Are BART’s new fare gates making stations safer? Here’s what the data shows

By Danielle Echeverria | San Francisco Chronicle (TNS)

Ridership is up on BART so far this year — and so is property crime.

Compared to the same period last year, reported property crimes are up the BART system, which includes trains, stations and BART property like parking lots. The increase persists even on a per-ride basis, a Chronicle analysis found, while violent crime continued to tick down.

The category that’s up: larceny theft, the data shows. Laptop users on BART, beware.

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While the tall, plexiglass gates have certainly been a boon to the beleaguered transit agency, their effect on reported crime is less clear. This year’s property crime uptick comes even though all 50 stations have fare gates, compared to roughly half as of April 2025. Still, crime remains lower than in 2024, when only West Oakland was piloting the new fare gates. (15 stations had fare gates by the end of 2024, and all 50 had them by last August.)

Remarkably, the fall in crime from 2024 to 2025 came even as BART police changed the way they count crimes. In 2024, BART was recording only the most serious offense in a given incident: For example, if someone stole both your backpack and your car, the incident would be recorded only as a motor vehicle theft. But in 2025, it switched to a system that counts each individual crime, so in the car- and backpack-stealing incident, both motor vehicle theft and larceny theft would be counted.

Functionally, that means that if crime had remained unchanged, 2025 numbers would have appeared higher than in 2024. Even with that caveat, it’s clear that crime numbers dropped between the two years — and the 41% drop in crime the agency touted between 2024 and 2025 likely understated the actual decline.

Nonetheless, that reporting change only applies to the comparison between years before 2025 and those after. For 2026, the increase in reported larceny thefts is real — although 2026 numbers remained well below the same period in 2024, when only West Oakland had the new fare gates.

In fact, the rate of property crimes per million rides, even with the reporting change, has plummeted below even pre-pandemic levels, when millions more people were riding the trains, data show.

Much of the property crime decrease over the last two years, however, comes from a fall in car break-ins, the data show, which happen outside of the fare gates — and also mirror a larger trend of plummeting car break-ins in San Francisco. Still, other property crimes (which could have happened on trains, in stations or outside on BART property) have come down from 2024 as well.

BART police Chief Kevin Franklin previously acknowledged that the causes of the system’s crime decline are complex, and they do reflect regional and national trends. Still, he credited the fare gates, as well as the agency’s other public safety efforts — BART police have also doubled officer presence systemwide and increased the number of officers riding trains.

In a statement, BART spokesperson Chris Filippi noted that connecting the fare gates to crime trends is “challenging,” but their positive impact is still quantifiable: The agency is spending far less time on rider-related maintenance, like “vandalism, graffiti, broken items and unusually large clean ups,” he said.

“The new gates are discouraging unwanted behavior, including instances that don’t necessarily rise to the level of a criminal act,” he wrote.

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