Between bordering and producing mobilities: the roles of fares in public transport policing

This article studies the links between public transport (PT) policing and fare policies. On the one hand, policing has recently been conceptualized as ‘practices of bordering’ (Christensen and Albrecht Citation2020), converging with research on the surveillance of enclosed public spaces. This research underlines the critical role of access control and flow management, through the facilitation of desirable circulations and the exclusion of individuals deemed dangerous (Klauser Citation2020). On the other hand, fares are usually viewed as neutral tools, although they embody political functions of maintaining social order on PT, filtering flows, and disciplining passengers. We ask how PT policing dynamics are affected by fare policy changes, through the cases of fare abolition in Luxembourg and fare diversification in Santiago de Cuba, using ethnographic observations and interviews with PT workers. We find that fare abolition changes transport workers’ policing practices, as they attempt to compensate for fares’ absent bordering role. With or without fares, PT staff engage passenger categorisation. In Luxembourg, this is used to enforce exclusionary social control of vagrant people. In Santiago, our research reveals the instrumental role of fares in producing mobility options, while passengers, rather than fares, play a central role in policing PT spaces.