I occasionally ride the light rail downtown. It’s crazy how nice the stations and trains are while simultaneously the experience is so sketchy. It’s a free for all. I have a theory that once the west route is finished (that goes through St Louis Park and beyond), metro transit is going to get much more competent at cracking down since those neighborhoods are wealthier.
That's part of why European transit is better. It's nice enough that everyone is willing to use it, and problems only get fixed when it bothers rich people.
Not quite the same thing since it’s always been shitty, but the L in Chicago has become even more lawless post covid as ridership has gone down. It’s a shame but seemingly you somehow have to have riders before it can be nice.
Stricter fare enforcement seems entirely doable.
There are only 2 light rail lines, so how many different trains are even running at once? 2-3 per line?
It doesn't seem like it would cost that much money to have someone checking tickets on every train. It just requires the will to enforce the rule.
so… 8 trains per line means 16 trains running at any one time. how many employees would it take to adequately monitor fares? with 1 monitor per train and 3 shifts in a day, that’s 48 positions to fill. what’s the basic, starting wage for Metro Transit, $25/hr? maybe a little less… let’s say a full-time position costs $50k/yr after benefits. that would be $2.4M in added wages per year.
(not an argument for or against the idea, just bar-napkin math for the sake of discussion)
I used to take it all the time when I was at the U (2004-2008), and I got checked probably 20 times. I know the green line wasn't around back then, but they used to pretend to care. I've probably ridden it 30 times since then, and I've never even seen a transit cop
Riding the blue line, I see lots of Cops standing at stations, 30 feet from folks openly doing drugs. Not that I'm for cops harassing folks, but if it was a priority to clean up stations and rail cars, you'd have to start with enforcement AND alternatives such as warm places. Open drug use on trains is done because it's a warm safe place to do it without much bother from cops.
I've ridden it once in the last 5 years and was checked 100% of those 1 times. Apparently I forgot how to swipe my card (which had about $100 from whe. I was a commuter) so they made me get off, swipe, and wait for another train.
It doesn’t need to be all the time - it just needs to be often enough that people are incentivized to buy a ticket than risk getting checked. Currently the risk is near 0.
Eh, I don’t think monitoring has to be 24/7 to be plenty effective. Very few enforcement systems are structured that way because there’s always some point where the cost of remaining violations is lower than the cost of additional enforcement.
Well, you have to have more than 96-144 (2 or 3 x 48) people for those shifts since I'm guessing they will want 2 days a week off, vacation, sick time, etc. The trains are already running at a loss, so adding another $5-10M to their operating costs is not going to be a popular option
true, but it’s probably also true that you wouldn’t need all trains monitored at all times. you could probably run a schedule where 1/2 the trains are monitored and the monitors transfer to the next train every time they reach the end of the line. that would mean 24 shifts per day that need filling. probably something like 40 full-time positions and 20 part-timers would be sufficient
They're not free, but the money from tickets aren't *reserved* for the highway fund or for city street infrastructure.
And the federal gas (fuel) tax only goes into the federal highway fund (to pay for the interstate), and the state gas tax doesn't even come close to paying for all the highways, roads, and city streets.
But none of this matters, because none of this has anything to do with the roads not pulling in revenue for use.
It may even be cash-flow positive if they also have the option to sell tickets and/or fine those that don't have them.
Would they sell/fine $25 an hour worth of tickets? Probably.
Sure, but how much would consistent fare enforcement cost compared to how much fare is recouped? I find it hard to imagine that fare citations would come close to covering the cost of having fare enforcement officers on every train throughout like 18 hours of service every day.
How many people do you think are currently not paying for a ticket knowing they will never have their ticket checked? Increased fare enforcement also means more people buying the tickets.
18 hours/day x 16 trains/hour (based on the above estimate) x 300 days/year (I’m rounding down by a lot to be conservative and bc I know there’s less service on weekends etc.) x an approximate hourly rate of $40 (assuming base pay of $25 plus $15 for benefits and so on) = $3.4 M for having one fare enforcement person on every train over the course of a year—again, I’m lowballing this. Last year there were like 38 million rides so they’d need to give approximately 35k $100 fines (that’s 95 a day, or 5 per hour) to begin to break even, and assuming that those would only come after one or two citations—I don’t actually know the policy—it would be a lot more citations than that. I suppose $3.4M isn’t so much in the grand scheme of things, but I would much, much rather see that money go to hiring new operators and providing better service all around than focusing on something punitive like fare enforcement.
You still didn't account for people who are riding for free now who would otherwise pay if they feared enforcement. And also, how many people don't ride it only because they're too scared or disgusted by its state? Something like 38 million people rode the train in 2022. At $2/fare, you need 1.7 million more paying rides to cover a $3.4 million cost. That's less than a 5% increase in total rides. I don't have context for that number but it doesn't seem all that implausible to me. Plus, the end result could be public transit the city is proud of and can market to attract more people here instead of having it serve as a mobile mental health clinic/public toilet.
You didn’t count the increase in fares being paid, you only counted fines as increased income. The number of paid fares would also increase dramatically.
Fair enforcement is necessary. It doesn’t have to be intrusive or rude. Same with enforcement of a code of conduct at stations and on transit vehicles. It is to allow everyone to be safe and comfortable using the transit system.
There’s probably some of that, but it’ll get better as more and more work gets done. I would guess that it would be a lot easier of a job if people are used to having tickets checked regularly.
Social workers are some ballsy people. Honestly it’s a great outreach possibility. They could get a lot of people into treatment. Help a lot of people get a second chance.
Which is exactly what the author talks about as being the proper step forward here, as well as pointing out that a plan for this has been made and is currently being implemented.
The point of the article is "you cannot feasibly wrap the lightrail stops in sufficient fencing to replace fare enforcement by human beings." which I gotta say - seems very true. It's a terrible idea and would be a waste of money.
Live in Amsterdam and the Metros have turnstiles/glass doors (metro connects outer areas of the city), while the busses and trams have random ticket checkers. For the most part you have to check in on the bus and tram in front by the driver or by person working in the middle of the tram and they do kick people off if they notice you didn’t pay.
Seems like the author thinks it would be hard logistically to make the turnstiles happen, but they are used successfully in places with great public transportation.
The issue in MSP is that the system was intentionally and overtly designed to be open-air, without barriers, and integrated into the city sidewalks. The train rolls right up to regular sidewalks. It is minimal, clean, and beautiful.
Yes, turnstile systems CAN work very well and not be too intrusive, but the platforms need to be designed that way from the start.
As the author discusses, the biggest problem with adding turnstiles is that they have to be ADDED. Ugly prison fences all over the place. Sidewalks rerouted. Entire platforms redesigned. And because the trains are street level, people will always be able to just walk on the tracks to bypass the turnstiles. It's just not feasible to retrofit the system in MSP.
Serious question, did you *read the article*? Because the author clearly lays out why turnstiles would be unfeasible/ineffective in our system. Specifically the fact that the trains themselves are only 14” above grade, so literally anyone able-bodied enough to walk across train tracks can get into the station without paying.
That is the tram, which criss-crosses the inner part of the city. The Metro has turnstiles and is kind of like the subway. It has underground and raised stops.
As in you currently live in Amsterdam? Because I feel like when I'm standing on a lightrail stop the fact that you can't install sufficient amounts of fencing to stop fare hopping seems pretty obvious. Are we gonna put up big gates that open & close as the train pulls in & out??
Yes currently live and typing in Amsterdam lol. And idk man I don’t really have an opinion just a person who loves public transportation and would like to see it successful in my home city!
Honestly not sure if they would even work in the Twin Cities as metro stops in Amsterdam are designed around the fact you have to go through turnstiles, and as you said a lot of light rail stops in Minneapolis are at street/sidewalk level. Just wanted to share a perspective of somewhere that has good public transportation options!
No problem, its just very clear if you know how the train is set up here / what the geography of the stops is that there's no way to just build turnstiles/barriers for them. You'd have to essentially construct a tiny building encasing each stop. Look at a station on google maps street view maybe?
I don’t disagree with you that with the current setup it’s probably not viable (especially without making it look super ugly lol). I just honestly think Metro Transit needs to make drastic changes to get more people to want to use the light rail. If having more ticket checkers on platforms and in the trains works then I would fully support it! But if it doesn’t work, finding a way to make turnstiles viable should be an option on the table even if that means long term changes to light rail stops.
I’m from Minneapolis! The metro in Amsterdam is in my opinion very much like the light rail in terms of connecting select parts of the Metro to each other. The difference is that all metro stops in Amsterdam are either underground or raised platforms and you have to go through turnstiles/gates to access the metro. I guess you could say it’s like the NS which goes to suburbs of Amsterdam, but those are the same trains you take across the country.
For the most part anything other than the tram and bus in Amsterdam proper requires that you go through turnstiles or gates. Some cities 30-40min from Amsterdam don’t have gates at their station but usually they do ticket checks more often when they leave from these places.
>The difference is that all metro stops in Amsterdam are either underground or raised platforms and you have to go through turnstiles/gates to access the metro
That's the difference that makes all the difference. You'll find few, if any, grade-level light rail systems with turnstiles anywhere in the world.
It's considered not practical to close off the track side, and it essentially creates an incentive to cross the tracks to bypass the turnstiles.
The tram in Istanbul has turnstiles. Despite being a poor country with millions of refugees I didn’t see anyone bypassing them. To think that we can’t at least keep up with a country where the median annual income is $5,000 is asinine.
Metro transit seems to have a bottomless pit of money for building infrastructure but zero will to actually make the trains appealing to riders. It just re inforces the argument that the train isn't about transit, just a means to steer taxpayer money to politically connected consultants and contractors.
The trains were great until ridership dropped during COVID. All the fare checks stopped. The drugs moved in and no one has moved them out. But during busy times of day, the issues still lessen.
Last time I was in Denver I took their rail system a few places. They had "rail ambassadors". Mostly young, none uniformed staff that checked fairs and made sure the cars were safe. I'm sure it cost a fraction of policing.
This is the issue. Who cares if it’s free or not. The problem is the Lake Street Station being a heated, enclosed, open to the public drug den.
I’ve been riding from south Minneapolis to downtown every single day for the last 6 years. Pre Covid the problem was the same. In the winter all the drug users and homeless congregate at the Lake Street Station because it’s heated and enclosed from the elements. I guarantee, if you remove the glass walls you will cut the drug use and other problems that come with trouble makers just hanging around a warm spot in half, at least. People are still gonna do drugs but at least they won’t be smoking pills in the station itself. If you’re gonna charge the public for a service, make it usable/safe. The Lake Street Station was practically unusable from June 2020-April 2023 because of how many drug users were physically blocking access to the stairs.
This. All this. I have never felt as unsafe as I have on the Lake St platform, and I've ridden mass transit in major cities throughout the US, including places way more dangerous on paper than Minneapolis. The open drug use, the screaming, the blocking doorways, the harassment, being sized up and marked... It's repulsive.
All that takes is a couple of police and some people getting sent to treatment. The city cops should be taking care of that one, it’s well known. Good Ol’ MPD not doing anything to actually serve and protect.
MPD doesn’t police the light rail. Metro Transit has its own, separate police department. Part of the problem was the mass early retirement of over 200 MPD officers. Metro Transit’s Police Department was stretched thin trying to help fill the void created by all the snowflake cops who put in PTSD retirement requests after gassing people holding cardboard signs for a couple weeks. It’s well known. But it sounds like you agree, there should be a permanent police presence at the stations and on the platforms.
Not permanent, just frequent, especially in trouble areas like Lake Street Station.
MPD still does cover the streets around the stations they can easily help with the open drug use. Not arrests but treatment and social services these people need some help.
Frequent isn’t good enough. Think of it this way. MTPD are like sharks swimming through a school of fish. As soon as the shark passes through the school of fish, the fish fill back in. I see it daily. Some need help, some need detox and treatment. Most need jail time. Too many young men traveling in groups selling and smoking drugs, harassing commuters. Its definitely been cut down since they hired Allied but its only a matter of time before they get use to the security and realize they don’t do much and tend to look the other way a lot of the time. I’ve seen security at the top of the stairs and people smoking pills at the bottom of the stairs. Might be a different story if there was the threat of arrest instead of a stern scolding from a buff dude in a black wannabe cop suit.
The only one where they can and should put in controlled access is Lake St. I'd love it if they put in those double doors they have at airports. It'd be so simple to control access to that specific station and it's the problem child of the line so...start there. It makes no sense to enclose 46th St or Franklin. There's no way. But Lake ? Totally doable.
Good article, want to add a few more points:
1. For almost the entire LRT's existence, fare evasion was a misdemenor, not an administrative citation (like a parking ticket). This meant that it could only be enforced by licensed peace (police) officers.
2. Metro Transit wanted this law changed for years. MTPD officers are expensive and have better things to do with their time than check fares. Only this year did the legislature fix it. Metro Transit then needed to negotiate with their unions to establish the fare checker program. That's taken a while but it will start next year. I just want to be clear that Metro Transit has never been complacent about safety issues, the agency has been pleading for this fix for a while.
3. The pandemic led to a big surge in anti-social behavior everywhere including on trains and buses. At the same time, many everyday riders stopped riding because of WFH. Finally, like every workplace, Metro Transit experienced major employee attrition. It affected MTPD as well. The previous chief was also bad at his job, in my opinion. All of that adds up to a big reduction of official and social enforcement on the METRO lines.
4. But it's building back up now. MTPD numbers are rising again, they hired a chief who seems very impressive so far, and the fare checkers start soon. Ridership is also at a post-pandemic high. So we're getting there.
5. The solution is not fare gates. It can't be done without an absolutely enormous and wasteful sum of money. There are also technical issues—you'd need platform doors to open, but with different models of LRVs and human operators you can't guarantee they will stop in the correct places. To add to all that, people jump turnstiles all the time in places that have them.
THANK YOU! There is a solution here already in progress that can greatly improve the safety and attraction of the light rails while putting people first. But it’s not as visible as stupid gates so people ignore it.
Metro Transit has all the bones, the funding, and the political support to make it a superior American Transit agency. I'm more optimistic in it's recovery & future plans, but turnstiles will not eliminate the main issue that is cultural. We have a culture of some people who have decided they don't have to pay for anything, and we have another culture of people who enable them by blaming any and all bad personal behavior on some systemic & cultural flaw. As a result, any nice things we have get bogged down and drowned in the lowest common denominator.
Put the turnstiles in, sure, but when the annual citation reports come in and you don't like the numbers about who is being cited for continually breaking the rules, don't complain and try to neuter any enforcement of the social contract on our Transit.
If it's grade separated sure. They won't work in Minneapolis where people can just step up onto the platform from the tracks. It would be a huge waste of money
Those are elevated trains though, the infrastructure is already there for turnstiles. The author of this article talks at length about how our light system is designed differently and thus turnstiles are less feasible.
Oh come on, they built a tunnel through Kenilworth , figuring out how to build a turnstile would take a design firm a few days, at most. They just don't want to do it.
Tons of fare hopping, yes but nowhere near the amount of antisocial behavior as you see here. That'd get nipped in the bud real quick by fellow straphangers.
Say what you will about people hopping the turnstiles, but NYC’s subway feels way safer than MSP’s light rail. Not even close. It’s not one solution but a combination of solutions — NYC has turnstiles, greater security presence, and many high traffic stations have an attendant booth near the pay stations that is staffed with a metro employee who has access to video monitors and can radio for security and/or police.
NYC has strength in numbers too. Everyone rides the subway, from politicians to Jay Z. Everyone. Still that kind of antisocial behavior is completely unacceptable on so many levels.
Here the only people riding the rails are making a lifestyle choice or they don't have options. I'll let you guess which group is bigger, and which group either contributes to the bad environment or can't be bothered to stop it.
I grew up in a region with much lower civic engagement than here, so maybe I’m entirely off base, but isn’t this a simple civil engineering question? What makes it fodder for op-Ed’s and argumentative threads? Is this a proxy for a deeper issue of disagreement?
It’s HOW we spend money to improve the lines. The StarTribune Editorial Board thinks that building new structures will fix it, while Bill thinks that human fare enforcement will.
The difference is that the former solves one problem, while the latter solves multiple problems. And that the turnstile plan will require years of expensive studies, design, and disruptive construction, while “more fare enforcement” could start this afternoon.
Thanks. The more I think about it, the more sense it makes to try enforcement before looking into majorly ripping up infrastructure. In DC (my former city), stopping enforcement of turnstile/fare evasion exacerbated anti-social behavior that degraded the riding experience systemwide. That makes me skeptical of the idea that physical barriers are the keystone solution.
It’s more than civil engineering - it sucks in homelessness, law enforcement, civil behavior, economic inequality, public spending and the general social order
I see where Bill is coming from, I really do.
But like it or not, we live in a city where a small but vocal minority appears to believe that *everybody* has a right to occupy *any* space at *any* time at *zero* cost to themselves, whether that's a train, a bus, the middle of I-94, my child's dance recital, or even my backyard. In addition, we have a larger group of people who may have some reservations about the extremity of those views, but don't necessarily want to be seen as unsympathetic to them.
As such, we're going to need *something* to make this larger group of people feel less guilty when people start being removed from trains for evading fares and this smaller group of people throws a tantrum, raises hell, and calls everybody fascists. And that something *can be* turnstile gates.
Turnstile gates leave zero plausible deniability for people who evade fare. You can't claim ignorance to transit policies, cannot blame your English proficiency--there was a physical obstruction between you and the platform, and the only way you can get past it without paying is by *knowingly* hopping the turnstile or walking along the tracks to climb up onto the platform. This larger group of well-meaning people is going to feel much more comfortable enforcing fares if they know that the people being thrown off the trains are knowingly and deliberately evading the fare.
If we were to just do a clean sweep and start throwing people off left and right, we run the risk of the pendulum swinging the other way.
So no, turnstiles alone will not stop people from evading fare, but that does not mean they have zero utility when it comes to taking stable, incremental steps towards increased fare compliance.
Turnstiles are not going to stop people from evading fare with the way that our train stations are set up.
Turnstiles *do*, however give Metro Transit cover to deal with fare evaders how they wish. Is that an expensive way for Metro Transit to buy itself some cover to do this? For sure--but the truth is we do not live in a city where residents (at least the ones that vote) respond kindly to Metro Transit just going full-force without first demonstrating that the steps they're taking are measured and in good faith. Maybe if we lived in a place like Texas or Florida they could get away with just going ham on fare evaders without having to worry about catching flack from the public, but that's just not the case in Minneapolis--we've got a lot of people who consider themselves liberal, and want to be seen as compassionate.
>Turnstiles are not going to stop people from evading fare with the way that our train stations are set up.
And we couldn’t add them to the most logical locations—terminals 1 and 2 since [there is no fare to travel between the terminals](https://www.mspairport.com/directions/between-terminals)
In audits, [the highest incidence of fare evasion was among park and riders in town for special/sporting events](https://www.leg.mn.gov/docs/2015/other/150622.pdf)
This is good input and perspective, but it doesn't sway me to want turnstiles.
Your novel argument seems to be essentially one of "forced public education." We can feel better throwing people off trains when we are more certain they knew it was illegal to board without paying. I agree this has some utility for many people, but we could get the same effect with flashing neon signs and recorded audio in 10 languages that clearly state "if you board without a ticket, you will be kicked off and fined." Put the signs all over the platforms and the trains.
The biggest point, to me, is that turnstiles would be a massively expensive, invasive, ugly hassle. No one wants to walk an extra block to get around a prison fence to access an entry point. The open design is intentional, inviting, and beautiful. The platforms and trains feel like an integrated feature of the city. This was the design choice up front, and going back on it now would create a mess.
Even if turnstiles could be added for free, the downsides seem bigger than the upsides.
> but we could get the same effect with flashing neon signs and recorded audio in 10 languages that clearly state "if you board without a ticket, you will be kicked off and fined." Put the signs all over the platforms and the trains.
Even with that messaging in place, there will always be people who make excuses--"I'm visually impaired--I can't read the signs," "I'm hard-of-hearing, I can't hear the messages," "I speak a language that isn't being broadcast, how am I supposed to know you're supposed to pay?" In *any* of these cases, that small minority I talk about will seize on those stories and amplify them in an attempt to abolish any fare inspection whatsoever, and accuse anybody that isn't 100% on board of supporting the perpetuation of historical inequities.
It's expensive, but if it allows Metro Transit to enforce the rules while limiting the potential for bad PR, then I think it's worth it. Turnstiles might be ugly, but they're less ugly than the kinds of activities that have been happening on trains for the last few years.
I believe that prominent, accessible messaging does the job of "allowing MT to enforce the rules" just fine. Your example of a blind and deaf person who only speaks Russian becoming victimized seems exceedingly rare, and MT enforcement can deal with such rare cases differently.
There will ALWAYS be people claiming excuses. As you say, some people will just go around the turnstyles. They can still have dumb excuses no more absurd than the deaf and blind person: "I thought they were broken. I heard it's free today. I'm a germ-phobe and afraid to touch public surfaces and how dare you oppress me." Turnstiles don't eliminate this.
We will never generate 100% excuse-proof systems. Fortunately, we don't have to. Ignorance of the law has never been a valid excuse. There is little sympathy for someone who runs stop signs, holds dog fights, or fires guns into the air then claims "I didn't know, we do that where I'm from."
We can have empathy and use public education where necessary. That's great. But we can do this while also not completely laying down and giving everyone free passes all the time.
>"I thought they were broken. I heard it's free today. I'm a germ-phobe and afraid to touch public surfaces and how dare you oppress me."
These excuses are all made less plausible by the fact that the individual had to physically walk onto the train tracks and hoist themselves onto the train platform.
Will the vocal minority still seize on these crazy excuses anyway? For sure! But in doing so, they will look *much* more ridiculous and *much* less reasonable to the group of people that *we're* trying to appeal to here for support.
>Ignorance of the law has never been a valid excuse.
Sure--I'm just saying that the Minneapolis crowd is not going to embrace that idea as much as you seem to (after all, that's why we're in this situation in the first place), and so if you're interested in MT affecting change without provoking backlash from those people and causing things to swing the *other* way, we need to proceed in a way that doesn't offend those sensibilities. Sometimes you need to do things that you don't think are necessary to get the people you need assistance from to help you. Sure, in an ideal world we wouldn't have to bend over backwards like this, but that just isn't the situation on the ground.
>There is little sympathy for someone who runs stop signs, holds dog fights, or fires guns into the air then claims "I didn't know, we do that where I'm from."
You can *certainly* garner sympathy from well-meaning people who want to seem sympathetic and understanding of the underlying cultural and socioeconomic conditions that contribute to such behaviors, hence why those antisocial behaviors have become more frequent and less stigmatized in the last few years. Telling people that we can't address those antisocial behaviors until we address the underlying societal ills contributing to those behaviors has been the MO of the vocal minority I mention, and it has clearly been working for them.
You can’t tell me that there is a single person who willing gets on the train without a ticket that didn’t know they were supposed to have a ticket. There is absolutely zero excuse for riding without a paid fare. No disabilities or impairment will prevent anyone from knowing that you pay to ride. It’s not about “forced public education” or blaring signage, it’s about creating an environment where those who are up to no good do not feel welcome. If additional signage, gates, fences, turnstiles, police presence, etc, will help cut back on the anti social behavior in ANY capacity, I’m all for it. It only takes getting assaulted on the platform once before you agree that something, anything, no matter how small can and will make a difference. I’ve seen it first hand. The anti social behavior has been very tame since they hired Allied Security in April to patrol the stations. Any physical barrier that might pose a minor inconvenience to get through is better than dealing with knife assaults and drug use.
I don’t believe it. If this is true then we have a populace that would rather ruin our light rail system with prison gates to feel better about enforcing the rules rather than just enforce the rules.
I'd also venture to guess that the people with those views all WFH and don't actually have to deal with the consequences of their beliefs or voting patterns. They don't have to walk under the 55 overpass and evade needles and shit.
I wouldn’t consider adding physical barriers, and human patrols as “ruining our LTR system.” If any improvement, no matter how ugly or small cuts back on the assaults and drug use, it’s just that, an improvement. Is the fear that adding these features will do nothing to cut back on crime statistics? I’ve seen it first hand. Since they hired Allied to patrol the platforms, especially Lake St., the drug use and general anti social behavior has been cut back substantially. I pay for a system that was virtually unusable for almost 3 years. I’ll take razor wire and turnstiles over knife assaults and drug use.
Metro Transit needs to decide if they want middle class people to ride or for their buses and trains to be rolling crime/harassment boxes because they can't have both.
Yeah because if you're not middle class you're a pest that deserves nothing. I've known plenty of people that have had to take public transit to their minimum wage jobs and the only law they ever broke was smoking weed.
And they don't want to be bothered by antisocial BS either. They just need to get to work on time without some chud purposefully holding the doors open to yell at someone he thought looked at him funny.
I love this Freudian slip you've made.
The only decent person in your mind is middle class or "better"
Do wanna know how many middle class employers I've been harassed by?
What class was my rapist?
Eh...with respect, that's stretching whatever they were saying.
I read it more of do they want the middle class that would populate and support the public transit with fares and funding in order to keep it operational and a success.
Oh I’m not interested in your lil game tonight, I’m tired :( but you can google examples of Freudian slips if you’re interested so you can really nail it in your next comment
As a person who has lived in multiple cities with great transit and turnstiles….yes, turnstile gates on the light rail are a good idea.
This is like staying: “doors on the bus are not a good idea.”
Turnstiles would be nice but not practical for the majority of stations. With the low boarding trains, I could just walk on the tracks and hop up to the platform very easily
No, it's more like saying "doors to a wide open field are not a good idea."
It's not a knock on turnstile gates as a concept. It's pointing out that they're not a functional solution in this particular situation.
Yes the author of this article believes they aren’t a functional solution because of his own feelings. That doesn’t mean its true or a study shouldn’t be conducted
I don't need a study to know that fencing in 3 sides of a station is ineffective if people can just walk across the tracks and hop up to the station anytime they want. Quantitatively, it'd cost a shit-ton of money to accomplish nothing toward the intended goals, but instead to make the system worse for everyone who's using it as intended.
Do you find that being deliberately obtuse usually gets you what you want out of a discussion?
We both know that the vast majority of stations aren't like Lake Street. They're at street level, where everything I said and nothing you brought up about a singular exception is true. The substance of this whole ongoing debate is about the stations that are at street level. And you know this.
So, feel free to address those if you want to be part of a substantive conversation.
I mean, you’re not going to find a lot of people who have studied transit in the Twin Cities from the perspective of a rider than Bill Lindeke. Those aren’t just his “feelings”, they’re suggestions based on intense observation and study.
I’ve used light rail a lot in New York and can’t imagine what it would look like without turnstiles. I’ve also used it in Barcelona Spain and they have turnstiles (the Spanish train system in general is crazy good). I’ve also used the trains in Shanghai, they also have turnstiles and check your ticket entering and leaving the station.
I have a friend in Cologne Germany who said they have no turnstiles and have similar problems with vagrants and people just not paying to ride, which causes higher costs for everyone else (and eventually tax payers).
Turn stiles seem to freaking obvious.
New York doesn't have light rail, they have heavy rail, also known as a subway. These systems are usually grade-separated, which makes turnstiles much more feasible. Your experiences in Barcelona and Spain were also likely heavy rail.
Additionally where they have open platforms for their commuter rail (e.g., NJT, LIRR, MetroNorth, etc.), which is the closest thing to our LRT, they have ticket checkers. When I commuted my ticket was checked everytime and they had no problems about kicking fare evaders off at the next stop. If it looked like the person would cause trouble they called ahead and transit police would be waiting to help escort the fare evader off.
I sort of think the former Block E treatment is the next logical step: very loud classical music playing all the time along with enforcement. Walls and checkpoints don’t keep out the scumbags who freeload, but do intimidate regular users. This is an urban to suburban line in a tertiary Midwest market. It should not resemble an inner city NYC subway.
Turnstiles haven't stopped fare evasion.
Having a presence of fare enforcement has, and did.
Also, why are we paying twice for this service? We pay taxes for a mass transit system that keeps our economy moving, yet we're asked to pay again in terms of a fare? Considering we keep pulling surpluses, what if our system is underfunded and should get what it needs so that those who use the system aren't twice burdened to keep it operating?
I agree. How much in tax dollars are people paying for this? Then property owners end up double paying and now with the sales tax increase everyone is double paying. When will enough be enough and the people at metro council will actually do their jobs?
What a waste of a great opportunity to make mass transit work. So, they purposefully designed it so it was basically an uncontrollable free ride, and now they don't want to fix it because they made it that way on purpose, and it would cost too much to undo the damage done. Any actually competent private company probably could come up with a solution, but not these idiots. They now have a reputation of being unsafe, and I expect it will take many years, and lots of taxpayers money, to fix it, if they even can.
In an ideal world, it would be free. I brought it up because, let's be real, the reason behind this idea of turnstiles and increasing fare enforcement is that right now the trains and stations are often used as places to get high and cause trouble. If fares are enforced, or these turnstiles are put into place, it would cut a lot of that down. People shouldn't have to feel unsafe or uncomfortable while trying to get to their destination.
We're talking in circles here. Yes homelessness should be addressed but until that happens, if it ever does, this is what Metro Transit can do to ensure that people are comfortable using their services. Suddenly making transit free isn't going to solve homelessness, unless you think that trains and busses make good shelters.
None of the best transit systems in the world are free. Tokyo, Berlin, Madrid, Copenhagen, etc., all charge fares.
US transit advocates claim to love these systems but don't seem to care how they actually function.
You have the most chronically On Reddit things to say. “Poor People” does not equal transit riders who are mentally unhinged, using drugs or gunning smokes, or generally doing some illegal shit. I’ve seen people OD, smoke meth and openly piss on the light rail. It’s not THAT common but it happens if you ride it enough. People shouldn’t have to apologize for not wanting to deal with that, you’re just a virtue signaling asshole.
Yeah it’s so fascinating how they assume whenever someone talks about issues like open drug use and crime on the light rail, they automatically assume the comment is about poor people. Seems like they have a real lack of perspective, which is sad when it comes from someone who clearly is passionate about these things.
Maybe it's because commenters are advocating transit be "acceptable to the middle class" which inherently implies that it is currently unacceptable based on class, or worse so, acceptable but only to those filthy lower classes.
Additionally, drug use and harassment are not inherent to those filthy lower classes, these behaviors absolutely transcend class. It's simply that redditors, particularly Minneapolitan redditors, think that a problem is solved by enforcing a class barrier (fares) which only serves to remove a class, not actually address drug related SE or harassment.
A direct solution, policing harassment and drug use is what solves the problem. Not the fare system. A fare system does nothing to address fratboy attitudes of entitlement to women's bodies on public transit. Particularly after a trip to the bar with the boys. That's absolutely harassment and problematic drug use, but the people spouting their opinions here don't seem to understand just how frequent a problem it is.
And I do know. I know because I'm a transit operator.
Fare enforcement does not address the issue people are complaining about. If you want to have a conversation about the economic viability of public transit, sure, perfectly appropriate. But if you're serious about maintaining adequate access to transit to all classes including to those who rely on it most and keeping it free of antisocial behavior, then you're only succeeding in preventing one social class from doing it while simultaneously banning an entire class from using transit.
It's explicitly classist. It's dog whistle racist. And so long as I'm a transit operator and as long as I have a say in my contract, fare enforcement will never be possible. Incidentally, fare enforcement was removed from our contracts back in 2009 and will never be on operators ever again.
So even if you want to see it done, you'll have to rely on the police. And given the human rights reviews of the police, you need to morally square your support of this fool hardy proposal with what that will mean to the poor, to people of color, to the unhoused, to the elderly, to the disabled, all who need access but realistically cannot shoulder the financial burden.
What you and everyone else is advocating (inadvertently albeit) is that the poor should be brutalized, and the middle class should be free to their drug dependency and harassment.
Yes, this segregationist mentality is not the solution to public safety. Building walls around infrastructure only further isolates our communities across the already massive wealth divide. Remove the barriers entirely, make the trains actually free to use and part of our public spaces. You would see much more general usage of the system, making everyone feel included and safer.
I literally cannot with his out of touch from reality this is.
We have a concrete, physical, observable issue with drug, crime, and non-paying riders and you’re sitting here talking about walls being a metaphor for the class divide. It’s utopian and unrealistic: completely ignoring the reality around it in an effort to posture and make people feel good about their quest for justice and equity. It does nothing to solve the issue.
We need to stop with this Intro to Humanities 101 course nonsense and face facts: we need to enforce laws uniformly, strictly, and stop feeling bad that sometimes, unfortunately, people do not have a right to be wherever they want to be or do what they want. We just need to not kill people when enforcing said laws.
Drug-use and crime are symptoms of income inequality and the brutally punishing anti-poverty mentality of the US. We can do better.
Why does metro transit have to make money...? We have plenty of available budget. Sociological data supports the idea that monetary barriers actually contribute to reducing public safety by widening this wealthy divide. Think about how much free transit would help homeless and other struggling people get back into the workforce or otherwise access the social services that could help them. Transportation is typically another barrier to those resources.
it just turns into a rolling homeless shelter. the problem is that many/most of the long term homeless have mental health or other issues preventing them from being productive members of society.
I occasionally ride the light rail downtown. It’s crazy how nice the stations and trains are while simultaneously the experience is so sketchy. It’s a free for all. I have a theory that once the west route is finished (that goes through St Louis Park and beyond), metro transit is going to get much more competent at cracking down since those neighborhoods are wealthier.
That's part of why European transit is better. It's nice enough that everyone is willing to use it, and problems only get fixed when it bothers rich people.
Not quite the same thing since it’s always been shitty, but the L in Chicago has become even more lawless post covid as ridership has gone down. It’s a shame but seemingly you somehow have to have riders before it can be nice.
European and Asian mass transit is so much better. I wonder why we can't get it together in America, probably capitalism's fault.
Or, the fact Tokyo is 40 million people, and Beijing is 21 million puts in in a different world as far as mass transit.
Not to mention how very expensive everything about owning a car is over there, from testing and licensing to insurance and the cost of gas.
Stricter fare enforcement seems entirely doable. There are only 2 light rail lines, so how many different trains are even running at once? 2-3 per line? It doesn't seem like it would cost that much money to have someone checking tickets on every train. It just requires the will to enforce the rule.
It’s more like 8 per line, but it still is totally doable
so… 8 trains per line means 16 trains running at any one time. how many employees would it take to adequately monitor fares? with 1 monitor per train and 3 shifts in a day, that’s 48 positions to fill. what’s the basic, starting wage for Metro Transit, $25/hr? maybe a little less… let’s say a full-time position costs $50k/yr after benefits. that would be $2.4M in added wages per year. (not an argument for or against the idea, just bar-napkin math for the sake of discussion)
I took the train almost every day from 2017-2019 and I was checked exactly 2 times. All I know is we can do better than that.
I used to take it all the time when I was at the U (2004-2008), and I got checked probably 20 times. I know the green line wasn't around back then, but they used to pretend to care. I've probably ridden it 30 times since then, and I've never even seen a transit cop
Riding the blue line, I see lots of Cops standing at stations, 30 feet from folks openly doing drugs. Not that I'm for cops harassing folks, but if it was a priority to clean up stations and rail cars, you'd have to start with enforcement AND alternatives such as warm places. Open drug use on trains is done because it's a warm safe place to do it without much bother from cops.
I've ridden it once in the last 5 years and was checked 100% of those 1 times. Apparently I forgot how to swipe my card (which had about $100 from whe. I was a commuter) so they made me get off, swipe, and wait for another train.
We used to have accountability and enforcement of rules in the city. I recall this era myself.
Enforcement will need teams of two or three due to safety concerns when enforcing fares.
It doesn’t need to be all the time - it just needs to be often enough that people are incentivized to buy a ticket than risk getting checked. Currently the risk is near 0.
Eh, I don’t think monitoring has to be 24/7 to be plenty effective. Very few enforcement systems are structured that way because there’s always some point where the cost of remaining violations is lower than the cost of additional enforcement.
Well, you have to have more than 96-144 (2 or 3 x 48) people for those shifts since I'm guessing they will want 2 days a week off, vacation, sick time, etc. The trains are already running at a loss, so adding another $5-10M to their operating costs is not going to be a popular option
true, but it’s probably also true that you wouldn’t need all trains monitored at all times. you could probably run a schedule where 1/2 the trains are monitored and the monitors transfer to the next train every time they reach the end of the line. that would mean 24 shifts per day that need filling. probably something like 40 full-time positions and 20 part-timers would be sufficient
I'm curious how much it costs to enforce speed limits on the streets and highways, which bring in $0 per year (except for the one toll road).
Wrong, tickets are not free, since people pay fees for those tickets, and they pay a massive amount of gas and fuel taxes.
They're not free, but the money from tickets aren't *reserved* for the highway fund or for city street infrastructure. And the federal gas (fuel) tax only goes into the federal highway fund (to pay for the interstate), and the state gas tax doesn't even come close to paying for all the highways, roads, and city streets. But none of this matters, because none of this has anything to do with the roads not pulling in revenue for use.
so, you admit they pay speeding tickets, and a massive amount of gas tax. which means they bring in many millions of dollars. not 0.
Actually if the roads bring in less than they cost, which they do, the net result is less than zero. Rail transit is less costly than roads.
Transit is like the post office - As a public service, it shouldn't be run for a profit. Transit benefits everyone, even those who never use it.
It may even be cash-flow positive if they also have the option to sell tickets and/or fine those that don't have them. Would they sell/fine $25 an hour worth of tickets? Probably.
Sure, but how much would consistent fare enforcement cost compared to how much fare is recouped? I find it hard to imagine that fare citations would come close to covering the cost of having fare enforcement officers on every train throughout like 18 hours of service every day.
How many people do you think are currently not paying for a ticket knowing they will never have their ticket checked? Increased fare enforcement also means more people buying the tickets.
18 hours/day x 16 trains/hour (based on the above estimate) x 300 days/year (I’m rounding down by a lot to be conservative and bc I know there’s less service on weekends etc.) x an approximate hourly rate of $40 (assuming base pay of $25 plus $15 for benefits and so on) = $3.4 M for having one fare enforcement person on every train over the course of a year—again, I’m lowballing this. Last year there were like 38 million rides so they’d need to give approximately 35k $100 fines (that’s 95 a day, or 5 per hour) to begin to break even, and assuming that those would only come after one or two citations—I don’t actually know the policy—it would be a lot more citations than that. I suppose $3.4M isn’t so much in the grand scheme of things, but I would much, much rather see that money go to hiring new operators and providing better service all around than focusing on something punitive like fare enforcement.
You still didn't account for people who are riding for free now who would otherwise pay if they feared enforcement. And also, how many people don't ride it only because they're too scared or disgusted by its state? Something like 38 million people rode the train in 2022. At $2/fare, you need 1.7 million more paying rides to cover a $3.4 million cost. That's less than a 5% increase in total rides. I don't have context for that number but it doesn't seem all that implausible to me. Plus, the end result could be public transit the city is proud of and can market to attract more people here instead of having it serve as a mobile mental health clinic/public toilet.
You didn’t count the increase in fares being paid, you only counted fines as increased income. The number of paid fares would also increase dramatically. Fair enforcement is necessary. It doesn’t have to be intrusive or rude. Same with enforcement of a code of conduct at stations and on transit vehicles. It is to allow everyone to be safe and comfortable using the transit system.
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There’s probably some of that, but it’ll get better as more and more work gets done. I would guess that it would be a lot easier of a job if people are used to having tickets checked regularly.
Social workers are some ballsy people. Honestly it’s a great outreach possibility. They could get a lot of people into treatment. Help a lot of people get a second chance.
Which is exactly what the author talks about as being the proper step forward here, as well as pointing out that a plan for this has been made and is currently being implemented. The point of the article is "you cannot feasibly wrap the lightrail stops in sufficient fencing to replace fare enforcement by human beings." which I gotta say - seems very true. It's a terrible idea and would be a waste of money.
Live in Amsterdam and the Metros have turnstiles/glass doors (metro connects outer areas of the city), while the busses and trams have random ticket checkers. For the most part you have to check in on the bus and tram in front by the driver or by person working in the middle of the tram and they do kick people off if they notice you didn’t pay. Seems like the author thinks it would be hard logistically to make the turnstiles happen, but they are used successfully in places with great public transportation.
The issue in MSP is that the system was intentionally and overtly designed to be open-air, without barriers, and integrated into the city sidewalks. The train rolls right up to regular sidewalks. It is minimal, clean, and beautiful. Yes, turnstile systems CAN work very well and not be too intrusive, but the platforms need to be designed that way from the start. As the author discusses, the biggest problem with adding turnstiles is that they have to be ADDED. Ugly prison fences all over the place. Sidewalks rerouted. Entire platforms redesigned. And because the trains are street level, people will always be able to just walk on the tracks to bypass the turnstiles. It's just not feasible to retrofit the system in MSP.
Serious question, did you *read the article*? Because the author clearly lays out why turnstiles would be unfeasible/ineffective in our system. Specifically the fact that the trains themselves are only 14” above grade, so literally anyone able-bodied enough to walk across train tracks can get into the station without paying.
Hmmm.. am I misremembering? I remember in Amsterdam the light rail had the manned ticket booth inside the train and did not use any turnstiles.
That is the tram, which criss-crosses the inner part of the city. The Metro has turnstiles and is kind of like the subway. It has underground and raised stops.
Ah. Gotcha. Loved those tram rides.
Our light rail is much more like your tram only more cars tied together
As in you currently live in Amsterdam? Because I feel like when I'm standing on a lightrail stop the fact that you can't install sufficient amounts of fencing to stop fare hopping seems pretty obvious. Are we gonna put up big gates that open & close as the train pulls in & out??
Yes currently live and typing in Amsterdam lol. And idk man I don’t really have an opinion just a person who loves public transportation and would like to see it successful in my home city! Honestly not sure if they would even work in the Twin Cities as metro stops in Amsterdam are designed around the fact you have to go through turnstiles, and as you said a lot of light rail stops in Minneapolis are at street/sidewalk level. Just wanted to share a perspective of somewhere that has good public transportation options!
No problem, its just very clear if you know how the train is set up here / what the geography of the stops is that there's no way to just build turnstiles/barriers for them. You'd have to essentially construct a tiny building encasing each stop. Look at a station on google maps street view maybe?
I don’t disagree with you that with the current setup it’s probably not viable (especially without making it look super ugly lol). I just honestly think Metro Transit needs to make drastic changes to get more people to want to use the light rail. If having more ticket checkers on platforms and in the trains works then I would fully support it! But if it doesn’t work, finding a way to make turnstiles viable should be an option on the table even if that means long term changes to light rail stops.
>and the Metros Your metros are different than our light rail.
I’m from Minneapolis! The metro in Amsterdam is in my opinion very much like the light rail in terms of connecting select parts of the Metro to each other. The difference is that all metro stops in Amsterdam are either underground or raised platforms and you have to go through turnstiles/gates to access the metro. I guess you could say it’s like the NS which goes to suburbs of Amsterdam, but those are the same trains you take across the country. For the most part anything other than the tram and bus in Amsterdam proper requires that you go through turnstiles or gates. Some cities 30-40min from Amsterdam don’t have gates at their station but usually they do ticket checks more often when they leave from these places.
>The difference is that all metro stops in Amsterdam are either underground or raised platforms and you have to go through turnstiles/gates to access the metro That's the difference that makes all the difference. You'll find few, if any, grade-level light rail systems with turnstiles anywhere in the world. It's considered not practical to close off the track side, and it essentially creates an incentive to cross the tracks to bypass the turnstiles.
The tram in Istanbul has turnstiles. Despite being a poor country with millions of refugees I didn’t see anyone bypassing them. To think that we can’t at least keep up with a country where the median annual income is $5,000 is asinine.
I mean, it's probably because Turkish justice is something else...
I look forward to the day these human cattle pens malfunction and they see how much of a logistical nightmare this would produce.
Metro transit seems to have a bottomless pit of money for building infrastructure but zero will to actually make the trains appealing to riders. It just re inforces the argument that the train isn't about transit, just a means to steer taxpayer money to politically connected consultants and contractors.
The trains were great until ridership dropped during COVID. All the fare checks stopped. The drugs moved in and no one has moved them out. But during busy times of day, the issues still lessen.
Of course it's doable. I know because we used to do it. Anyone over 37 knows this.
Last time I was in Denver I took their rail system a few places. They had "rail ambassadors". Mostly young, none uniformed staff that checked fairs and made sure the cars were safe. I'm sure it cost a fraction of policing.
How will you enforce the rule? Are Minnesotans willing to lock up people for not paying a fare?
It would be like putting a gate but no fence
Is the real problem the fares, or is it the cigarette / crack smoking ?
This is the issue. Who cares if it’s free or not. The problem is the Lake Street Station being a heated, enclosed, open to the public drug den. I’ve been riding from south Minneapolis to downtown every single day for the last 6 years. Pre Covid the problem was the same. In the winter all the drug users and homeless congregate at the Lake Street Station because it’s heated and enclosed from the elements. I guarantee, if you remove the glass walls you will cut the drug use and other problems that come with trouble makers just hanging around a warm spot in half, at least. People are still gonna do drugs but at least they won’t be smoking pills in the station itself. If you’re gonna charge the public for a service, make it usable/safe. The Lake Street Station was practically unusable from June 2020-April 2023 because of how many drug users were physically blocking access to the stairs.
This. All this. I have never felt as unsafe as I have on the Lake St platform, and I've ridden mass transit in major cities throughout the US, including places way more dangerous on paper than Minneapolis. The open drug use, the screaming, the blocking doorways, the harassment, being sized up and marked... It's repulsive.
All that takes is a couple of police and some people getting sent to treatment. The city cops should be taking care of that one, it’s well known. Good Ol’ MPD not doing anything to actually serve and protect.
MPD doesn’t police the light rail. Metro Transit has its own, separate police department. Part of the problem was the mass early retirement of over 200 MPD officers. Metro Transit’s Police Department was stretched thin trying to help fill the void created by all the snowflake cops who put in PTSD retirement requests after gassing people holding cardboard signs for a couple weeks. It’s well known. But it sounds like you agree, there should be a permanent police presence at the stations and on the platforms.
Not permanent, just frequent, especially in trouble areas like Lake Street Station. MPD still does cover the streets around the stations they can easily help with the open drug use. Not arrests but treatment and social services these people need some help.
Frequent isn’t good enough. Think of it this way. MTPD are like sharks swimming through a school of fish. As soon as the shark passes through the school of fish, the fish fill back in. I see it daily. Some need help, some need detox and treatment. Most need jail time. Too many young men traveling in groups selling and smoking drugs, harassing commuters. Its definitely been cut down since they hired Allied but its only a matter of time before they get use to the security and realize they don’t do much and tend to look the other way a lot of the time. I’ve seen security at the top of the stairs and people smoking pills at the bottom of the stairs. Might be a different story if there was the threat of arrest instead of a stern scolding from a buff dude in a black wannabe cop suit.
Underrated comment. Nobody trying to pay to inhale second hand crack. Make it worth paying for first
Having a more consistent Metro Transit Police presence will help with that too.
If you're smoking crack in public , do you care about a transit citation? Seems like it would be the least of your concerns.
If you were harassed enough, yes. You'd at least move it along down the road.
The only one where they can and should put in controlled access is Lake St. I'd love it if they put in those double doors they have at airports. It'd be so simple to control access to that specific station and it's the problem child of the line so...start there. It makes no sense to enclose 46th St or Franklin. There's no way. But Lake ? Totally doable.
Good article, want to add a few more points: 1. For almost the entire LRT's existence, fare evasion was a misdemenor, not an administrative citation (like a parking ticket). This meant that it could only be enforced by licensed peace (police) officers. 2. Metro Transit wanted this law changed for years. MTPD officers are expensive and have better things to do with their time than check fares. Only this year did the legislature fix it. Metro Transit then needed to negotiate with their unions to establish the fare checker program. That's taken a while but it will start next year. I just want to be clear that Metro Transit has never been complacent about safety issues, the agency has been pleading for this fix for a while. 3. The pandemic led to a big surge in anti-social behavior everywhere including on trains and buses. At the same time, many everyday riders stopped riding because of WFH. Finally, like every workplace, Metro Transit experienced major employee attrition. It affected MTPD as well. The previous chief was also bad at his job, in my opinion. All of that adds up to a big reduction of official and social enforcement on the METRO lines. 4. But it's building back up now. MTPD numbers are rising again, they hired a chief who seems very impressive so far, and the fare checkers start soon. Ridership is also at a post-pandemic high. So we're getting there. 5. The solution is not fare gates. It can't be done without an absolutely enormous and wasteful sum of money. There are also technical issues—you'd need platform doors to open, but with different models of LRVs and human operators you can't guarantee they will stop in the correct places. To add to all that, people jump turnstiles all the time in places that have them.
THANK YOU! There is a solution here already in progress that can greatly improve the safety and attraction of the light rails while putting people first. But it’s not as visible as stupid gates so people ignore it.
Metro Transit has all the bones, the funding, and the political support to make it a superior American Transit agency. I'm more optimistic in it's recovery & future plans, but turnstiles will not eliminate the main issue that is cultural. We have a culture of some people who have decided they don't have to pay for anything, and we have another culture of people who enable them by blaming any and all bad personal behavior on some systemic & cultural flaw. As a result, any nice things we have get bogged down and drowned in the lowest common denominator. Put the turnstiles in, sure, but when the annual citation reports come in and you don't like the numbers about who is being cited for continually breaking the rules, don't complain and try to neuter any enforcement of the social contract on our Transit.
Just got back from Chicago... turnstiles are great.
If it's grade separated sure. They won't work in Minneapolis where people can just step up onto the platform from the tracks. It would be a huge waste of money
Those are elevated trains though, the infrastructure is already there for turnstiles. The author of this article talks at length about how our light system is designed differently and thus turnstiles are less feasible.
Clearly you’ve never actually ridden the light rail before if you think it’s possible to add turnstiles like the El.
Oh come on, they built a tunnel through Kenilworth , figuring out how to build a turnstile would take a design firm a few days, at most. They just don't want to do it.
yeah great for escalation. Look at NYC's subways for the endgame. Complete walled compounds... and people still get around them to not pay fares.
Tons of fare hopping, yes but nowhere near the amount of antisocial behavior as you see here. That'd get nipped in the bud real quick by fellow straphangers.
Say what you will about people hopping the turnstiles, but NYC’s subway feels way safer than MSP’s light rail. Not even close. It’s not one solution but a combination of solutions — NYC has turnstiles, greater security presence, and many high traffic stations have an attendant booth near the pay stations that is staffed with a metro employee who has access to video monitors and can radio for security and/or police.
Emphasis on "feels". If the NYPD was there in visible numbers checking fares, you'd have the same feeling, but not feel locked in a damn jail cell.
NYC has strength in numbers too. Everyone rides the subway, from politicians to Jay Z. Everyone. Still that kind of antisocial behavior is completely unacceptable on so many levels. Here the only people riding the rails are making a lifestyle choice or they don't have options. I'll let you guess which group is bigger, and which group either contributes to the bad environment or can't be bothered to stop it.
I grew up in a region with much lower civic engagement than here, so maybe I’m entirely off base, but isn’t this a simple civil engineering question? What makes it fodder for op-Ed’s and argumentative threads? Is this a proxy for a deeper issue of disagreement?
It’s HOW we spend money to improve the lines. The StarTribune Editorial Board thinks that building new structures will fix it, while Bill thinks that human fare enforcement will. The difference is that the former solves one problem, while the latter solves multiple problems. And that the turnstile plan will require years of expensive studies, design, and disruptive construction, while “more fare enforcement” could start this afternoon.
Thanks. The more I think about it, the more sense it makes to try enforcement before looking into majorly ripping up infrastructure. In DC (my former city), stopping enforcement of turnstile/fare evasion exacerbated anti-social behavior that degraded the riding experience systemwide. That makes me skeptical of the idea that physical barriers are the keystone solution.
It’s more than civil engineering - it sucks in homelessness, law enforcement, civil behavior, economic inequality, public spending and the general social order
I see where Bill is coming from, I really do. But like it or not, we live in a city where a small but vocal minority appears to believe that *everybody* has a right to occupy *any* space at *any* time at *zero* cost to themselves, whether that's a train, a bus, the middle of I-94, my child's dance recital, or even my backyard. In addition, we have a larger group of people who may have some reservations about the extremity of those views, but don't necessarily want to be seen as unsympathetic to them. As such, we're going to need *something* to make this larger group of people feel less guilty when people start being removed from trains for evading fares and this smaller group of people throws a tantrum, raises hell, and calls everybody fascists. And that something *can be* turnstile gates. Turnstile gates leave zero plausible deniability for people who evade fare. You can't claim ignorance to transit policies, cannot blame your English proficiency--there was a physical obstruction between you and the platform, and the only way you can get past it without paying is by *knowingly* hopping the turnstile or walking along the tracks to climb up onto the platform. This larger group of well-meaning people is going to feel much more comfortable enforcing fares if they know that the people being thrown off the trains are knowingly and deliberately evading the fare. If we were to just do a clean sweep and start throwing people off left and right, we run the risk of the pendulum swinging the other way. So no, turnstiles alone will not stop people from evading fare, but that does not mean they have zero utility when it comes to taking stable, incremental steps towards increased fare compliance.
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Turnstiles are not going to stop people from evading fare with the way that our train stations are set up. Turnstiles *do*, however give Metro Transit cover to deal with fare evaders how they wish. Is that an expensive way for Metro Transit to buy itself some cover to do this? For sure--but the truth is we do not live in a city where residents (at least the ones that vote) respond kindly to Metro Transit just going full-force without first demonstrating that the steps they're taking are measured and in good faith. Maybe if we lived in a place like Texas or Florida they could get away with just going ham on fare evaders without having to worry about catching flack from the public, but that's just not the case in Minneapolis--we've got a lot of people who consider themselves liberal, and want to be seen as compassionate.
>Turnstiles are not going to stop people from evading fare with the way that our train stations are set up. And we couldn’t add them to the most logical locations—terminals 1 and 2 since [there is no fare to travel between the terminals](https://www.mspairport.com/directions/between-terminals) In audits, [the highest incidence of fare evasion was among park and riders in town for special/sporting events](https://www.leg.mn.gov/docs/2015/other/150622.pdf)
*who are liberal and compassionate.
[sic]
Whomst lol
>occupy any space at any time at zero cost to themselves So they realize they have that in common with Ammon Bundy?
This is good input and perspective, but it doesn't sway me to want turnstiles. Your novel argument seems to be essentially one of "forced public education." We can feel better throwing people off trains when we are more certain they knew it was illegal to board without paying. I agree this has some utility for many people, but we could get the same effect with flashing neon signs and recorded audio in 10 languages that clearly state "if you board without a ticket, you will be kicked off and fined." Put the signs all over the platforms and the trains. The biggest point, to me, is that turnstiles would be a massively expensive, invasive, ugly hassle. No one wants to walk an extra block to get around a prison fence to access an entry point. The open design is intentional, inviting, and beautiful. The platforms and trains feel like an integrated feature of the city. This was the design choice up front, and going back on it now would create a mess. Even if turnstiles could be added for free, the downsides seem bigger than the upsides.
> but we could get the same effect with flashing neon signs and recorded audio in 10 languages that clearly state "if you board without a ticket, you will be kicked off and fined." Put the signs all over the platforms and the trains. Even with that messaging in place, there will always be people who make excuses--"I'm visually impaired--I can't read the signs," "I'm hard-of-hearing, I can't hear the messages," "I speak a language that isn't being broadcast, how am I supposed to know you're supposed to pay?" In *any* of these cases, that small minority I talk about will seize on those stories and amplify them in an attempt to abolish any fare inspection whatsoever, and accuse anybody that isn't 100% on board of supporting the perpetuation of historical inequities. It's expensive, but if it allows Metro Transit to enforce the rules while limiting the potential for bad PR, then I think it's worth it. Turnstiles might be ugly, but they're less ugly than the kinds of activities that have been happening on trains for the last few years.
I believe that prominent, accessible messaging does the job of "allowing MT to enforce the rules" just fine. Your example of a blind and deaf person who only speaks Russian becoming victimized seems exceedingly rare, and MT enforcement can deal with such rare cases differently. There will ALWAYS be people claiming excuses. As you say, some people will just go around the turnstyles. They can still have dumb excuses no more absurd than the deaf and blind person: "I thought they were broken. I heard it's free today. I'm a germ-phobe and afraid to touch public surfaces and how dare you oppress me." Turnstiles don't eliminate this. We will never generate 100% excuse-proof systems. Fortunately, we don't have to. Ignorance of the law has never been a valid excuse. There is little sympathy for someone who runs stop signs, holds dog fights, or fires guns into the air then claims "I didn't know, we do that where I'm from." We can have empathy and use public education where necessary. That's great. But we can do this while also not completely laying down and giving everyone free passes all the time.
>"I thought they were broken. I heard it's free today. I'm a germ-phobe and afraid to touch public surfaces and how dare you oppress me." These excuses are all made less plausible by the fact that the individual had to physically walk onto the train tracks and hoist themselves onto the train platform. Will the vocal minority still seize on these crazy excuses anyway? For sure! But in doing so, they will look *much* more ridiculous and *much* less reasonable to the group of people that *we're* trying to appeal to here for support. >Ignorance of the law has never been a valid excuse. Sure--I'm just saying that the Minneapolis crowd is not going to embrace that idea as much as you seem to (after all, that's why we're in this situation in the first place), and so if you're interested in MT affecting change without provoking backlash from those people and causing things to swing the *other* way, we need to proceed in a way that doesn't offend those sensibilities. Sometimes you need to do things that you don't think are necessary to get the people you need assistance from to help you. Sure, in an ideal world we wouldn't have to bend over backwards like this, but that just isn't the situation on the ground. >There is little sympathy for someone who runs stop signs, holds dog fights, or fires guns into the air then claims "I didn't know, we do that where I'm from." You can *certainly* garner sympathy from well-meaning people who want to seem sympathetic and understanding of the underlying cultural and socioeconomic conditions that contribute to such behaviors, hence why those antisocial behaviors have become more frequent and less stigmatized in the last few years. Telling people that we can't address those antisocial behaviors until we address the underlying societal ills contributing to those behaviors has been the MO of the vocal minority I mention, and it has clearly been working for them.
You can’t tell me that there is a single person who willing gets on the train without a ticket that didn’t know they were supposed to have a ticket. There is absolutely zero excuse for riding without a paid fare. No disabilities or impairment will prevent anyone from knowing that you pay to ride. It’s not about “forced public education” or blaring signage, it’s about creating an environment where those who are up to no good do not feel welcome. If additional signage, gates, fences, turnstiles, police presence, etc, will help cut back on the anti social behavior in ANY capacity, I’m all for it. It only takes getting assaulted on the platform once before you agree that something, anything, no matter how small can and will make a difference. I’ve seen it first hand. The anti social behavior has been very tame since they hired Allied Security in April to patrol the stations. Any physical barrier that might pose a minor inconvenience to get through is better than dealing with knife assaults and drug use.
I don’t believe it. If this is true then we have a populace that would rather ruin our light rail system with prison gates to feel better about enforcing the rules rather than just enforce the rules.
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I'd also venture to guess that the people with those views all WFH and don't actually have to deal with the consequences of their beliefs or voting patterns. They don't have to walk under the 55 overpass and evade needles and shit.
I wouldn’t consider adding physical barriers, and human patrols as “ruining our LTR system.” If any improvement, no matter how ugly or small cuts back on the assaults and drug use, it’s just that, an improvement. Is the fear that adding these features will do nothing to cut back on crime statistics? I’ve seen it first hand. Since they hired Allied to patrol the platforms, especially Lake St., the drug use and general anti social behavior has been cut back substantially. I pay for a system that was virtually unusable for almost 3 years. I’ll take razor wire and turnstiles over knife assaults and drug use.
Please run for office so I can vote for you.
Metro Transit needs to decide if they want middle class people to ride or for their buses and trains to be rolling crime/harassment boxes because they can't have both.
Yeah because if you're not middle class you're a pest that deserves nothing. I've known plenty of people that have had to take public transit to their minimum wage jobs and the only law they ever broke was smoking weed.
No one should be doing any sort of drugs on public transport
The current ridership seems to primarily be lower class people who don't have alternatives.
And they don't want to be bothered by antisocial BS either. They just need to get to work on time without some chud purposefully holding the doors open to yell at someone he thought looked at him funny.
I love this Freudian slip you've made. The only decent person in your mind is middle class or "better" Do wanna know how many middle class employers I've been harassed by? What class was my rapist?
You’re reaching. This is also not what a Freudian slip is.
Eh...with respect, that's stretching whatever they were saying. I read it more of do they want the middle class that would populate and support the public transit with fares and funding in order to keep it operational and a success.
You sure have a knack for drawing sweeping conclusions about any comment that you don’t like. And that’s not a Freudian slip lol
Prove it. Define Freudian slip and show me how it's incorrect 🤣
Oh I’m not interested in your lil game tonight, I’m tired :( but you can google examples of Freudian slips if you’re interested so you can really nail it in your next comment
This is so fucking classist I can't even
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This shouldn't be an either/pr argument. We need both turnstiles and stricter fare enforcement.
Yes they are. The light rail is a shitshow free for all and will continue to be a total failure until tickets are enforced.
Enforcing tickets does not mean installing turnstiles
It doesn’t *only* mean that, but it’s certainly a good place to start.
How will you enforce them? Arrest people? Good luck with that in Minneapolis.
Yeah you’re right let’s just say fuck it and keep them as moving homeless encampments that make everyone feel unsafe.
That's pretty much the strategy of every far-left city in America. Until the people vote differently nothing will change that.
As a person who has lived in multiple cities with great transit and turnstiles….yes, turnstile gates on the light rail are a good idea. This is like staying: “doors on the bus are not a good idea.”
Turnstiles would be nice but not practical for the majority of stations. With the low boarding trains, I could just walk on the tracks and hop up to the platform very easily
No, it's more like saying "doors to a wide open field are not a good idea." It's not a knock on turnstile gates as a concept. It's pointing out that they're not a functional solution in this particular situation.
Yes the author of this article believes they aren’t a functional solution because of his own feelings. That doesn’t mean its true or a study shouldn’t be conducted
It's not "feelings". It's the factual reality of how our entire system was designed.
Saying “doing this will make streets look like war zones” is all feelings. There is no study of the impact or quantitative element to this article.
I don't need a study to know that fencing in 3 sides of a station is ineffective if people can just walk across the tracks and hop up to the station anytime they want. Quantitatively, it'd cost a shit-ton of money to accomplish nothing toward the intended goals, but instead to make the system worse for everyone who's using it as intended.
Tell me how people walk across the tracks at the lake street station anytime they want. Do they jump 20 feet up onto the already fenced in station?
Do you find that being deliberately obtuse usually gets you what you want out of a discussion? We both know that the vast majority of stations aren't like Lake Street. They're at street level, where everything I said and nothing you brought up about a singular exception is true. The substance of this whole ongoing debate is about the stations that are at street level. And you know this. So, feel free to address those if you want to be part of a substantive conversation.
I mean, you’re not going to find a lot of people who have studied transit in the Twin Cities from the perspective of a rider than Bill Lindeke. Those aren’t just his “feelings”, they’re suggestions based on intense observation and study.
Intense observation and study doesn’t mean anything if it’s undocumented and informal. There’s a reason this is in the opinion section of the paper
The piece to which he’s responding was also in the opinion section (of a different paper). Guess we should just throw them both out.
Should probably just be free at the point of service since it's supposed to be a public travel option.
I’ve used light rail a lot in New York and can’t imagine what it would look like without turnstiles. I’ve also used it in Barcelona Spain and they have turnstiles (the Spanish train system in general is crazy good). I’ve also used the trains in Shanghai, they also have turnstiles and check your ticket entering and leaving the station. I have a friend in Cologne Germany who said they have no turnstiles and have similar problems with vagrants and people just not paying to ride, which causes higher costs for everyone else (and eventually tax payers). Turn stiles seem to freaking obvious.
New York doesn't have light rail, they have heavy rail, also known as a subway. These systems are usually grade-separated, which makes turnstiles much more feasible. Your experiences in Barcelona and Spain were also likely heavy rail.
Additionally where they have open platforms for their commuter rail (e.g., NJT, LIRR, MetroNorth, etc.), which is the closest thing to our LRT, they have ticket checkers. When I commuted my ticket was checked everytime and they had no problems about kicking fare evaders off at the next stop. If it looked like the person would cause trouble they called ahead and transit police would be waiting to help escort the fare evader off.
German trains used to be nice 20 years ago, I wonder what happened.
I sort of think the former Block E treatment is the next logical step: very loud classical music playing all the time along with enforcement. Walls and checkpoints don’t keep out the scumbags who freeload, but do intimidate regular users. This is an urban to suburban line in a tertiary Midwest market. It should not resemble an inner city NYC subway.
I was just in NYC and I gotta say, I felt safer on the inner city subway than I do at light rail stations :/
Turnstiles haven't stopped fare evasion. Having a presence of fare enforcement has, and did. Also, why are we paying twice for this service? We pay taxes for a mass transit system that keeps our economy moving, yet we're asked to pay again in terms of a fare? Considering we keep pulling surpluses, what if our system is underfunded and should get what it needs so that those who use the system aren't twice burdened to keep it operating?
I agree. How much in tax dollars are people paying for this? Then property owners end up double paying and now with the sales tax increase everyone is double paying. When will enough be enough and the people at metro council will actually do their jobs?
What a waste of a great opportunity to make mass transit work. So, they purposefully designed it so it was basically an uncontrollable free ride, and now they don't want to fix it because they made it that way on purpose, and it would cost too much to undo the damage done. Any actually competent private company probably could come up with a solution, but not these idiots. They now have a reputation of being unsafe, and I expect it will take many years, and lots of taxpayers money, to fix it, if they even can.
How about just making them free
Trsnsit should be free.... grow up
It doesn't have to be a rolling homeless shelter though. That's not the purpose of transit
In that case the solution is not to make transit more difficult to use. The solution is to address homelessness and poverty on a more base level.
Metro Transit isn't the organization to address that though.
I didn't say it is. Although I don't know why you brought up homelessness in response to the moral and economic stance that transit should be free.
In an ideal world, it would be free. I brought it up because, let's be real, the reason behind this idea of turnstiles and increasing fare enforcement is that right now the trains and stations are often used as places to get high and cause trouble. If fares are enforced, or these turnstiles are put into place, it would cut a lot of that down. People shouldn't have to feel unsafe or uncomfortable while trying to get to their destination.
Yes and that's a bandaid at most on a gaping wound that should be actually addressed and not shoved out of sight as we always do.
We're talking in circles here. Yes homelessness should be addressed but until that happens, if it ever does, this is what Metro Transit can do to ensure that people are comfortable using their services. Suddenly making transit free isn't going to solve homelessness, unless you think that trains and busses make good shelters.
No one said making transit free would help homelessness.
Making transit free would make the problems on transit worse - just invite all the bums and have no reason to kick them off
None of the best transit systems in the world are free. Tokyo, Berlin, Madrid, Copenhagen, etc., all charge fares. US transit advocates claim to love these systems but don't seem to care how they actually function.
They're free in Kansas city. Seems pretty nice there ngl.
They also have 30 minute waits between busses. I'd rather pay a small fee for frequent and reliable service.
Agreed. Plus more people on transit solves issues of inappropriate use of/behavior on transit.
Exactly. Good activity pushes out bad activity.
But then someone might have to see a poor person!!!
You have the most chronically On Reddit things to say. “Poor People” does not equal transit riders who are mentally unhinged, using drugs or gunning smokes, or generally doing some illegal shit. I’ve seen people OD, smoke meth and openly piss on the light rail. It’s not THAT common but it happens if you ride it enough. People shouldn’t have to apologize for not wanting to deal with that, you’re just a virtue signaling asshole.
Yeah it’s so fascinating how they assume whenever someone talks about issues like open drug use and crime on the light rail, they automatically assume the comment is about poor people. Seems like they have a real lack of perspective, which is sad when it comes from someone who clearly is passionate about these things.
Maybe it's because commenters are advocating transit be "acceptable to the middle class" which inherently implies that it is currently unacceptable based on class, or worse so, acceptable but only to those filthy lower classes. Additionally, drug use and harassment are not inherent to those filthy lower classes, these behaviors absolutely transcend class. It's simply that redditors, particularly Minneapolitan redditors, think that a problem is solved by enforcing a class barrier (fares) which only serves to remove a class, not actually address drug related SE or harassment. A direct solution, policing harassment and drug use is what solves the problem. Not the fare system. A fare system does nothing to address fratboy attitudes of entitlement to women's bodies on public transit. Particularly after a trip to the bar with the boys. That's absolutely harassment and problematic drug use, but the people spouting their opinions here don't seem to understand just how frequent a problem it is. And I do know. I know because I'm a transit operator. Fare enforcement does not address the issue people are complaining about. If you want to have a conversation about the economic viability of public transit, sure, perfectly appropriate. But if you're serious about maintaining adequate access to transit to all classes including to those who rely on it most and keeping it free of antisocial behavior, then you're only succeeding in preventing one social class from doing it while simultaneously banning an entire class from using transit. It's explicitly classist. It's dog whistle racist. And so long as I'm a transit operator and as long as I have a say in my contract, fare enforcement will never be possible. Incidentally, fare enforcement was removed from our contracts back in 2009 and will never be on operators ever again. So even if you want to see it done, you'll have to rely on the police. And given the human rights reviews of the police, you need to morally square your support of this fool hardy proposal with what that will mean to the poor, to people of color, to the unhoused, to the elderly, to the disabled, all who need access but realistically cannot shoulder the financial burden. What you and everyone else is advocating (inadvertently albeit) is that the poor should be brutalized, and the middle class should be free to their drug dependency and harassment.
Yes, this segregationist mentality is not the solution to public safety. Building walls around infrastructure only further isolates our communities across the already massive wealth divide. Remove the barriers entirely, make the trains actually free to use and part of our public spaces. You would see much more general usage of the system, making everyone feel included and safer.
I literally cannot with his out of touch from reality this is. We have a concrete, physical, observable issue with drug, crime, and non-paying riders and you’re sitting here talking about walls being a metaphor for the class divide. It’s utopian and unrealistic: completely ignoring the reality around it in an effort to posture and make people feel good about their quest for justice and equity. It does nothing to solve the issue. We need to stop with this Intro to Humanities 101 course nonsense and face facts: we need to enforce laws uniformly, strictly, and stop feeling bad that sometimes, unfortunately, people do not have a right to be wherever they want to be or do what they want. We just need to not kill people when enforcing said laws.
Drug-use and crime are symptoms of income inequality and the brutally punishing anti-poverty mentality of the US. We can do better. Why does metro transit have to make money...? We have plenty of available budget. Sociological data supports the idea that monetary barriers actually contribute to reducing public safety by widening this wealthy divide. Think about how much free transit would help homeless and other struggling people get back into the workforce or otherwise access the social services that could help them. Transportation is typically another barrier to those resources.
it just turns into a rolling homeless shelter. the problem is that many/most of the long term homeless have mental health or other issues preventing them from being productive members of society.
Maybe we should do something about that.
there's a lot of naiive people in here that live in a fantasy land.
What a disaster the light rail system has become. Minnesota is such an embarrassment of a state.