MARTA targets freeloaders

By Ariel Hart

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

There’s no turnstile to jump with MARTA’s tall fare gates but enterprising lawbreakers have found other ways to beat the system, and MARTA is documenting them.

The practice of riding MARTA without paying has got to stop, because these people hurt the system in multiple ways, MARTA CEO Beverly Scott said at a recent board meeting.

The offenders prevent MARTA from collecting revenue. And when they fail to tap a Breeze card, even when leaving a station, they complicate MARTA’s planning for distance-based fares; passengers eventually will be charged when they tap out at the end of a trip rather than at the beginning, and people who take longer trips will be charged more.

“We’ve got to lock it down,” Scott said.

One solution will be timing the fare gates to close faster. MARTA originally slowed the gate closure because people were getting hurt, but Atlantans should be used to them now, said Ted Basta, MARTA’s chief of business support services.

“To introduce a distance- and variable-based fare, one of the underlying themes, and it’s absolutely at the heart of this, is to lock the system,” Basta said.

Scott told the board that fare evasion happens everywhere, including among Wall Street bankers in New York’s subway system. To combat it, MARTA conducted recent video surveillance, which The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has obtained and will be available on its ajc.com Web site today.

Among the tactics used to ride MARTA without paying: Some gates open merely by someone approaching from the outgoing side; passengers push through a gate; people go to a gate, wait for an outgoing passenger to open it and slip through moving in the opposite direction, or more than one person crowds through while heading in the same direction on one fare tap.

All actions can lead to arrest and a fine of $65 to $230 if the person avoids paying the fare, MARTA spokeswoman Cara Hodgson said. MARTA officials held off arresting most of the video violators to document the problems. However, they couldn’t resist detaining a man who let another passenger through the gate by diving under it for a fee, MARTA police Chief Wanda Dunham said.

“My folks couldn’t let that one go,” she said.

MARTA has 18 months to plan its distance-based fare system, and it will be implemented if funding is available, Basta said.