Muni Promises Another Crackdown on Fare-Evasion
Photo by Plug1
Muni wants your two dollars. Seriously.
The city is losing “tens of millions of dollars a year” due to fare evasion, and the agency is going to step up in collecting fare, says Transportation chief Nathaniel Ford.
Well, duh.
As SFist wisely pointed out, you can probably figure out that fare evasion is a big problem if you’ve ever been on any Muni line. However, the agency had placed a team of Muni employees and interns on buses and Metro stations to track the fare-evasion problem, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. Ford told the Chronicle that 35,000 observations have been logged, but no word on the exact analysis of this data and how this supposed crackdown will proceed.
One of the hurdles in enforcing fare is that Muni operators can’t actually physically make fare evaders get off the bus, SFWeekly‘s Joe Eskenazi points out. And who wants to stay on the bus while the driver spends time arguing with riders who either won’t get off or pay up?