A mere four days after BART decided to move forward with new, more fare-cheat-proof gates, a Twitter video surfaced Sunday after Oakland’s Rolling Loud music festival, showing dozens jumping over the gates at the Coliseum BART Station.
On Sunday evening, the hip-hop festival — which has self-knighted itself as the “largest hip-hop festival in the world” — played to a crowd of 40,000. After the show, festival-goers began pouring into the aforementioned BART station, many of whom cheated their way to a free ride home, via some clumsy gymnastics, as shown below.
Twitter user @Kathviloria, whose mother apparently works at the Coliseum BART station, posted the video to the social media platform (since removed) that showed dozens of people catapulting themselves over the antiquated gates.
"My mom works for BART and sent me this video of people leaving Rolling Loud lmaoooo the commentary,” Viloria wrote in the now-erased tweet.
BART's board of directors has recently been debating a solution to the transit system's fare evasion problem. Last week they voted to move forward with swing-style fare gates that will be much harder to vault over than the current, 70s-era gates.
The new swing-style doors, much like the ones used at Muni, will (hopefully) thwart episodes like Sunday's from regularly happening. However, “tailgating”—i.e. when a BART rider rushes through the gates, seconds after the rider directly in front of them pays using his or her Clipper card — will still be possible, even when the newly designed gates are installed.
According to the Chronicle, BART officials estimate fare evaders cost the rapid transit agency north of $25 million in lost revenue, per year.