I Used to Be a Fare Hopper

Last week, a 16-year-old boy shot a 14-year-old boy in the head on the Brookland Metro platform, just a few blocks away from where I work. It was about 4:00 p.m. and the station was crowded with kids who had just got out of school. I have been down there many times at that hour, and I can imagine the scene: teenagers jostling, fighting, annoying the other commuters, until things get out of hand and pop pop—someone’s dead. 

These things don’t happen too often, but when they do, everyone starts looking for explanations beyond blind chance. It was widely circulated in the hours afterward that the shooter was also a fare hopper. The fact came as no surprise. Fare evasion is a huge problem on the D.C. Metro, especially among the younger set, who, more than older people, generally don’t see it as a very serious offense. But it is a serious offense, fare-hopper hawks respond. An incident such as this most recent shooting proves it: commit small crimes, like jumping a turnstile, and pretty soon you could be committing big ones, like clocking a kid in the head. Little distortions of public order blot and blacken the canvas until it resembles a monstrous work of abstract expressionism.

But I have to wonder if fare hopping always and inevitably leads to worse things. In the case of the shooter, I think the fact that he didn’t pay for the Metro was incidental to his other problems. At any rate, the question has some personal significance for me. Until rather recently, I never paid for public transportation in D.C. or in any other city when I could help it. Of course I do now—these responsibilities seem to accompany marriage and fatherhood—but if I did not, would I really be so dissipated? Or, on the other hand, would I be too warped even to know? After the shooting, I wondered aloud with my sister, who lives near the Brookland Metro station, and revisited my fare-hopping days.