BART Crime Against Riders Drops 67% as New Fare Gates Turn One in Walnut Creek

WALNUT CREEK, CA — BART says crime against riders is down 67 percent, and the new fare gates — the ones that now stand taller than a lot of the fences in this town — are the reason.

It’s been one year since the agency finished swapping in its Next Generation Fare Gates at all 50 stations, including the ones you walk through at Walnut Creek and Pleasant Hill. And the numbers are finally in.

Crimes against riders per million trips fell 67 percent from the end of 2024 through the latest quarter. That’s a big swing, and it happened while more people were riding — not because everyone stayed home. Over the same stretch, BART police and safety-related delays dropped 47 percent, because officers simply weren’t getting called to as many incidents.

If you’ve ridden through Walnut Creek lately, you already know the gates. Clear swing panels, hard to push through, harder to jump, nearly impossible to crawl under. The whole array stands at least 72 inches tall. In a region that spent a decade arguing about fare evasion, the fix turned out to be a wall of glass and steel.

Bob Powers, BART’s general manager, credits the gates with the bulk of that 67 percent drop and calls them the core of what he calls the “New BART.” That’s his phrase, not mine, but the data behind it is hard to argue with.

Riders are noticing, too. The share of people who say they witnessed fare evasion on a trip is down 60 percent. BART figures the gates are quietly adding about $10 million a year in revenue, just from fares that used to walk right past the old turnstiles without paying.

For the riders who park and ride from Northgate, or catch a bus down Ygnacio Valley Road to the station, the change is more than a statistic. It’s the tap of a Clipper card against a reader that wants your fare, and a barrier that gives a little resistance instead of just waving you through.

Walnut Creek’s station sits at the edge of a downtown that has spent years trying to shake a reputation it didn’t entirely earn. A cleaner, calmer gate line helps. It’s a small thing — until you’re the one walking through it at 6:40 a.m. with a coffee in one hand and a day of work in front of you.

Police Chief Kevin Franklin says fewer fare-evasion calls mean his team can get to real emergencies faster. That’s the quiet part of the win — not just that fewer people are jumping the gates, but that the cops aren’t stuck writing those tickets while something worse is happening two platforms over.

The agency isn’t done tinkering. It’s testing a beefier motor-gear system that can shrug off repeated ramming — the pilot is running at Coliseum and Pittsburg Center stations. The goal is gates that take a beating without bending, so the fare-evasion numbers don’t creep back up.

Here’s the thing about BART and Walnut Creek: this station is how a good chunk of the town commutes, and the system spent years taking public-relations hits every time a phone got snatched on a train. A 67 percent drop isn’t a cure-all, and it’s BART’s own number, so take it with the usual grain of salt. But it lines up with what riders have been saying at the gates — the barriers changed the feel of the place.

BART has been on something of a run lately, from its best reliability numbers in a decade to the line that reshaped downtown Walnut Creek in the first place. One year into the new gates, the bet looks like it paid off. Whether it holds is the question — but for now, the fare gates are the one part of the commute nobody’s complaining about.

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