You have to show your pass or scan your ticket in order to be allowed to board the buses.Despite the fact that DART has long ago given up on using the honor system for the bus routes, it continues in it's misguided belief that people will just pay up. Now most of you know that this didn't work in third grade, didn't work for vending at work, and isn't going to work now with train routes.

I've yet to see the fare inspectors come through and not scoop up at least one person who thinks that it's O.K. to ride the rails sans a ticket. This is tantamount to stealing from the rest of us. I know it's just $2.50 but when you multiply that by one person per train it works to be quite the tidy sum.

The latest scam I've seen is to hang out near the rail stations and buy a day pass from someone who's done with it. They'll pay you a dollar and suck $2.50 out of the system. Again, stealing from the rest of us, since our tax dollars have to make up the short fall.

At just one person per train, that racks up to a nice chunk of change. According to my count, there are 345 trains per day (Red and Blue line) on weekdays. At $2.50 for just one person per train riding for free, that's a missing revenue of $862.50 per day. With 52 weeks per year and five working days per week, thats $862.50 x 260 = $224,250 per year in missed revenues by DART.

That's money that dollars from the extra sales tax have to make up. Money, I might add, that you and I have to pay. I'm also guessing that the missed revenue is actually much higher than this due to the prevalence of riding with out a ticket or purchasing someone else's ticket.