You could look at this in two ways. One option is to say "well, actually see that's just letting them get away with fare evasion". You could bring back a system that intuitively passes the gut feel test for fairness. A fraction of a percent of problem passengers will thus be encouraged to act out, thus creating a pretext to come down hard on antisocial behavior, stop everything, call the cops, take the bus out of service, and wait an hour for them to show up and look pissed that their donut break got interrupted.

Or you could say fuck it, the results are what matter most, I just want to get from point A to point B. You don't get an opportunity to bring the system to a halt so you can have an epic showdown that solves nothing. But on the other hand, everything runs better.

Rational, cool headed results-oriented technocrats will obviously choose the second. But a lot of people are not rational. They are motivated by feelings and nothing but feelings. They crave confrontation and they want to see a showdown between the "good guys" and the "bad guys". So they'll gladly make everything worse just to scratch that itch.