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Have you ever been to Seattle?What???
Why is access not restricted?
I've riding els & subways since I was a baby in my parents' & grandparents' arms!. I've never seen one (in my city) without access restriction.
This is a long running issue, so to explain it briefly, sound transit, the operator of these trains is a “special taxing district” that is privileged under state law to set its own rates, set its own fees, not have any elected oversight, and can even set its own district boundaries at will.
It is highly corrupt and not subject to any direct oversight.
The fare evasion has been tolerated for a long time because they’ve spent hundreds of billions of dollars since the 1990s and they’ve completed very little of the original project goals. So in the late 2000s, around 2009 if I remember, they opened the “link” light rail system and the ridership numbers were terrible, they wasted large amounts of money on a project that carried like 1/2 a percent of daily commutes, so then they started justifying it by claiming ridership was 100 times higher than official numbers and that the low numbers were because of fare evasion.
From then on they made only sporadic efforts to enforce fare evasion rules, sound transit doesn’t have their own police department, and they only hire a small number of King County sheriffs deputies as transit police, most fare enforcement is by private guards, but the political climate in Seattle has long been to tolerate fare evasion, so if you’re a private guard and detain someone for fare evasion, if they refuse to cooperate and attempt to leave the train or the station you have to physically arrest them and call the sheriffs office, but they have only like 15 or so deputies who do sound transit so you have to arrest someone for maybe hours to get a cop to actually arrest them.
Then to actually pay, you have to purchase your ticket at a ticket machine not on the actual platform. So if you don’t know and walk yo the platform there’s not a ticket machine. You have to walk back downstairs and buy than walk back up.
TLDR, sound transit has long tolerated fare evasion to cover up corruption, they don’t hire sufficient law enforcement, the politics of the region and the specificity of state law in regards to enforcing this means they’te basically not trying.
If you ever do visit, don’t bother paying for the train, I sure don’t.