The next step to secure gates on the Metro Rail system begins this week at the Green Line’s Crenshaw, Vermont/Athens and Harbor Freeway stations with gates scheduled to be latched Wednesday, April 9. Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department deputies are assigned to the stations from 6 to 9 a.m. and 3 to 6 p.m. through April 11 to provide advance notice and to assist patrons.
Metro Green Line stations at Redondo Beach, Douglas, El Segundo, Mariposa, Aviation/LAX and Hawthorne/Lennox stations already have gates that are latched. Metro plans to latch the five remaining Green Line Stations by the end of May. When this phase of latching is complete, 41 of 80 Metro Rail stations will be latched and Metro staff are exploring adding gates at some of the remaining stations.
Gate latching requires passengers to use a TAP card loaded with an appropriate fare to pass through turnstiles at rail stations. TAP helps to strengthen security and fare enforcement and is utilized as fare media on 11 transportation providers including Metro, the Los Angeles Department of Transportation LADOT), Access, Antelope Valley, Culver City, Gardena, Foothill, Norwalk, Montebello, Santa Clarita and Torrance.
Metrolink has its own TAP-enabled tickets that allow Metrolink riders to transfer to Metro Rail at no additional cost. A total of 26 carriers are scheduled to be part of TAP by the end of this year, helping to create a more seamless and regional transit system.
Metro and its transit partners have been rolling out TAP for several years and Metro is monitoring TAP’s progress to determine its impact on fare evasion. The LASD and civilian security personnel provide added security on board trains and buses, as well as at transit facilities and stations. They randomly check patrons on trains and stations using electronic fare checkers to ensure proper payment is made.
Categories: Projects
Great news and it can’t come soon enough.
The Green Line is plagued with people trying to ride for free. But in order to make this more effective, Metro needs proactively step up and staff these stations with Metro personnel at all times to keep an eye out on those who’d try to jump the gates. Real transit systems have real people closely monitoring the gates. You can’t keep trying to be cheap thinking that surveillance cameras and remote speakers are going to help prevent fare evaders. Fare evaders know that you guys can’t do anything because you’re several miles away watching it on TV and unable to stop them. It’s like you saying “oh, naughty naughty, you can’t do that” when the fare evaders just mock and laugh at you saying “yeah, whacha gonna do? LOL.” You need real, live people at these stations all the time.
I know you don’t have the money, but can’t you figure out ways to make money so that you can pay for people at these stations? Other cities have real live people at their stations all the time so they must be finding money to do this.
What I really want is Metrolink to be fully on TAP instead of these “TAP-enabled tickets” which is just a bandaid solution. Any word on how many decades it’ll take for this to be done?