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Kansas City’s transit system sets the standard for free fares, but it has had to contend with an uptick in homeless riders since the program’s inception two years ago.
In metro Kansas City, when a bus comes to the end of the line, the drivers take a break and most riders head off. But loop riders—the chronically homeless people who want to stay on the bus for the return trip—stick around. Before it implemented its “ZeroFareKC” policy two years ago, Kansas City Area Transportation Authority prohibited people from staying on the bus. Drivers had loop riders get off to pay a new fare. With zero fares, however, drivers now confront loop riders with mental health or other issues who fall asleep or pass out before reaching the terminus. In these situations, which peak in hot months and during cold periods, drivers call in road supervisors or security officers for assistance in handling these riders.
Before ZeroFareKC, most altercations between passengers and drivers stemmed from fare disputes. The downside of no fares has been an increase in confrontations between homeless people and other riders. The agency does not have firm data on the numbers of loop riders, but calls from drivers about these passengers have also increased in the past two years.
The main challenge is enforcing the end-of-the-line disembarkment policies. “What we want to do is make sure everyone is trained through staff-refresher training, operators know what to do and pursue that properly,” says Richard Jarrold, KCATA’s interim deputy CEO, “and that our security forces also know what to do to de-escalate and take care of the situation.”
But enforcement has massive drawbacks of its own. Handling rowdy riders in confined spaces is dicey. More police or private security guards may comfort some riders. Others may fear racial profiling when incidents occur. To better meet such challenges, KCATA is in talks with the Kansas City government (on the Missouri side), and with a local social services agency, Hope Faith Ministries, on a proposal to deploy teams at major transit centers and other locations in the system to offer advice and information on services like overnight stays or more permanent housing options. Another plan could potentially establish new bus routes that stop at major food and medical service centers or ones that are designed to assist people with transporting suitcases and other belongings. (The system has bag and luggage limits.)
With cities like Washington en route to free fares and Los Angeles trying to figure out how to get there, transit agencies have to step up to balance the needs of chronically homeless riders with those of their other riders. Most WMATA riders have celebrated the free bus fares legislation that the District of Columbia City Council passed earlier this month. But others have expressed concerns about buses serving as “mobile shelters” for those homeless people who decline help or are unaware of the services that are available.
Transit systems new to the free-fare universe have to prepare for and weigh the next-level problems posed by possible increases in riders who engage in behaviors that other riders find unacceptable. “You can’t go into a library and look at porn on the computer, right? You can’t go to a park and lie out naked,” says Joshua Schank, a Mineta Transportation Institute research associate. “You want to get to the heart of what the issue is. It’s not whether people have a house, it is people who are mentally ill, or who are posing a threat, or are taking up three seats with bags of things that have a tremendous odor. Whatever it is that is making other people’s journeys uncomfortable and less pleasant, or potentially dangerous, that’s the issue.”
As the Kansas City proposal indicates, some of the most encouraging programs involve specialized teams that travel the system and offer one-stop assistance.
Homelessness has become so pervasive for transit systems in recent years that the American Public Transportation Association, the transit system industry group, holds regular sessions on homelessness at its annual conferences. A 2018 survey of about 50 transit agencies found that while most indicated that homeless people in the system affects ridership, the majority of the agencies did not allocate funding to deal with the issue.
In 1989, Austin launched a fare-free program on its bus network. Drivers no longer had to deal with fare evaders. But those gains for drivers did not last as the ensuing confrontations with non-destination riders—transit speak for homeless people—eroded those gains. The fare-free program ended in 1990 after commuters deserted the system and drivers’ anger exploded about problems with homeless people, raucous students and other adults, and property damage.
Today, Austin’s Capital Metro bus network collects fares from passengers. Nonprofit organizations that work with the homeless in the city recently launched a six-month program to provide passes to unhoused people, a program rooted in earlier efforts to get people experiencing homelessness to cooling centers in the summer.
As the Kansas City proposal indicates, some of the most encouraging programs involve specialized teams that travel the system and offer one-stop assistance. The Central Ohio Transit Authority that serves the greater Columbus metro area has strategic response specialist teams that travel on the lines with high ridership and monitor stations, parking lots, and shelters. Besides providing additional security, the teams also investigate accidents and handle claims and other insurance and legal matters.
Denver’s Regional Transportation District has mental health teams of police officers and mental health workers to handle specific kinds of cases. Austin’s public-transit system, Capital Metro, situates two tiers of teams—public-safety ambassadors who help riders, identify issues, and summon specialists and police, if necessary, and another comprised of intervention specialists who handle homeless and mentally ill people in their confrontations with riders and law enforcement. (Randy Clarke, the current WMATA general manager, managed Capital Metro before coming to Washington.)
This fall, the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority implemented a 300-member ambassador program, a pilot program of up to five years which New York magazine’s Curbed referred to as a cross between “a TGI Fridays host and Sesame Street character.” More of a customer service program than a network of intervenors, the ambassadors have been credited with saving lives. The ambassadors do not enforce the transit system’s “code of conduct” for riders. Instead, they contact the system’s police force or request the intervention of teams of social workers who work with the mentally ill and the homeless.
Dealing with people seeking such basics as shelter and restrooms has put transit systems in an untenable position, forcing them to become de facto social service agencies, while state and federal agencies often are reluctant to intervene or sidestep these issues entirely.
Right now, KCATA sets the standard for free fares—and its proposed template for handling loop riders falls well with the parameters set by peer agencies. Cindy Baker, KCATA’s vice president of communications, admits that the agency has not received landslides of complaints. They hear comments every so often from a rider about “odors” or “that somebody might have been a little bit of a hygiene issue,” but she says, “Most people understand that people on the bus need the ride, need the transportation to get where they’re going.”
Whether such muted reactions to homeless transit riders is transferable to larger systems like WMATA or to a city with a formidable homeless crisis like Los Angeles, if and when they switch to fare-free transit is, at best, debatable.
