Let’s be honest: The new BART fare gates are bad. Really bad.
If you’ve ridden BART since the widespread rollout of these gates, you probably agree. At every station that has them, there’s almost always a three-second lag between tapping your Clipper card or phone and the clear plastic gates opening up. That’s assuming you’re not hit with a “Tap Again” or “See Agent” notification. Pile-ups at the gates — especially during rush hour — are a frequent sight and a source of frustration for riders.
“I just noticed what everybody else noticed,” said Lucy Gigli, the general manager at transportation nonprofit AlamedaTMA. “They are just slow as molasses.”
On a recent trip from the MacArthur BART to San Francisco, Danielle, a commuter, explained that she’s regularly had issues with the fare gates during her commute. (She declined to give her last name.) Even during this trip, she had to tap her card at another gate in order to get into the station.
“It doesn’t always work,” she sighed.
BART began erecting its so-called “Next Generation” fare gates in late 2023. These new, $90 million barriers have been marketed as being more accessible to wheelchair users and more biker-friendly, but the main selling point has been the supposed decrease in fare evasion. The Next Gen gates are also the first step of a new Clipper Card system that promises to speed up the process of adding money to your Clipper and allow customers to pay for transit with contactless credit or debit cards like the “tap and go” turnstiles of New York’s MTA.
But as the gates have expanded across the BART system — so far to 35 of the 50 stations have them — complaints have piled up. “Obviously not tested by real people,” one person opined in BART’s Facebook comments. “I'd rather have $90 mil of free fare days than these prison style gates,” said another.
BART spokesperson Jim Allison is acutely aware of these gripes.
“It’s not just customers, but station agents, too,” he told me matter-of-factly over the phone Tuesday.
Allison admits that the Next Gen is “not a perfect system.”
“We’re not going back to the old system, so it’s a matter of getting people to adapt to the new system,” Allison said.
So, how do we get used to it? Allison had a few suggestions.
“The best practices are for people to hold it within about an inch of the reader, to not have it in a wallet or any kind of holder, and to try to hold it as still as possible,” he said.
In other words: Have patience.
That’s all well and good, but it doesn’t change the fact that, until (at the earliest) the rollout of the new Clipper card system, passengers will remain pretty dissatisfied with the change.
Gigli — a transit advocate and frequent biker who had misgivings about the “clunky” old fare gates — would theoretically be the ideal passenger for the new setup. But in addition to the slowness she’s faced getting through them, she finds the newer gates somehow less bike-friendly. She’s often had her Clipper card rejected at the gates when she has her bike in tow. A fare agent even suggested a workaround: Don’t get your bike into the beam of the fare gate before you tap.
It doesn’t seem like, for all this grief, that fare evasion has gone down either, she griped.
“To top it all off, there are still people going in twos and threes, so I don’t know how they thought it was going to solve that,” Gigli added.
Allison pointed to a recent performance review that showed that the number of respondents who said that they witnessed fare evasion dropped from 25% to 17% within a year. Things are improving in that regard, but any improvement in fare evasion, like the new gates, is slow as molasses.
In the meantime, Allison had one more bit of advice for frustrated riders: “If they can hang in there, hopefully, things will be better in the near future.”
