Independent reporting and analysis find LA Metro struggling with extensive fare evasion (about 46% of riders, roughly 12 million unpaid boardings monthly), weakened enforcement since 2017, and growing rider concerns about safety, cleanliness, and delays. Buses are frequently late and ridership has declined sharply since the 1980s. Experts recommend restoring fare enforcement, prioritizing rider-focused reliability and safety, appointing transportation-proficient board members, favoring bus investments over costly rail expansion, and pursuing competitive contracting and denser housing near transit.
LA Metro’s Crisis: Fare Evasion, Safety Fears, and What It Will Take to Fix It
LA Metro stops at Union Station | The Port of Authority at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons
A wave of recent reporting and independent analysis paints a stark picture of Los Angeles County’s transit authority: widespread fare evasion, rising safety concerns, chronic service problems, and ballooning costs. Together these issues help explain why many riders avoid the system and why experts say major reforms are needed to make Metro useful and sustainable.
How Severe Is The Problem?
Transit advocates Alex Davis, Dr. Nimesh Rajakumar, and commuter-safety activist Erica Solis summarized their findings in a November 16 piece titled A Metro Worth Paying For, reporting that roughly 46% of riders do not pay fares — about 12 million unpaid boardings a month. They trace the trend to a decline in enforcement after 2017, when Metro assumed fare-enforcement duties from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.
Metro employs roughly 200 Transit Security Officers (TSOs), but those officers typically issue fewer than ten fare-evasion citations systemwide per day. Over one recent summer, TSOs reportedly issued only 19 combined citations and written warnings for non-fare Code of Conduct violations — a level of enforcement that offers little deterrent effect.
Safety, Ridership, And Operational Strain
The Independent Institute and the Reason Foundation highlight a linkage between fare evasion and crime: more than 90% of people who commit crimes on Metro enter without paying. Riders feel the consequences — an LA Barometer survey found 84% of respondents said riding Metro trains felt unsafe. Reporting for the Boyle Heights Beat in May 2025 also described students facing dark stations and crime, sometimes feeling compelled to carry self-defense tools.
Operationally, Metro faces reliability problems: buses are late 21.5% of the time, while rail lines are often scheduled less frequently so trains arrive on time but too infrequently to meet riders’ needs. Metro’s own customer surveys repeatedly list reliability, frequency, safety, cleanliness, and homelessness among top concerns.
Ridership has fallen dramatically from the system’s peak: Metro carried 497 million trips in 1985, which dropped to 370 million by 2019 and has declined further. Analysts link that decline to decades of high car ownership and services that struggle to match modern travel preferences.
Cost, Governance, And Project Performance
Critics also fault Metro’s capital program and governance. Independent comparisons find frequent cost overruns and delays—especially on heavy-rail projects—and accusations that billions in county taxes have been spent on lines whose benefits are uncertain. The report argues Metro’s board appointments are often political rather than expertise-driven, producing policy choices that prioritize rail expansion over flexible, cost-effective services.
Policy Recommendations: Experts propose restoring robust fare collection, refocusing service around riders’ priorities (reliability, cleanliness, safety), appointing board members with transportation expertise, shifting future investments toward buses, easing housing-density restrictions near transit, and expanding competitive tendering for operations.
Is Full Privatization Realistic?
While full privatization is praised in very dense cities such as Hong Kong and Singapore, analysts say Los Angeles lacks the population density to support full private provision. Instead, they recommend competitive tendering — contracting out operations where private vendors compete to deliver services under public oversight.
Bottom Line
Until Metro restores fare enforcement, improves safety and cleanliness, and reorients spending and governance toward riders’ needs, the system will likely remain costly, unreliable, and unattractive to many commuters. The Independent Institute even awarded Metro the California Golden Fleece Award for perceived waste and mismanagement — a symbolic rebuke that underscores how much work advocates say the agency faces to regain public trust.
