These are the most bludgeoned fare gates in the BART system. Can they be hardened?

Near the end of BART's yellow line, at a tiny station in east Contra Costa County, sits the most bludgeoned fare gate in the rail system.

It's one of the "next generation" gates, installed in March 2025 at the end of a single array on the concourse - the only way into Pittsburg Center Station. Each gate in the row has tall, Plexiglass panels that swing open when riders tap their payment cards, then click shut behind them, an institutional-checkpoint-style design meant to discourage fare evasion.

*

Read more: Can BART's new speedy fare gates finally solve the ‘piggybacking' problem?

*

Also: BART's fare gates were built to stop evasion. Now they'll sell ads

*

Related: These BART parking lots are nearly empty. Could they be put to better use?

*

More: Why is BART still so loud? We answer your questions

But the high-tech panels have not stopped people from trying to bash their way through, largely because Pittsburg Center has no station agent booth or agent posted on site to keep watch. Without adequate staffing, this particular entrance - along with two at other stations - is testing the limits of BART's "hardening" strategy, revealing what happens when the agency relies on physical barriers alone to secure its paid areas.

At Pittsburg Center, it has been a bruising experiment.

Over the past year, maintenance crews at BART have replaced the gate's door panels 12 times and the motor 13 times. It appeared to be broken again on Wednesday, with the panels flung open and an orange "out of service" sticker affixed to the tap-to-pay button. When a train pulled into the station, four passengers bypassed the functioning fare gates and instead slipped through the open one.

"This is frustrating," said BART Board Director Mark Foley, whose east Contra Costa district includes the Pittsburg Center Station. He has reported the constant stream of maintenance issues to agency staff at least twice, and occasionally fields complaints from his constituents. Because the gate is monitored remotely, via a closed circuit television, people "feel they have the freedom" to barge right through it, Foley said. Mechanics make fixes, only to find them undone three weeks later.

"We are looking for solutions from a technological standpoint," Foley said, "to figure out how we can address this issue long-term."

A similarly vulnerable gate, at the far end of the platform at Civic Center Station, has also required repeat maintenance. It bears some resemblance to the Pittsburg gate in that both of them are wide enough to accommodate wheelchairs. And both are secluded from BART staff. The Civic Center stile sits two floors below the station agent booth, and leads to an elevator that carries people up to the concourse. Despite signs warning "24 hour surveillance," it's a natural escape hatch for fare-beaters.

People have tried ramming shopping carts through the gate to force it open, one BART engineer told the Chronicle. All this abuse has necessitated more than a dozen repairs since the gate's installation in August 2024, including seven door replacements, three motor replacements and three swap-outs of couplers (which connect the doors to the motors). Photos captured in April showed panels slightly askew, scratched up and scrawled in graffiti.

These two BART entrances, and a third at Bay Fair Station (four door replacements and two new motors since the June 2025 installation) are a bane for the rail agency as officials tout all the benefits of next generation fare gates. Among them: $10 million in additional revenue each year, and 961 hours in maintenance work averted, because the sturdy material largely deters scofflaws.

Yet the three battered outliers show the challenges that BART officials face as they keep adding protective infrastructure, warding off all the antisocial behavior that once pervaded the system. Notably, each of the problem gates has a tragic flaw. BART had built the Pittsburg Center and Antioch stations without station agent booths to "test that concept and save money," said agency spokesperson Alicia Trost. When both stations were besieged by cheating, BART management responded by adding a booth in Antioch in 2021, but couldn't install one in Pittsburg because its footprint is too small.

Civic Center is a more awkward situation, because the platform elevator gate has fully-functional replacement upstairs on the concourse. This gate is a replica of the one on the platform, in that it also fits wheelchairs and guards an elevator, though its location - right next to a station agent kiosk - is highly visible and less exposed to fare evasion. But the new gate has never been activated, Trost said. It would block cash-paying Muni riders from accessing the elevator to Muni Metro, which is one level above BART. No one has figured out how to resolve that conflict.

Bay Fair also suffers from an imperfect configuration, in that its oft-pummeled gate sits on an elevated platform, one floor above the station agent. Like the Civic Center stile, the one at Bay Fair opens to an elevator that, according to Trost, has become a portal for cheaters.

On Thursday, BART's board will hear a presentation about new engineering features to make the gates tougher. These include triangular gussets to reinforce doors at the joints, mechanical locks to hold them shut, detachable pins that mitigate the damage when a gate is shoved, and motor gears that allow the machines to bear large loads and resist impact.

"We've always intended for this to be an iterative process," Trost said. "It's a living, breathing project."

At many stations, the new machinery has made a difference. That much was clear from a recent viral video of a woman who got stuck while trying to crawl under a fare gate in San Francisco, evidently to avoid paying fare. While many viewed the footage as a satisfying morality tale, some BART leaders drew a different lesson: that the gates are finally fortified, and could, at least in this case, be more effective than the old approach of having police officers or fare inspectors enforce payment.

Then again, BART can't always account for the brazenness of a would-be fare evader. The woman in the video created a widely entertaining spectacle and a rather alarming predicament. At some point, she must have been extricated. Whether she broke the fare gate is unclear, Trost said. BART has not traced any police or maintenance calls to that incident.

Copyright 2026 Tribune Content Agency. All Rights Reserved.