(L.A. Metro Blue Line/Brianna Sacks, Neon Tommy)

They could press a few buttons, run some computer code and almost instantaneously, all
of the gates would be locked, or “latched” in public transportation lingo.

“We could do that today, but many of our customers would have trouble,” said David
Sutton, deputy executive officer for Metro’s Transit Access Pass.

However, after repeatedly announcing plans to lock the gates, Metro is once again saying
they have plans to latch turnstiles, this time by next month.

“Plans are calling for June,” Sutton said, “we are not going to latch them all at once, we
are going to go through one by one, systematically, with our event staff. We want a smooth transition.”

It may come as a surprise to law-abiding and fare-paying citizens that the turnstiles are
not already locked, particularly because Metro has been testing latching the gates for more than two years, and has done so as recently as February.

Yet, as has been the case since the turnstiles were installed in 2009, customers can continue to ride the subways for free, risking a ticket if they are caught.

One of the reasons that Metro decided to leave its turnstiles unlocked (it had been
operating without locked gates for decades) was the estimation that 97 percent of riders would buy tickets.

Any observation of a Metro station leaves the impression that 97 percent is more than a lofty expectation, and not everyone is buying it.

"It's impossible that, in a system where there's, practically speaking, no checking whether people paid their fare or not, that 97 percent would pay their fare," Zev Yaroslavsky, a county supervisor, and member of Metro’s board, said at a board meeting last February.

Yaroslavsky, who has long been a strong advocate for locking the turnstiles, primarily cites the argument of lost revenue when calling for latching the turnstiles.

"There are a lot of people who have been avoiding their fares," he said at the meeting "we're leaving millions and millions of dollars on the table."

How many millions of dollars is up for debate.

In a blog post on LA.StreetsBlog.org, Erik Griswold estimates that Metro will make an
additional $2,350,735 a year.

“Now, that is a lot of money, except if you take notice of how much this turnstile fetish has cost to implement. Wasn’t it $46 million for the turnstiles alone?” he wrote.

People like Griswold advocate other methods of fare enforcement, such as fare inspection, a method that, to an extent, is already being used.

Currently, sheriff’s deputies patrol stations randomly and occasionally ticket riders without valid fare.

Sutton thinks that these deputies could be put to better work once the turnstiles are latched.

“Once our gates our latched we can redeploy our sheriffs. They can focus on other issues,” he said.

Sutton says the delays in locking the turnstiles have been made with the riders in mind.

While the technology to lock the gates has been in place as long as the turnstiles themselves, Metro wanted to wait to lock the turnstiles until the public had been warned for a variety of reasons.

Confusion is one. Metro has taken time to put up signs, distribute publications and
blog about the change, but even rider safety has been taken into consideration.

“One thing we know, when our customers hear that train they start booking it and we want to make sure people know the gates are latched,” he said, “you do need to tap before you get through a latched gate. It will stop you.”

Reach guest contributor Willy Nolan here