety that our customers have. I think you will be seeing a different response from SEPTA police in the near future.”