Video: Huge Crowd Of Fare Evaders Caught Leaving Rolling Loud Festival
SAN FRANCISCO (KPIX 5) -- Cell phone video showing dozens of fare evaders jumping the gates after leaving the Rolling Loud Festival in Oakland Saturday night has been seen tens of thousands of times on Twitter in a matter of hours.
"I think it's just kids being kids trying to save their money, and they already paid like $250 for a ticket and they don't have $15 dollars to ride the BART," said frequent BART rider Dennis Diaz of Richmond.
We showed the video to BART riders at the Embarcadero station.
"It's been happening since I've been coming as a high schooler at big events. It depends on the event. The minute you have more people than what the space can handle, there's going to be abuse," said BART rider Lynda Gutierrez of Oakland.
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Thousands of people attended the two day event dubbed the largest hip-hop festival in the world. It was held at the Oakland Coliseum parking lot.
Rebecca Madsen attended Saturday's shows.
"Just really chaotic, a lot of people, so there really wasn't much to do, like if you wanted to go and take the BART, everybody was like jumping, and everybody was like trying to get through, so you were kind of like in a situation that was a little bit uncomfortable," she said.
KPIX 5 alerted BART Director Debora Allen to the video.
"I am surprised, I'm disappointed, BART does spend a lot of resources to run extra trains on nights when we have large events like this," she said in a phone interview.
Just last week, the BART Board of Directors unanimously voted for a new fare gate design, a swing-style barrier, meant to discourage fare evaders.
"I'll have a lot of questions for staff, as to how something like this goes on, and there do not appear to be any BART personnel or police around," Allen added.
Replacing the old gates with the new design is expected to cost BART about $150 million dollars.
BART says first the agency will install the new gates at one station within the next 6 months as part of a pilot program, before rolling them out system wide.
