Everything you're saying is why I'm starting to conclude that we should just make the buses free. We already have a lot of people not paying, with no plans to stop it. You could put tap-to-pay readers at the back door, but you'll still get a lot of fare evaders. And I don't want bus drivers enforcing any of this because that slows the bus down, plus the confrontation puts bus drivers in unnecessary danger.
And really practically, make buses free just to reduce dwell times, speed up travel times, and improve on-time performance. The buses took in
$55 million in fare revenue in 2022. That's really not much. That's not even the cost of the consultants who will advise the MBTA on which vendor to buy back-door-tapping machines from five years from now (joke). Some big chunk of those bus riders would have paid their full fare anyways because they're transferring to a subway, where it's
much faster and easier to collect the fares. It could be implemented overnight and could be the cheapest, most effective possible way to speed up every single bus in the MBTA.