NEW YORK (PIX11) — The MTA has been considering a redesign of the iconic subway turnstiles as fare evasion continues to seriously hurt the transit agency’s bottom line, MTA Chair and CEO Janno Lieber said.
Fare evasion is costing the MTA about $500 million a year. The MTA’s already rolled out guards as part of a pilot to try and stop turnstile jumping, but they’re looking for other ways to stop the practice.
“We are hard at work figuring out how do we redesign the fare array because that is just like, it’s too porous and it’s letting a lot of people in, and we have to have a different physical barrier to stop people from doing this,” Lieber told 1010 WINS on Tuesday.
Emergency exit gates have become “the superhighway of fare evasion,” Lieber said. The turnstiles are a problem too.
“The turnstiles frankly, you know it seems like we’re trying to cultivate a generation of world-class gymnasts because you could just put your hands on the side and vault over them,” Lieber told 1010 WINS. “We got to deal with that by whether it’s raising the height or changing the design so it’s not so easy for people to literally just vault and kick their legs over.”