Good morning. It’s Wednesday. We’ll find out why transit employees with hand-held devices are asking to check bus passengers’ tap-and-ride payments. We’ll also see what prompted Representative Joseph Morelle to visit the State Capitol in Albany.
Buses in New York City are going European, New York City Transit says.
That doesn’t mean that they will be double-deckers that are driven on the left side of the street, as in London. It means that enforcement teams will be onboard, checking on whether you paid the fare when you climbed aboard — as in, yes, London, as well as Paris, Berlin and other European cities.
This “requires a cultural shift,” said Demetrius Crichlow, the president of New York City Transit, the arm of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority that runs the buses and subways.
It’s a significant shift, considering that slightly more than half of passengers — 52.7 percent — skip the fare on Select Bus Service buses, which make fewer stops and often let passengers enter through their rear doors. Slightly less than half — 48.6 percent — of the passengers on regular local buses don’t pay. On express buses, the figure is only 6 percent.
Crichlow told an M.T.A. committee last week that the fare payers resent the fare beaters: “Paying customers have long said that they find it incredibly frustrating when they see other people who do not pay the fare.” He added, “I can’t agree with them more.”
He said that the M.T.A. has worked to “turn the tide against fare evasion” and that “we’ve had a lot of success on the subway side,” thanks to changes that included putting semicircular sleeves on turnstiles to discourage fare beaters from jumping over or crawling under. But “there is still much work to be done on the bus side,” he said.
So bus passengers “should now expect to provide proof of payment” when asked, he said.
Who wants to know?
The request will come from an M.T.A. fare enforcer with a hand-held device that can check whether an OMNY card or a cellphone made a payment on the bus someone is riding on. The fare enforcers are civilian M.T.A. employees who belong to what the agency calls EAGLE teams. It is an acronym for Evasion and Graffiti Lawlessness Eradication. Crichlow called the members of the team “the face” of stopping fare evasion.
Crichlow said the hand-held devices that EAGLE team members carry do not accept payments. Nor do they store financial or personal data, he added. “These devices are designed specifically just for validation,” he continued, adding that members of the EAGLE team have the authority to write summonses for passengers who did not pass the inspection.
The EAGLE teams date back to 2008, Crichlow said, but mainly kept an eye on fare boxes in the days of MetroCards. “We never had the ability to validate the MetroCards,” Crichlow said.
That changed with the arrival of tap-and-ride payments using OMNY cards or cellphones. The M.T.A. stopped selling MetroCards at the end of last year. The Select Bus Service had required passengers to pay the fare at a curbside machine that printed out a ticket. On the bus, an EAGLE team member could ask to see it. But the sidewalk machines do not take OMNY cards or cellphone payments.
Crichlow’s boss, Janno Lieber, the chairman of the M.T.A., is an enthusiastic proponent of using the hand-held devices to check whether passengers have paid. “This is modern fare-payment technology, the way it works all over the Western world,” he said. “My brother lives in Europe, and routinely when he gets on, somebody comes up to him and says, ‘Show me how you paid, and let’s validate that you paid.’”
Lieber added that “we haven’t gotten a lot of pushback.” But William Owen, a spokesman for the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, a civil rights and privacy group, criticized the validation action.
“We need to fix the unaffordability of transit, which is why bus riders skip the fare,” he said. “This is just another move to make transit in N.Y.C. exclusive and out of reach for lower-income New Yorkers.” He added that despite Crichlow’s assurances, “we need to be absolutely certain” that personal data would not be collected by the hand-held devices.
Weather
Showers are possible today as temperatures near 71. Rainy conditions will continue tonight with a low around 53.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until May 14 (Solemnity of the Ascension).
QUOTE OF THE DAY
“Jeffrey Epstein was a great manipulator.” — Leah Blume McGee, testifying at a New York State Senate hearing in support of a bill that would allow Epstein’s victims to sue his estate for punitive damages.
The latest New York news
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Attack on Mamdani’s tax-the-rich approach: Steven Roth, the chief executive of Vornado Realty Trust, criticized Mayor Zohran Mamdani for singling out the billionaire Ken Griffin in his push to make wealthy New Yorkers pay more taxes.
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Mamdani’s rise presents a political opportunity: The Muslim Democratic Club was founded to increase political power among the city’s Muslims. Now, some of its founders are the mayor’s top aides, and other Muslim political veterans fill high-ranking posts at City Hall.
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Police captain is demoted: Capt. James Wilson was transferred to a less prominent role after a viral video showed him, while on duty, calling Mayor Zohran Mamdani “total nonsense.” Wilson also called Democrats a “waste of human race.”
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Goodbye to a famous streetwear shop: H&R Hosiery, a South Bronx store where the rappers Fat Joe and Slick Rick cultivated their looks, shaped street fashion for 60 years. It closed last week, doomed by a rent increase.
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Leading the list of Tony nominees: “Schmigadoon!” and “The Lost Boys,” two Broadway musicals that opened just a few weeks ago, each earned 12 nominations. The revival of the musical “Ragtime” was close behind with 11. Here’s the complete list.
A message to Albany Democrats: Draw some maps
Representative Joseph Morelle returned to his old stomping ground, the State Capitol in Albany, with a message for Democrats: Get to work on drawing more favorable maps.
Morelle, who had spent more than 20 years in the Assembly and now represents an upstate congressional district, was sent by the House Democratic leader, Representative Hakeem Jeffries, who sees New York as the focal point in the next clash of the redistricting wars.
Morelle’s trip to Albany came less than a week after the Supreme Court struck down Louisiana’s voting map as an unconstitutional gerrymander and only one day after he and Jeffries announced the creation of the New York Democracy Project, a redistricting initiative meant to counter Republican redistricting in Texas.
The national fight over redistricting is in high gear, because the Louisiana case made it harder to use the Voting Rights Act to challenge a legislative map as racially discriminatory. But despite Morelle’s call for urgency, change in New York seldom happens quickly — and with redistricting, it cannot. Any redistricting bill must be passed by two consecutive legislatures and then approved by voters in a referendum.
The leaders in New York are now considering how far they want to go to change the state’s Constitution, which contains anti-gerrymandering provisions.
Democrats currently hold 19 of New York’s 26 congressional seats and are eager to pick up at least one more this fall. Representative Mike Lawler, a Republican from Rockland County who is thought to be the delegation’s most vulnerable member, took issue with any redistricting effort. “This is New York Dems continuing their efforts to stifle Republican voices in the state,” he wrote on X.
METROPOLITAN diary
Helping hand
Dear Diary:
I ride my bicycle 99 percent of the time. It’s just me and the city. I move fast enough to keep things interesting, but slowly enough to catch the weather changing or feel the mood of the people on the sidewalks.
Every so often, I have to take the train. On very rare occasions, it’s me, the train and my bike, a combination no one ever seems thrilled to encounter.
Because I know this, I try to shrink myself into an apologetic bicycle origami project once I’m on the train. I fold. I hover. I whisper “sorry” to people who haven’t even seen me yet.
On one such evening, I was trying to avoid anyone’s shins while hauling my bike up a flight of stairs after getting off the train, when I felt someone close behind me.
Terrified that I’d clipped someone, I whipped around to see a smiling woman who had one hand casually gripping the back of my bike.
“I got you,” she said, like we were old friends moving a couch.
I told her I had it under control.
“Two hands are better than one,” she said. “I got you.”
So we climbed the stairs together: me, my bike and a total stranger, moving in perfect, unspoken coordination. At the top, she let go, nodded and vanished into the crowd.
— Evan Abel
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Tell us your New York story here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.
Davaughnia Wilson and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].
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James Barron writes the New York Today newsletter, a morning roundup of what’s happening in the city.
The post Fare Enforcers Are Coming to New York City Buses appeared first on New York Times.
