Subway farebeaters don’t just cheat the MTA from needed revenue, they also cheat honest straphangers who feel like suckers when seeing others slip past the turnstiles or sneak in through the exit crash gates.
Everyone should pay their subway fare and we applaud Gov. Hochul and the MTA announcing last week that the piloting of new gate-type subway entrances that are harder to jump over or crawl under than turnstiles had been a success against farebeating in 20 stations and that the agency was moving ahead with a $1.1 billion implementation that will eventually cover 150 of the city’s busiest subway stations.
That, combined with an expanded Fair Fares program for discounted rides for low income folk, should reduce the farebeating that is costing $400 million a year, making the new gates a wise investment that will quickly pay for themselves.
As the testing showed, making it harder to back-cock or hurdle over turnstiles dissuaded cheats and encouraged straphangers to pay up. That said, the new gates have to be fast and work every time without fail, as New Yorkers aren’t the patient type for any slow or balky entrances to their trains.
While they’re at, the MTA must get its newish OMNY payment mechanism to show at the turnstiles or gate if a passenger is paying three bucks or getting a free transfer or a free ride due to fare capping. And the balances on the OMNY cards must also display.
As for those who have trouble making the $3 fare, there is the Fair Fares program, which has long been an avenue for lower-income New Yorkers to get half-price fares. More riders can benefit than ever before since Mayor Mamdani and the City Council reached a deal to raise the cutoff to 200% the federal poverty level, adding some 340,000 people to eligibility.
The program’s main pitfall has been lack of public knowledge and a relatively byzantine application process, an issue that the mayor’s public engagement efforts and the Council’s proposed simplification to enrollment are aiming to tackle, respectively.
Our subway is a vital public service, and like all public services, it needs to be paid for. You’re less likely to notice your contributions to the public library system, schools or the fire department because these just come out of your city taxes.
The enormously expensive transit system is usage-based, so you already have the benefit of only having to pay for what you’re using, but New Yorkers do have to pay for what they’re using if they expect it to continue to function. It’s a literal free-rider problem: if enough people decide that they can ride without having to pay, then it will only continue to deteriorate for everyone, including them.
Between the new fare gates and the expansion of Fair Fares — think about it not as reducing the amount that many New Yorkers are paying but as raising that amount from zero to a half-fare — fare revenue will climb, which is good. Still, if it’s going to get more of it, then it’s on the MTA to make the most of our hard-earned cash, which means always finding additional savings and using their labor pool most effectively.
The subway system has long been the lifeblood of the city, without which we would literally come to a standstill. There’s no reason that in this world-class city it shouldn’t be a world-class example of both engineering and good government.