Cop a feel and beat the fare

NY Post 

Forget swiping — or jumping.

Waving one’s hand over an ill-placed sensor is all that’s needed to get past a new set of $700,000 subway gates the MTA is testing to crack down on fare-beating.

The simple hack, first exposed in a TikTok video, was replicated by The Post this week — proving how embarrassingly easy it is to defeat the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s shiny new line of defense against turnstile jumpers.

In the video, posted by a user named kiingspiidertv, a man walks up to the gates at the Sutphin Boulevard-Archer Avenue station in Queens, then leans over the paddles of a neighboring gate and waves his hand over the exit sensor.

The doors fling open, letting him saunter through as if that’s how it was supposed to work.

“How To Avoid Getting A Ticket✅ “NEW NYC TURNSTILE HACK,” the clip is captioned.

But there was another flaw, as Post reporters discovered, namely that the doors stay open for about five seconds — giving fare-beaters plenty of time to scurry through on the heels of paying customers.

This happened several times at the Queens station — as did people going through in pairs with only a single ticket swipe.

“One person will pay and three will go through,” an MTA employee at the station told The Post. “Or someone goes through with a stroller and the others just walk through. When I see them, I say, ‘No, you gotta pay. I don’t let them through.”

It’s not quite the rollout the agency wanted for the new design, installed late last year as part of a test of potential remedies to the fare-beating plague that robbed $690 million from the city’s coffers in 2022.