BART officials have a new proposal to lure riders back on the trains that serve San Francisco International Airport: add a second full-time police officer to patrol the station, and let the airport pay for it.

Representatives of both agencies met Thursday afternoon in San Francisco to discuss the idea, one of several proposed strategies to fix a galling image problem at the airport’s BART station. Frustrated with the increased visibility of homelessness, the high number of fare cheats and the steady exodus of riders to Uber and Lyft, BART and the airport have drafted an agreement to tackle these issues together.

“The BART-SFO station is really the international gateway into the Bay Area,” said Bob Powers, deputy general manager of BART. He attended Thursday’s meeting along with board President Bevan Dufty, Director Janice Li, Airport Commission President Larry Mazzola and airport Director Ivar Satero.

Under a memorandum of understanding they plan to sign soon, the airport will provide funding for a second officer to patrol the station between 5 a.m. and 1 a.m. BART already pays for one officer there during those hours. The airport will also invest $300,000 in “station-hardening,” which is BART-speak for higher railings and locked swing gates to discourage scofflaws.

And the airport will pay half the cost of a homeless outreach team from San Mateo County. BART and the county would split the other half, possibly with help from other agencies.

For the past two years, BART officials have watched riders peel off the airport line. Entries and exits decreased 2 percent from 2017 to last year, and dropped another 8 percent since then, according to agency records. That’s translated into about $4 million in lost fares.

The airport, meanwhile, is grappling with traffic jams outside its terminals — a side effect of people arriving in cars, rather than on transit. The curbside backups have gotten so severe that SFO began offering a $3 discount to ride-hail customers who meet their drivers at a nearby garage. Those enticements end next week, at which point the garage is mandatory — Uber and Lyft drivers will no longer be allowed to pick up customers at the curbs, airport spokesman Doug Yakel said.

Airport duty managers have also watched the homeless population swell at the International Terminal, a trend they attribute to BART. With nowhere else to go, homeless people are riding trains south from the city in the middle of the night, then seeking shelter at the airport until BART reopens at 5 a.m.

“A lot of homeless people are getting stuck at the airport, and then in the morning they are getting on the trains,” Dufty said. “So when passengers try to get on the first car, a lot of the seats are taken up with people’s possessions. It’s intimidating for tourists.”

A recent Chronicle report showed that police contacts with homeless people have tripled at SFO. There were 1,139 such calls in February, or roughly 40 a day, compared with about a dozen contacts a day in March 2017, according to airport figures obtained through a public records request.

To many officials, these issues are interconnected. Riders now have an array of transportation options to get to the airport, so they’re not beholden to BART. If private car services offer a more comfortable environment that insulates passengers from larger societal problems, many riders will take it.

“The homelessness issue kind of exploded for everyone in California,” Powers said. “It’s going to take everybody to help out and try to course-correct on this thing.”

Though homelessness was the big theme at Thursday’s meeting, the discussion inevitably shifted to fare evasion, which is how most transients wind up in stations and on trains, Yakel and others say. That’s a point of contention at BART — Li, the board director, said at a recent meeting there is no evidence that fare evasion is tied to the prevalence of homeless people on the transit system.

“We’re looking at some methods to potentially make it harder for fare evasion to occur in the (San Francisco International Airport) station,” Yakel said.

At the same time, the airport may start offering perks to travelers who ride transit, Dufty said. He envisions something resembling a new program in Boston, where people who take a bus to Logan International Airport get priority in airport security lines.

BART is setting up meetings with the San Francisco County Transportation Authority to discuss how that program might work.

Rachel Swan is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: rswan@sfchronicle.com Twiter: @rachelswan