If you ride LA Metro, you’ve already seen the omnipresent signage and announcements telling you to be ready to present your TAP card for inspection. You may have also seen news or social media clips about Metro’s efforts to curb fare evasion. So you can imagine our shock when, this summer, we discovered that LA Metro quietly stopped enforcing fares years ago.

As we document in our 15 page report , Metro’s roughly 200 Transit Security Officers (TSOs) typically issue under ten citations for fare evasion per day system-wide (as of the most recent data). According to Attachment D of this month’s public safety report , the average TSO issued roughly 1.4 fare citations per month over the last year. Sadly, this isn’t because fare evasion is rare. In fact, roughly 46% of r

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