Is Collecting Fares Too Dangerous for Bus Drivers?
17th August 2026
The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority says that 70 percent of bus riders don’t pay fares, costing the agency at least $50 million a year. Before about 2016, the agency told drivers to tell boarding passengers, “Hello, the fare of $X.XX.” But in 2017, it abandoned this policy because fare disputes led to too many assaults on drivers.
D.C. is full of Democrats i.e. criminals. This ought to come as no surprise.
Now the agency is in financial trouble, and it also recognizes that allowing passengers to evade fares simply encourages more serious transit crimes. So it once again has asked drivers to make fare announcements. But the transit union is objecting, saying this is likely to lead to an increase in driver assaults. As an example, they posted the above video of a masked passenger beating on a bus driver, though the reason for the attack was the driver saying the passenger could not have an alcoholic beverage, not that he had to pay a fare.
Betcha he was a Person of Color, too. Betcha.
Part of the problem is that agencies like Washington Metro have no incentive to reign in costs and every incentive to spend more to keep union workers, contractors, and bureaucrats happy. Transit agencies have convinced the public, or at least politicians, that profits are unimportant, so hardly anyone other than the Antiplanner bothers to calculate how much money agencies like WMATA lose.
Sound like Democrats to me. Perhaps you have been following, as I have, the YouTube videos from Europeans who were over here for the World Cup. Uniformly, they express amazement that Americans are the horrible people portrayed in movies and headlines.
Well, they’re half-right. Americans who live outside of big Democrat-ruled behavioral sinks aren’t what they expected to be, but if they spend any time in the Blue Cites (even in Red States there are Blue Cities) they would have found conditions as they were expecting.
Culture is king.