Here's a revolutionary concept that apparently took Bay Area transit officials decades to figure out: if you stop letting people waltz through your system without paying, bad things happen less.

New data on fare evasion prevention measures shows that making it harder to skip the fare on public transit has delivered staggering results. We're talking a 98.2% decrease in patron-related corrective maintenance — that's station vandalism, busted equipment, and the general destruction that comes when a transit system becomes a free-for-all. Not 10%. Not 50%. Ninety-eight percent. Overnight.

Let's be precise here: this isn't a 98% drop in all maintenance. Trains still need upkeep, stations still age. But the vandalism and rider-caused damage? Virtually eliminated. The math is almost comical — as one Bay Area commuter put it, "Who'd have guessed that by eliminating the worst 10% of people from BART, BART instantly becomes 98% better?"

What makes this even more remarkable is that the new barriers don't even make fare evasion impossible. One local rider noted they still see tailgating at 24th Street on a regular basis — but even partial enforcement, even just making it harder rather than effortless, delivered these results. The old open-gate honor system wasn't just naive; it was an active policy choice to subsidize the destruction of public infrastructure.

For years, San Franciscans were told that enforcement was mean-spirited, that fare gates were inequitable, that the real solution was some vague upstream intervention. Meanwhile, paying riders got to enjoy stations that smelled like a bathroom and escalators that worked about as often as a coin flip.

This is what accountability looks like. Not punitive, not cruel — just basic. You pay to ride. The gates enforce it. The system works better for everyone, including the vast majority of riders who were already doing the right thing.

The lesson here extends well beyond transit: when government stops enforcing basic rules out of ideological squeamishness, the public pays — literally — for the consequences. And when someone finally flips the switch back to common sense, the results speak for themselves.

Now do Muni.