48% of NYC riders do not pay the bus fare

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/26/nyregion/nyc-bus-subway-fare-evasion.html

by paulpauper • 2 years ago

47 170 2 years ago

pclmulqdq5• 2 years ago

Why would you if you can get away with not paying? When I was a NYC resident, I looked at people who evaded fares with disgust for raising the price for all of us, but it's really just a consequence of failing to enforce the law. I should have been looking with disgust at the NYPD guys who walked around the platform like tough guys but constantly failed to hand out tickets to fare evaders.

readthenotes13• 2 years ago

Both can be true...

vladvasiliu• 2 years ago

Because it’s the right thing to do. You can’t have a cop behind each person to enforce all the laws. People should “self police” and realize that we’re living in a society where we must actually adhere to the values we say we have instead of just paying lip service.

This is why we can’t have nice things.

jart• 2 years ago

I didn't know petty thievery was among our values, Vlad.

pclmulqdq5• 2 years ago

Self-policing by social shame doesn't work when there is a large population of shameless people.

That population happens to also include pretty much all of the thugs in the NYPD.

SllX• 2 years ago

Self-policing is nice but it is nicely complemented by actual police work. Cities should be aggressively policing fare evaders and maybe that means putting actual police in front and inside the fare areas to catch fare evaders, exclude people with hygienic issues and take harassment reports/arrest sexual harassers.

parpfish• 2 years ago

Maybe we need to stop thinking about public transport as a revenue generating/ self funding organization and just think about it as a critical piece of making a city work.

Nobody worries about whether the fire department is “breaking even”, you just pay for it through taxes because it’s essential

readthenotes13• 2 years ago

Where I live, the fare ticket's affordance is the ability to kick homeless off public transportation as it is the most comfortable place they have during hot summer days.

I wish they would also kick off people who eat on the train and leave their mess behind, but they never confront nuisance-makers.

pests2• 2 years ago

Did you know the homeless can also buy a ticket, even without a home?

VWWHFSfQ4• 2 years ago

just think about it as a critical piece of making a city work

That's what the NYC MTA is... and they're $42 billion in debt. And they need to "borrow" another $23 billion from taxpayers to fund themselves for 2025-2030.

[0] https://www.osc.ny.gov/files/reports/osdc/pdf/report-3-2025....

mikem1702• 2 years ago

Did that have anything to do with the cancellation of congestion pricing? I heard that was supposed to generate $16 billion through 2030 for the MTA.

nomel2• 2 years ago

This would be fine if government projects like this had any sort of accountability. As is, these systems can become infinitely inefficient while claiming "we just need more money to fix it". Privatization seems to be the only way to enable accountability.

askvictor• 2 years ago

Privatization doesn't fix that; the state just ends up continuing to chuck money every time the companies (who are now in charge of critical infrastructure, and thus can't be allowed to fail) cry poor. It ends up being less efficient with a bunch of extra money flowing to the private sector. At least this is the Australian experience.

heavyset_go2• 2 years ago

The endless streams of private contractors blowing through deadlines, budgets and billions of dollars on government contracts doesn't really agree with that assertion.

Gud• 2 years ago

Sorry, but you are wrong. The best possible railway system I’ve been on, SBB is wholly owned by Switzerland itself.

I would not describe it as “infinitely inefficient”.

pintxo• 2 years ago

I don’t think it’s about accountability, after all democracy has more or less the same accountability mechanisms as a publicly traded company.

Given the massive public interest, there is probably at least an order of magnitude more oversight of public offices than there is for private companies.

In the end it’s the same challenge that every team, department, company has to solve: how to have people that care about their job?

Here my impression is that that’s often not the case, leading to the effects you described.

Given the often severely reduced pay in public jobs, compared with industry, I don’t find that overly surprising, you get what you pay for.

seanmcdirmid• 2 years ago

Mobile day centers for the unhoused? Surely there is a more efficient way of going about that. A lot of people avoid the bus due to safety concerns, not due to paying the fare.

freetime22• 2 years ago

I think when you have a finite resource like seats on a bus, having a usage-based fee helps to promote more efficient usage.

I have lived in communities where buses were free to ride, and it was a great option to get around. But these were relatively small and wealthy communities where demand for public transportation was relatively low. I'm not sure the same system could work in NYC.

AnthonyMouse6• 2 years ago

There aren't really finite seats on a bus. The hardest problem with mass transit is being able to operate routes at enough frequency that people will use mass transit instead of driving because the next train is too long a wait. If you can get more people to ride it then you can justify more frequent service and further increase usage -- which gets more people out of cars, reduces pollution and traffic congestion, etc. These are public goods.

And most buses are not going to be 100% full most of the time. So if you have an empty seat, the cost is zero. If you don't have an empty seat, now you can justify another bus/train, which reduces latency and causes several more people to take mass transit, which is good.

pests2• 2 years ago

In large parts of the country fire service is not provided by the city and you must contract and pay for your own.

dotnet008• 2 years ago

Fire departments aren't something open to a public which doesn't give a damn about it being shared property, (fire department equipment is typically only handled by the trained people employed by the department) nor do they typically involve much infrastructure that incurs constant wear and tear.

The solution to the MTA being exceedingly wasteful and unwilling to enforce rules isn't to just make it easier for them to be even worse.

If these people already feel such little civic responsibility for city infrastructure as to be skipping the fare and effectively taking advantage of everyone else, it's going to get much worse if it appears to them that they aren't even being asked to pay. Deciding to just make it 'free' would be the same as deciding just not to measure things that reveal inconvenient facts and celebrating that as having solved the problem.

pclmulqdq5• 2 years ago

Not to mention that the fire department in many places will also send you a bill if you happen to use their services. It's usually a very small bill (a few hundred bucks for a service literally worth hundreds of thousands), and your insurance will usually cover it.

If you need an ambulance ride, that bill can be thousands, but is covered by health insurance.

rayiner9• 2 years ago

Even Sweden and Denmark have bus fare. If half the people are evading bus fare, then that’s a problem that needs to be fixed regardless of anything else you might do. It’s not likely that the people jumping the turnstiles are orderly and polite riders who help keep the system clean. You’ll just end up taxing everyone to create a system that’s unpleasant for normal people to use, which will destroy public support for those taxes.

Toxic empathy, ironically, is antithetical to building functioning transit systems. To get buy-in from the public to direct tax dollars to transit, you need to have pleasant, orderly, clean systems that people who can afford to drive want to use instead of driving. You can’t get that if half your riders are law breakers.

OutOfHere4• 2 years ago

Toxic empathy

Do not forget that NYC charges a substantial income tax, and also a substantial sales tax. As such, the empathy is 100% justifiable.

fulafel2• 2 years ago

Sweden and Denmark have low economic inequality and high income transfers. On the other hand nearby Estonia has less income transfers & higher inequality but free bus fares.

dgrin91• 2 years ago

The difference is that the fire department is only used for emergencies. If you call the fire department to help you get downtown you are probably getting a bill.

doublepg23• 2 years ago

It would be nice if we had a 100% income tax so the State could never run out of money to fund more programs for the anti-social.

yongjik• 2 years ago

The difference is nobody sees firefighters saving a homeless man and thinks "Eww gross I'd rather not have them saving lives next to me."

When public transportation gets the reputation of being the place of juvenile delinquents and petty criminals, people start to ask why their tax money is spent on it, and it becomes a self-reinforcing cycle.

I may sound like a cold bastard but I'd rather have public transportation system frequented by middle class families and commuters, because that's how you get these people to demand more public transportation.

AnthonyMouse6• 2 years ago

The fare has to be low enough that poor people can afford it because they have to be able to use mass transit to get to work. Even the homeless need to be able to use it so they can e.g. get to a job interview. And a fare is not going to be a deterrent to juvenile delinquents because they're the ones jumping the turnstiles.

But if you're not actually excluding the deplorables then the fare is just a regressive tax and a deterrent to mass transit use for everyone.

The real problem is that you have unsheltered people without taking effective action against it and then the subway is a form of shelter. If you want to help them then you fix the zoning so more housing can be built, provide shelters, etc. If you want to be a cold bastard then you give them a one way ticket to a lower density city. Charging 10% of the cost of the transit system as a fare, which costs about as much to collect as it generates if not more, is neither of those things and counterproductive.

Ferret74462• 2 years ago

I think it's wrong of you to group "revenue generating" and "self funding" together like they are the same thing. Public transport should absolutely be self funding, if even partially, to provide the right value structure for both riders and the planning agency when choosing when/where to ride/set routes.

EasyMark2• 2 years ago

Of course we should but I think you will quickly find yourself out on the street as a politician if you propose this. I don’t think proposing free anything these days goes over all with the public who often won’t benefit from it.

dumbo-octopus25• 2 years ago

Public transit fares are generally malformed. I personally never pay the LA Metro fare. Why? Because I pay the Metrolink fare, which by their own admission covers same-day Metro transit. But police will actively seek me out as a person who looks like they have money and give me a hard time for not “tapping”, all while folks who very clearly have no money waltz on into the metro, stopping only to smoke crack on the elevator up. There’s a general problem in this country of what to do with law breakers who do not have money. It seems like the answer is to make them work and garnish their wages, but for whatever reason we are against that.

01HNNWZ0MV43FF• 2 years ago

There are no jobs that want jobless people. There's few that even want 18 year olds

dumbo-octopus25• 2 years ago

Plenty of work for prison laborers.

mc32• 2 years ago

It didn't used to be a problem, but over the course of the last 12 years or so, people have abdicated any agency they had. It started out in areas like the SF panhandle where well meaning folks got the cops to not arrest delinquents for trespassing, mistreating animals, loitering, begging, etc. Some got tired after a while and they passed redundant sit-lie laws... that stuck for a tiny bit, till riots were used as excuse to engage in all kinds of unlawful behavior and that in combination with Covid and a national defund-the-police movement led to a substantial increase in quality of life crime and petty crime that has now pervaded and has entrenched itself like an invasive species but the people responsible for this are loath to admit a mistake and now pretend it's not really an issue.

Maybe people will tire of this and hold officials accountable --but it will take a change of perspective from bleeding hearts and lots of time as well. It can be done. The wild west was tamed. This can be tamed as well but it takes will and commitment.

dumbo-octopus25• 2 years ago

Yes. Even on this very form, a suggestion that folks who break the law are held accountable for their actions and are made to pay back society for their transgressions results in an immediate downvote brigade.

mikem1702• 2 years ago

substantial increase in quality of life crime and petty crime

Do you have any sources for that?

I was only able to find numbers on violent crime, which have gone down recently, and weren't as bad as thirty years ago. The 70s through 90s were pretty rough.

I've heard other people say that these minor crimes go unreported and undercounted, but then it's difficult to get past anecdotes without some kind of meaurement, for example perceptions may have shofted due to more news coverage, or as we've gotten older.

I notice more beggars in general. I take that as mental health, drug and poverty than crime. I also notice less traffic law enforcement and more reckless driving. A lot of other things seem to depend on the neighborhood.

I agree that mistakes have been made in some localities. Some of problems are too big to sweep under the rug.

Lammy• 2 years ago

Jump the turnstile / Never pay the toll

Doo-wah diddy and bust in with the pre-roll

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itStM-gwUyU

booleandilemma• 2 years ago

I'm not too familiar with the buses but I use the subway and see people evading the fare daily. I pay but then I feel like a sucker.

scotty796• 2 years ago

Try not paying and see if that's an experience you'd prefer to pay to avoid.

drewmol• 2 years ago

I’m now wondering what the ratio for the subway is, do half the people skip paying the subway fare?

stevenwoo• 2 years ago

I’m only familiar with the buses near me - I don’t think the bus driver would let me on board if I didn’t pay - how do these riders get away without paying? The driver will wait for people to get exact change and not move, though I have seen a driver let someone on who claimed they lost their card. I can see how people do this on a train or subway (until you get spot checked for fare) but I have to walk by the meter/card reader where I am for buses. The article is behind a paywall so I only got the first two paragraphs.

dataflow• 2 years ago

I’m only familiar with the buses near me - I don’t think the bus driver would let me on board if I didn’t pay - how do these riders get away without paying?

There's a history of bus drivers being attacked pretty badly for ticking off the wrong traveler. So they don't enforce this for the sake of their safety; they're supposed to just make a record of it and move on.

https://gothamist.com/news/why-the-mtas-bus-drivers-dont-enf...

senkora• 2 years ago

Many NYC buses let you enter at the middle or back of the bus, so it is easy to simply not tap when you get on. You don’t go past the bus driver.

liveoneggs• 2 years ago

Select Bus Service uses those paper tickets or OMNY app reader, both of which are self-service and available in the middle door of the bus, far away from the eyes of the driver.

dotnet008• 2 years ago

They usually just don't insist that strongly because they'd rather not get into a confrontation, as not moving might also anger people other than just the one you're holding for (as an argument I once saw happen on a bus went after a driver insisted, "the money isn't coming out of your paycheck so why do you care?").

Previously the consideration used to be nice because it was possible to end up in a situation where your metrocard was too low on balance, too far away from a machine to add more money to it, and you didn't have change. But nowadays most busses have tap-to-pay, so there shouldn't be many excuses.

lsb• 2 years ago

All New Yorkers pay 80% of the cost to run the bus before they even think about boarding. (“Farebox recovery ratio”)

This is an excuse to fund more cops. Transit should be free, like sidewalks and parks.

VWWHFSfQ4• 2 years ago

Transit should be free, like sidewalks and parks.

Sidewalks and parks cost $0 for people to walk on, or let their dog shit in. Maybe $15/hour for the guys in blue jumpsuits to clean it up once a week?

NYC has the largest subway system in the world _by_far_ (and also one of the oldest). It's extremely expensive to operate.

Don't compare it to walking around on sidewalks or in parks.

ceejayoz2• 2 years ago

Sidewalks, as with trains, require construction and maintenance.

An extra walker a day on a sidewalk costs the same marginal $0 or so an extra rider on the trains does. Both are expensive to run on large scale.

snypher• 2 years ago

NYC parks budget is like $600m, it must cost something to maintain?

bydo2• 2 years ago

NYC has the largest subway system in the world _by_far_

It absolutely does not. It is the 12th in length and 10th by ridership: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metro_systems

dublinben• 2 years ago

Transit should be free, like sidewalks and parks.

And most similarly, roads. The theoretical 'farebox recovery ratio' of most roads is 0, but this is never part of the conversation. Maybe if it were, transit would look much better in comparison.

hattmall2• 2 years ago

But there is a usage based fee for roads too in the form of gasoline tax which funds roads. Something people that don't buy gas don't pay.

orange_joe3• 2 years ago

The simple truth is that urban progressives no longer believe that the poor owe anything to society in general. The idea of enforcing the law against such a presumably disadvantaged group is anathema. Until there is a cultural shift where you can discuss the idea of mutually upholding the commons more and more city services will devolve into taxes on honesty.

drawkward2• 2 years ago

Is society equitable to the poor?

orange_joe3• 2 years ago

In the case of the NY subway, it would cost a poor person receiving subsidized fare about $2.20/day to do their part, or about 9 minutes of work at minimum wage. It is not a crime to ask a person to participate in their own survival.

StanislavPetrov• 2 years ago

Of course not, but that doesn't mean that we can have a functional society without having rules about what conduct is allowed in public places, and enforcement mechanisms to make sure that those who violate the rules are removed from society.

lazide• 2 years ago

It all boils down to a philosophical question:

- should that matter? And if so, how much?

Because at the end of the day, there is a (small) percentage of the population that will do the absolute minimum they can get away with. Or even less than that (criminals).

So you’ll get what you tolerate, and often somewhat worse (depending on strength of enforcement).

Is that fair? In at least some cases, probably not.

Should that matter enough to stop enforcement? That is the classic ‘the road to hell is paved with good intentions’.

rayiner9• 2 years ago

It doesn’t matter. Each individual has an obligation to be unobtrusive to those around them. Maybe society will reciprocate and provide support to the individual in return—the US certainly gives poor people more than poor people give society. But the obligation to society comes first.

dotnet008• 2 years ago

Are 48% of the ~1.4 million people who use NYC busses so poor as to be unable to afford to pay the bus fare?

https://new.mta.info/agency/new-york-city-transit/subway-bus...

scotty796• 2 years ago

How about removing their disadvantage first and enforcing the law next?

What's the point of wasting increasing amounts of money on escalating enforcement against people behaving socially because they were pushed out of society instead of working to being them back into society first?

rayiner9• 2 years ago

Being poor does not cause dysfunctional behavior. There’s lots of Eastern European countries much poorer than NYC and SF that have a fraction of the dysfunctional behavior you see on public transit in NYC or SF.

megablast• 2 years ago

It should be free. Most roads are free.

srj• 2 years ago

Roads are funded by gas taxes, or with income/property taxes.

scotty796• 2 years ago

What's wrong with funding buses the same way?

marssaxman• 2 years ago

I totally agree, in principle! But I also remember what Seattle buses were like when we still had the ride-free zone: people would just ride the bus back and forth across the zone all night, to have somewhere to sleep. To a point, making buses free makes them more accessible as transportation; but then, literal free-riders make them less accessible as transportation. I don't know what the solution is.

8bitsrule• 2 years ago

In King County, buses lost -a lot- of riders when COVID appeared. And that ridership hasn't rebounded yet. At non-peak times, it's maybe 1/3. (And that's at 15 minute intervals ... a -lot less- frequent that New Yorkers expect [Youtube] ). So yeah, a high tolerance for freeriders should prevail below 1/2 loads.

Also there a lot of new drivers these days ... there's more than enough for them to learn and watch ... policing should be low priority. Kids (IIRC) are free-riding anyway.

micromacrofoot• 2 years ago

it shouldn't have a fare! taxes are the fare!

the amount of time, effort, and money spent on fare collection is absurd! taxes are more efficient

ipnon• 2 years ago

Fare evaders are often critics of the high price, not realizing that the price could apparently be cut in half if all riders simply cooperated to pay the fare.

ceejayoz2• 2 years ago

As if that’s what would happen with the extra revenue.

m_ke• 2 years ago

I wonder what percentage of that is people getting on a bus to get to a train, where they actually pay the toll.

I used to have to take a bus to a train and it was normal to have people get in through the exit doors in the back because the front of the bus was too packed to get through (people not moving to the back because they're old or want to be close to the exit to get off). Almost everyone got off on the last stop that was next to a train stop where they would go down and pay to get on the subway.

I also used to take another bus down metropolitan ave in Queens, which usually only had 5-10 people on it at a time but would be stuck in heavy traffic due to all of the people driving down the avenue from Queens to Brooklyn, and it made me wonder how much time everyone would save if we made the bus free to incentivize more of the drivers to take the bus instead.

poidos• 2 years ago

Doesn’t NYC spend significantly more on police to crack down on fare evasion than they do on skipped fares?

dotcoma2• 2 years ago

I imagine that 90% of those who get on a bus without paying have a smartphone in their hands.

Is there really no way to charge for bus rides via smartphones, and track those who are on buses but don’t pay?

dotnet008• 2 years ago

Most if not all NYC busses have tap to pay now, so yes, they could tap and pay. Tracking phones that aren't paying might cause issues though.

dotcoma2• 2 years ago

Even without tapping, I mean. You’re within a few feet of one of those sensors for more than a minute? Thanks for your purchase (if you have credit, or a card tied to the system).

And if you don’t, it’s one line on your record, just like you were speeding or peeing on the streets. I’m not against treating buses as something we pay with taxes. But as long as we are required to buy a bus ticket, I think we should track those who don’t.

rayiner9• 2 years ago

You can’t have nice things if you don’t have nice people. In Germany busses often use an honor system: https://www.german-way.com/travel-and-tourism/public-transpo....

Half of riders evading bus fare is third-world country levels of dysfunction. How does a developed country get to that point? And is it even possible to get things back on track? I imagine you could institute harsh punishments for fare evaders, but if you need to do that, you’ve already lost. You can’t beat orderliness into people.

pcwalton3• 2 years ago

I was curious about your claim, having spent time abroad in Germany and never having seen an honor system. In fact, what your link describes is not an honor system but a proof-of-payment system. Proof-of-payment systems are common in the US too, for example on Caltrain in the Bay Area (which reportedly has very low fare evasion rates).

telotortium3• 2 years ago

Proof-of-payment works on Caltrain because they have conductors who will walk up and down the aisles to examine your ticket/scan your Clipper card for payment. On busses, which don't have conductors, it really is an honor system.

tamaharbor• 2 years ago

Funny no one in the comments has mentioned law and order.

Arnt• 2 years ago

Strange. 48% is a lot, and the difference indicates that there may be design problems.

By design problems I mean... For a while my bank's ATM gave me only large-denomination notes and the bus company's machine didn't accept those. So I'd stand there, money in hand and unable to pay.

Later, when I had my first child, a few of the tube station entrances only had ticket-stamping machines at the stairs, not at the path I had to use with my baby pram.

Do NY buses have that sort of problem?

https://archive.is/e7agL btw

48% of NYC riders do not pay the bus fare

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