Metro Vancouver Fare Evasion: 2.5%

Seeing how there are no turnstiles at Skytrain stations, it's pretty easy to get from point A to point B without buying a ticket. Further still, it's not all that hard to go on a multi-zone ride with just a single-zone ticket. Given the relatively leniency of the system, you would think that fare evasion would be a huge problem for Translink.

As it turns out, it's not so bad. An independent audit was conducted by PriceWaterhouseCoopers and it revealed that only 2.5% of travelers are hopping on board without a ticket (or an adequate ticket). This is down from the nearly 4% evasion rate recorded five years ago and well below the 25% rate incorrectly perceived by the public.

For this reason, it is not really financially responsible to pay for turnstiles at all Skytrain, Seabus, and West Coast Express stations. TransLink lost about $6.4 million in 2006 in evaded fares and it would have likely cost more than that to install (and maintain) a turnstile system.

Source: Canadian Press

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