On a Friday afternoon in January, Doug Gillingham and Dana Friehauf jumped on the North County Transit Coaster in Old Town. They were heading back to Solana Beach after a long day of bike riding.
They gladly paid the $6.50 fare for their train ride home.
“I like supporting mass transit even though the fares we pay don't fully support the operating costs of the train,” Doug said. “It's a public benefit.”
Every day, thousands of people ride on the transit agency’s trains to get to work, go to doctors appointments and visit the beach.
In recent years, however, riders like the Gillingham and Friehauf, who actually pay their fares on North County Transit District (NCTD) trains have steadily decreased. Since 2023, about a third of Coaster riders and more than half of Sprinter riders were fare evaders, according to a KPBS analysis of NCTD ridership data.
The agency does have transit inspectors, and they do in some instances check a passenger’s fare and ask them to pay on the train. But there aren’t consequences if the passenger refuses the NCTD employee's request to pay.
This explosion in fare evaders has added strain to an agency that was already struggling to recover from a sharp drop in ridership during the pandemic and dealing with an increasing number of assaults per year since 2020.
Last year, NCTD lost upwards of $4.4 million from fare evasion on just the Coaster and Sprinter. If these losses continue without financial offset, the NCTD could end up curtailing its services. Right now, the Sprinter connects Oceanside, Vista, San Marcos and Escondido. The Coaster runs along the coast from Oceanside to downtown San Diego.
Have a tip? 📨
The Investigations Team at KPBS holds powerful people and institutions accountable. But we can’t do it alone — we depend on tips from the public to point us in the right direction. There are two ways to contact the I-Team.
For general tips, you can send an email to investigations@kpbs.org.
If you need more security, you can send anonymous tips or share documents via our secure Signal account at 619-594-8177.
To learn more about how we use Signal and other privacy protections, click here.
You feel ‘like a sucker’
Philip Plotch, principal researcher and senior fellow at the Washington D.C.-based Eno Center for Transportation, reviewed NCTD ridership data compiled by KPBS. He described the agency’s fare evasion problem as “a little bit out of control.”
Plotch said the trend can feed off of itself — and be difficult to reverse — when it starts to stick as a social norm.
“You feel … like a sucker if you're paying and other people aren't,” Plotch said. “You feel like there's a sense of lawlessness, and I think that's not a good feeling for people to have on the system.”
The spike in evasion rates coincides with a hands-off fare enforcement policy NCTD rolled out a few years ago. NCTD has embraced an “inform not enforce” policy when checking whether a passenger has paid, according to CEO Shawn Donaghy.
“If someone chooses to not pay that fare, we do not intervene at that moment — for the safety of the employee,” he said.
The Sprinter is one of Fallbrook resident BK Nicholson’s main ways of getting around. He had questions when KPBS told him in January about the district’s approach to fare evasion.
“I don't know if that's a sustainable business model,” Nicholson said. “I mean somebody's got to pay for the fuel and the electricity and for the workers. So, I think it's great that they give people an opportunity to ride when they obviously can't, but at some point the rubber’s got to meet the road.”
Donaghy’s concern for the safety of NCTD employees is supported by data. The agency’s own records show buses, trains and transit stations have become more dangerous in recent years. Assaults against passengers and employees increased by three-fold since 2018, the records show.
The current policy contrasts with an earlier era when NCTD cracked down on fare evasion.
Code enforcement officers wrote hundreds of additional tickets in 2011. And fare dodgers faced a penalty of nearly $400, according to a San Diego Union-Tribune story at the time.
That year, fare evasion dropped to less than 2% on the Coaster and Sprinter, according to NCTD board agenda documents.
However, this is an isolated statistic. KPBS requested fare validation data for the last decade to compare. In an email, NCTD chief of staff Mary Dover said the agency is unable to provide data from before 2021 because it’s stored in a system “that we no longer have access to.” A KPBS search of board documents also did not turn up additional data.
Plummeting fare revenue and ridership
What available statistics do show is fare revenues started dropping in 2016, and the gap has further widened over the past decade. Fare revenues nosedived from about $18.9 million in 2013 to $11.7 million last year. During that time, the transit system’s operating costs roughly doubled from $79 million to more than $166 million.
It’s a trend that’s playing out across the country.
“In Seattle, in Chicago, in Philadelphia, in Boston — everywhere else, the same thing is happening,” Plotch said.
A variety of factors have pushed down public transit ridership in recent years, according to Plotch. Going back to 2010, rideshare companies like Uber and Lyft began cropping up in cities across the country, giving residents a convenient way to travel from doorstep to destination. The steady rise of e-commerce and rapid delivery in the coming years also cut down on trips to stores and malls.
And then public transit ridership cratered when the pandemic closed businesses and forced many people to work from home. The number of passengers on Coaster trains dropped by nearly 80% at the start of the COVID-19 outbreak, NCTD said in a press release at the time.
Nearly six years later, public transit is still trying to recover.
“For the most part, we have transit systems that are still operating because of the generosity of the taxpayers and because the local economy needs it,” Plotch said.
While no public transit system in the country is able to cover all of its operating costs with fare revenue, NCTD is especially dependent on local, state and federal funding to keep its system running.
Fare revenues covered less than 8% of NCTD’s operating costs last year — down from 22% a decade ago.
The spike in fare evasion in recent years has compounded NCTD’s financial problems. Donaghy said the lost revenue hampers efforts to improve and expand services.
The agency, for example, would like to grow its on-demand van system. The $4.4 million lost to fare evasion last year, Donaghy said, “would essentially cover the bill for us to expand it in three different cities.”
In an interview last month, Donaghy dismissed the notion that fare prices would have to increase to make up for lost revenue from fare evasion. He said fares typically need to be increased to keep up with inflation.
However, at a NCTD board committee hearing in February of last year, he indicated there is a connection between fare evasion and potential fare increases.
“We talk about raising the fares on people who are already paying the fare — now they have to cover the brunt of something that we don't want to address in fare enforcement from a societal perspective,” Donaghy said.
Dover clarified that statement in an email to KPBS.
“During the Board meeting, Shawn’s comments were intended to reflect that from a community perspective, it is difficult to justify fare increases without having a conversation on fare evasion,” Dover wrote. “While the two are typically perceived in connection with each other, fare increases are typically prompted by rising costs, which can be attributed to inflationary pressures.”
Assaults against employees, passengers
The policy of informing passengers about NCTD’s fare policy as opposed to enforcing payment came about for a few reasons. In 2021, NCTD rolled out a new payment system called Pronto. The agency understood riders would need to get acclimated to the new tap-and-ride system.
But safety was another concern. Assaults on public transit nationwide more than doubled from 2015 to 2025, according to the federal Bureau of Transportation Statistics.
At NCTD, assaults against transit employees and passengers spiked in the last few years. In the 2024-2025 fiscal year, the agency recorded 157 physical and non-physical assaults.
“We need to make sure that we're collecting fare and managing our fiscal responsibility, but also making sure that our employees (are) not going to be physically assaulted or harassed over $2.50,” Donaghy said. “I think the temperature has changed a little bit on what people feel compelled to feel like they can get away with and I think that's affected our front line employees from a safety standpoint.”
About a decade ago, North County resident Dara Olivarez remembers riding the Coaster to work and said a train attendant was usually onboard and she generally felt safe. Now, she rides the Sprinter a couple of times a week and said that’s no longer the case.
“Usually when I'm going to Escondido, I'm coming back late, so I'm always worried … is there going to be an attendant on there? How many people are going to be on the train? Is anybody going to save me if there's a problem?” Olivarez said.
She’s called security on a few occasions. In one instance, she reported a rider who was yelling profanities and taking off their clothes.
Donaghy receives a text whenever an employee is assaulted. “It’s very tough ... It's very emotional for me to see those text messages,” he said.
“The impact of assault on transit employees is devastating,” said Yuko Nakanishi, a researcher who studies safety and security on public transit.
Assaults can result in injuries, trauma and PTSD for victims, she said, and can have broader organizational impacts.
“Workforce retention and morale suffer,” Nakanishi said. “Fear of assault drives absenteeism, early retirements and operator attrition. It makes it really hard for agencies to recruit and retain frontline workers.”
In the last five years, the turnover rate at NCTD has ranged from 15% to 26%
And, Nakanishi adds, “It erodes public confidence in the transit system.”
Donaghy acknowledged the challenges the district faces in enforcement.
“I think it's very difficult at times for us to manage the way that people are acting at our transit centers or on our buses or equipment because they feel emboldened to do so because they know that the repercussions will not be there,” Donaghy said.
Documents show there is some law enforcement and security presence. The sheriff’s department has a Transit Enforcement Services Unit (TESU) that patrols and responds to crimes, including fare evasion, according to the NCTD website. Separately, the district also contracts with a security company that rides the trains and buses, makes reports and educates on fares.
No easy solutions
Plotch warns that some transit agencies find themselves in a vicious loop when all of these problems converge. Fare evasion results in decreased revenue and a sense of lawlessness.
The resulting concerns about safety often lead to decreases in ridership, which exacerbates the revenue problems. In response, agencies may cut services or raise fares on paying customers, which can drive down ridership even further.
“That downward spiral is really dangerous,” he said.
Research shows fare evasion is hard to reverse, once it becomes normalized.
Most fare evaders are, in essence, “justifiers,” said Jérémy Celse, a researcher and professor at the ESSCA School of Management in France. He authored a 2023 study examining how to reduce fare evasion.
Celse said these are people who recognize that fare evasion is morally and legally wrong but are nonetheless tempted to engage in it, often because “everyone else is doing it.”
Fixing the “justifier” mindset starts with pushing back on the norm, Celse said.
“When fare evasion rates are low … simply informing passengers about the actual prevalence of fare evasion, while ensuring the credibility of the information, is generally sufficient to reduce fare evasion behavior,” he said.
He also suggested “gamifying” fare validation — introducing a temporary lottery offering a cash prize and each successful validation would provide passengers with one entry.
Plotch believes fare evasion can also be combatted with a combination of education, engineering and enforcement. He said a push on social media might be effective too.
“You can change social norms. It's not easy, but you can do it. Maybe, we need more social influencers to do it on social media. Maybe that would help,” Plotch said.
When told he could be the one to start that trend, he replied “I think maybe a Kardashian might be more effective than me.”
Engineering includes infrastructure changes, like turnstiles or gates, which would make it more difficult for people to evade fare checks. Dover said in an email that NCTD has plans to pilot fare gating at one of their stations.
Enforcement includes transit inspectors checking the passes, and police issuing summons for citations. Plotch pointed to San Diego’s Metropolitan Transit System (MTS), which upped its enforcement last year. The shift is already making a financial difference. The San Diego Union Tribune reported enforcement helped boost revenue from bus and trolley fares by roughly $500,000 per month.
“Getting more inspectors and police out there not only is raising revenue, but it's making it safer for passengers,” Plotch said. “And that is probably going to increase passenger revenue even more.”
Plotch also mentioned a direct approach to eliminating fare evasion — make the transit system free. He acknowledged that comes with its own challenges. The agency would have less revenue and potentially higher expenses with increased ridership, but some cities around the country, like Albuquerque, are already giving it a go.
For Nicholson, one of the riders KPBS spoke with in January, NCTD’s fare dilemma leaves him with more questions about whether he can rely on the transit district in the future, especially given the revenue losses.
“How are they going to make that up? And does that mean that in the future we're not going to have public transportation?” Nicholson asked.
NCTD is currently conducting surveys to determine if fares should increase in order to combat expected budget shortages in the coming years.
