The D.C. government is under scrutiny for not enforcing fines for passengers on the city's transit system, with the percentage of those who don't pay bus fares as high as 70%.

“I don’t know that there has been a citation that has gone through full adjudication,” one source told the news outlet NOTUS, which posted a story Monday about the toothless enforcement.

The adjudication – the legal process by which a judge or court reviews evidence and arguments to decide whether to enforce the ticket and related fine – is handled by the capital city's Office of Administrative Hearings. 

There are at least two reasons why the tickets and fines are not being enforced, according to the NOTUS report: 

The court's cost priorities and a disagreement between the city and the Washington Area Transit Authority, the Washington, D.C. region's public transportation system, over who should prosecute fare-evaders due to errors in how citations are written and submitted to the administrative court and the  

Last year, OAH said it had “made the policy decision to spend its limited resources on live cases … rather than processing filings from WMATA just to dismiss them immediately,” also according to NOTUS.

WAMTA said in a statement, the transit agency said it “remains committed to improving fare compliance through a combination of education, infrastructure improvements, and enforcement." 

The agency also said its investments in "modern fare rates and fare-enforcement contributed to an 82% reduction in rail fare evasion system-wide in 2024.”

A report earlier this month by local TV station WUSA9 found the evasion rate on WAMTA trains is just 4.8%, but the rate for buses was nearly 70%, according to the lates figures, July 2025 to March, with agency staffers saying that rate is the highest in the country and roughly double the national average for comparable systems. 

WMATA General Manager Randy Clark said the increase in fare evasion enforcement helps the agency’s funding, among other initiatives, in WMATA’s “Fares Pay for Service” campaign addressing both bus and rail issues.

In 2018, the Democrat-led D.C. City Council decriminalized fare evasion, bringing a $300 fine and up to 10 days in jail down to a civil offense punishable by a $50 fine. 

There were 297 fare evasion citations in the DMV in 2021, according to WAMATA. In 2024, there were 16,181. 

More than 21,000 fare evasion citations were issued last year, according to local TV station. NBC4.