MTA looks to redesign subway turnstiles to crack down on rampant farebeating

The MTA wants to redesign subway turnstiles and emergency exit gates — the “superhighway” for deadbeats — to crack down on fare evasion, CEO Janno Lieber said Monday.

“We have to change the physical turnstile,” Lieber said at a breakfast hosted by the Manhattan Institute.

“The exit gate — which is nominally supposed to be for fire, exiting purposes, to comply with the fire code — has become the superhighway for fare evasion.”

In May, Lieber said the MTA was on track to lose $500 million to fare evasion this year.

To address the issue, the appointee of Gov. Kathy Hochul formed a “blue ribbon panel” to study solutions. The group has yet to release its findings.

But new designs — likely to require significant financial investment — are one proposal expected to come out of the panel’s work, an MTA spokesman said.

In San Francisco, Bay Area Rapid Transit has budgeted $90 million to install gates that people “can’t push through, jump over or maneuver under,” according to the agency’s website.

A new turnstile is just one part of the effort that’s so far included both armed and unarmed security guards to patrol fare machines and turnstiles, increased NYPD enforcement and behind-the-scenes collaboration with local prosecutors, Lieber said.

Prosecutors across 13 counties also need to have the same approach to fare evasion enforcement, Lieber said. That hasn’t happened yet.

“We are working with DAs on this. We want to have a consensus fare evasion enforcement policy,” Lieber said. “There’s no secret there’s ideological range in some of our New York City and suburban DAs.”

NYPD fare enforcement, meanwhile, jumped 97% this year compared with last, NYPD Transit Bureau Chief Jason Wilcox said last week.

Lieber has claimed transit criminals are “overwhelmingly” fare beaters, though he hasn’t provided statistics to back that up.

Fare evasion spiked on both buses and subways since the COVID-19 pandemic.

Fare beaters accounted for 29.3% of bus riders during July, August and September, according to the MTA — up from 29.1% during the first three months of the year.

Subway fare evasion also rose, according to data: 9.8% of riders were deadbeats at the end of 2021. According to the most recent survey, 13.4% of riders now do the same.