Every weekday in New York City, close to one million bus riders — roughly one out of every two passengers — board without paying. The skipped fares are a crucial and growing loss of revenue for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which is under severe financial pressure.
New York’s long-running fare evasion problem, among the worst of any major city in the world, has intensified recently; before the pandemic, only about one in five bus riders skipped the fare.
Yet public officials have done relatively little to collect the lost revenue from bus riders. Instead, they have focused almost exclusively on the subway system, where waves of police officers and private security guards have been deployed to enforce payment, even as fare evasion rates on trains are dwarfed by those on buses.
During the first three months of this year, 48 percent of bus riders did not pay, according to the latest available statistics from the transit authority, while 14 percent of subway riders evaded fares. Roughly twice the number of people ride the city’s subways as ride its buses.
Fare evasion has led to startling financial losses for the M.T.A., the state agency that runs the city transit system. In 2022, the authority lost $315 million because of bus fare evasion and $285 million as a result of subway fare beaters, according to a 2023 report commissioned by the M.T.A.
Transit experts say some New Yorkers don’t pay to board the bus because they cannot afford the fare. Others find it far easier to board a bus without paying than to sneak into the subway system, where turnstiles and gates block access. The standard fare for subway riders and most bus passengers is $2.90 per trip.
Fare beaters might also feel emboldened, experts say, because heavy traffic and a lack of bus lanes means that bus service can be slow and unreliable. For some riders, it is simply not worth the price of admission. The pandemic also reinforced the perception that fares were optional, after the authority made bus rides free for a few months in 2020.
“In the public’s mind, they don’t see the bus system as the real source of fare evasion,” said David R. Jones, an M.T.A. board member and the chief executive of the Community Service Society, a nonprofit supporting lower-income New Yorkers. “We have to get people to recognize that this is no longer acceptable.”
Even before the pandemic, bus fare evasion was a serious problem in New York. The evasion rate was roughly 18 percent in 2018, according to a 2019 M.T.A. report. Around that time, the rate was 11 percent in Paris and 5 percent in Toronto. In London, where riders can face fines exceeding $1,000, the fare evasion rate on buses was only 1.5 percent.
Transit leaders in New York have struggled to balance their desire to enforce the rules against the safety of drivers and the needs of low-income commuters. When Andy Byford, the former leader of the city’s subway and bus systems, suggested in 2019 that the M.T.A. needed “cops on buses,” the backlash was swift. The authority for years has sent groups of unarmed employees, known as “eagle teams,” to patrol buses and give tickets to riders who do not pay. Last year the agency expanded the routes they covered.
A representative for the Transport Workers Union Local 100 said that the union discouraged bus operators from calling out fare beaters because of concerns that the drivers could be harassed or assaulted. In 2008, a bus driver was stabbed to death in Brooklyn after telling a passenger that he needed to pay. The union has since fought to limit interactions with passengers.
“First and foremost, I avoid all confrontation,” said Robert Freeman, 47, a bus operator in College Point, Queens, who said that he did not ask fare beaters to pay in order to avoid backlash. “Me, I just concentrate on driving, and I don’t say nothing.”
Riders are also aware of the potential for violence.
On Friday, Mary Parrish, an 85-year-old retired public-school teacher, said that she was often frustrated by people skipping the fare in her Brooklyn neighborhood of Prospect Lefferts Gardens. But she said she was reluctant to confront them because she was afraid of being attacked.
“It’s a messy situation,” Ms. Parrish said as she waited for a B43 bus at Brooklyn Avenue and Fulton Street. “Something should be done about it. But I don’t know where to start.”
Those offering potential solutions to the city’s fare evasion problem must navigate politically sensitive terrain. Some paying riders are outraged by the idea of letting others ride for free. Advocates for poor residents, however, worry that tighter fare enforcement will disproportionally affect the city’s most vulnerable people. The bus system generally serves people who are older and poorer than those who take the subway.
The M.T.A.’s struggle with fare evasion has revived perennial questions about whether mass transit users should pay at all. Left-leaning advocates have argued that the bus system should be treated as a public service funded through taxes, like public education and the police.
“This is not the way it has to be,” said Assemblyman Zohran K. Mamdani, a Queens Democrat who pushed legislation last year making five bus routes temporarily free to ride. “New Yorkers cannot afford the cost of public transportation in their own city.”
But New York’s transit system needs fare money now more than ever. The M.T.A. has largely blamed higher-than-expected fare evasion rates for a projected fiscal deficit of nearly $1 billion in its operating budget by 2028. The authority has historically relied more on fares than many other major transit systems — in 2019, before the pandemic began to drain ridership, farebox receipts made up roughly 42 percent of its revenue.
In June, the M.T.A. lost at least $15 billion in expected funding when Gov. Kathy Hochul abruptly canceled a congestion pricing program for Manhattan weeks before it was scheduled to begin. The revenue from the tolls would have paid for urgent repairs to the subway’s century-old tunnels and crumbling tracks. Without the funding, the authority is on the brink of crisis.
Janno Lieber, the M.T.A.’s chief executive, said that he had sought a balanced approach to the city’s fare evasion problem by combining enforcement efforts with programs to teach people about the importance of paying and government relief for the neediest passengers. He said that he had been frustrated by mixed enforcement from public officials in the past, noting that in 2017, the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., stopped pursuing criminal cases against most turnstile jumpers.
“If the transit system does not work and nobody plays by the rules, it feels lawless. It is lawless,” Mr. Lieber said during a phone interview on Friday, adding: “This is really tearing at the social compact of New York.”
In a statement, the Police Department said, “New Yorkers have come to expect and rightfully deserve to use the city’s mass transit system without being subjected to acts of lawlessness.” Last year, the department created a unit specifically dedicated to bus fare evasion. As part of that effort, the department deploys officers alongside the M.T.A.’s eagle teams to more effectively tamp down on fare beating.
The 2023 report on fare evasion that the M.T.A. commissioned recommended hiring more fare checkers for buses and starting an advertising campaign that would remind people to pay. The authority has carried out some of those suggestions.
Ultimately, the most effective solution is to add more enforcement workers, said Graham Currie, a researcher at Monash University in Australia who has studied the psychology of fare evasion. But he acknowledged that the gig was a tough one.
“It’s not the most popular job in the universe,” Mr. Currie said. “They’re in a role where they have no power. They can’t arrest people. They have no protection. This is a more dangerous environment in New York City, and we have plenty of cases of them being assaulted. So you can see the problem.”
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