How to Save the MTA

Queens Councilman Rory Lancman (D-NY) filed a lawsuit against the NYPD and the Mayor’s office on September 19 for not making data on MTA fare evasion arrests and summons available to the public. A law passed in NYC’s 2017 Administrative Code demands that the NYPD release quarterly reports on these arrests with a breakdown of age, race, gender, and other descriptive categories. Councilman Lancman is pressuring the NYPD to release these reports due to concern that there are a disproportionate number of black and Hispanic young men punished for fare evasion.

The NYPD has so far refused to release the reports out of concern for public security. They argue that data from stations that have heavy or soft police presences would be dangerous in the hands of criminals and terrorists. Nonetheless, the NYPD is working toward a compromise, and chances are that the data will soon be released.

Once the information is public, it is likely that Lancman and other Councilmembers will support a decrease or end to fare evasion policing. This is because it is likely that the NYPD data will corroborate state data from the Division of Criminal Justice Services, which shows apparent discrimination in fare evasion arrests, with 89.2 percent of arrests in the first four months of 2018 being of black and Latino citizens. And while the MTA will likely push back and complain that they lose millions of dollars a year from fare evasion (and that diminishing police presence will cause them to lose even more), it might actually be in their financial interests to deregulate fare evasion.

As it is, the MTA is severely underfunded. This is reflected in a broken public transit system with constant delays, high fares, and little room for change to meet the city’s rising population. The MTA’s inefficiency has led to a two percent drop in subway ridership last year and a 4.5 percent drop in bus ridership. The increased usage of third-party transportation services (such as Uber, Lyft, and CitiBike) is almost certainly the cause of this ridership drop, and the city streets are becoming more and more congested. With everything that is going wrong for the MTA, it would be reasonable to think that they should hike fares, get more government and taxpayer funding, and impose other austere tactics so that they can renovate the system and get riders back.

But while these policies may sound good in theory, they will ultimately restrict the MTA in the future and leave it without ridership and unable to compete with independent transportation alternatives. Instead, the MTA should now be focusing on making fares more affordable, borrowing more money from the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) and Federal Transit Administration (FTA) to fund the modernization of the subway, implementing congestion pricing (where cars must pay to drive in the most trafficked areas of the city), and lobbying the state and city government to collaborate in providing more funding. While taking out loans and cheapening fares will deepen the MTA’s current $35 billion deficit, it will benefit the MTA in the long-term by ensuring that subways and buses are the main source of transportation for New Yorkers in the future.

To begin with, the MTA’s fares have increased drastically from $1.50 to $3.00 per ride in the last 15 years. This has created a crisis of affordability for low-income New Yorkers and is part of what contributes to high levels of fare evasion. The average amount of money spent on subway and bus fares for those who commute to work within the city is around $1,500 each year, and yet almost 20 percent of the city’s population live under the poverty line, earning less than $25,000 yearly for a four-person household. The MTA needs to ensure fares are low enough to make public transit truly accessible to everyone; lowering fares by $0.25 or $0.50 can already make a large impact on people’s lives.

The Speaker of the City Council, Corey Johnson, has been an enthusiastic supporter of the Fair Fares proposal, which would give discounted MetroCards to New Yorkers under the federal poverty line. This program would require $212 million each year; in its first year, it could save over 800,000 low-income residents up to $726 each. While Mayor Bill de Blasio originally pushed back on the plan, he recently decided to allocate $106 million of his $89 billion budget to implement Fair Fares, which is set to begin in January of 2019. This is a good first step, but the Fair Fares program will need full funding to make the MTA affordable enough for the 20 percent of the city that needs it the most.

Of course, it will take more than cheaper fares to get New Yorkers to ride the subways and buses. Improving and updating the transit system will also be important. The new President of the New York City Transit Authority, Andy Byford, has proposed the Fast Forward program, which will modernize the MTA and eliminate the delays on subways and buses caused by an outdated system. In its first five years, the plan will renovate stations and signal systems (which tend to cause the most delays), make 50 new stations accessible, add 650 new subway cars and modify 1,200 more, add 2,800 buses, redesign the bus routes of all five boroughs, and create a new fare payment system. In another five years, the plan will add even more subway cars and buses and make all stations accessible. Perhaps one of the best facets of the Fast Forward plan is that it is centered on transparency and rider feedback. The plan is supposed to take 10 years instead of the expected 40 years, but will cost up to $30 billion, which is a large demand for the city and state to cover.

Mayor de Blasio and Governor Cuomo are currently divided over where the money should come from, with de Blasio wanting it to be split equally between the city and the state and Cuomo advocating for the city to cover the entire cost. In the end, the solution should come down to more funding on behalf of the city and, more importantly, the implementation of congestion pricing. For the MTA to improve, it needs a large funding boost over a short period of time that will allow it to overhaul its system quickly while decreasing fare price. The slower the MTA makes renovations and changes to the system, the more their current $35 billion debt will increase (interest alone adds $2.2 billion each year). By speeding up the Fast Forward plan, the MTA will save more money in the long term.

In both the short and long term, congestion pricing will be able to raise more money for the MTA while fighting pollution and lessening traffic in the city. If it is appropriately implemented, it could also limit the spread of ride-hailing services like Uber that otherwise take away ridership from subways, buses, and taxis. These factors would all combine to ensure that the MTA gets more ridership and funding, at which point Cuomo may be convinced it is worth it to come to an MTA funding compromise with de Blasio.

Once the MTA renovates and updates the subway and bus system and cheapens the price of MetroCards, more New Yorkers will actively use public transit, and the MTA will be able to chip away at its debt and forge a new reputation as a modern, affordable, and reliable transit system that everyone in New York City can depend on.