It looks like Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s getting a wish-granted monkey-paw style: MTA buses are now de-facto free — at the price of making them increasingly dangerous and blowing a disastrous hole in the agency’s finances.
Not to mention the larger consequence of surrendering to farebeating.
MTA chief JannoLeiber last week suspended the EAGLE fare-verification program after a couple of ugly incidents, presumably under political orders not to upset the anti-policing left.
And NYPD flacks say the cops have “no plans” to step in; officers haven’t been issuing more than handful of farebeating summonses for some time, and the city’s district attorneys have given up on prosecuting them.
Few bus drivers are in any position to enforce; it means risking their lives.
With nothing making anyone pay, ever-fewer riders are.
Fare-skipping bus riderscost the agency $568 million in 2024, estimates the nonpartisan Citizens Budget Commission; 2025 was likely worse.
And that’s not just an immediate hit to the agency’s bottom line: Its finances also depend on regularly issuing bonds backed by expected fare collections.
With bus revenues rushing to zero, who’s going to bid much when the MTA attempts its next bond auction in a few weeks?
Potential bidders also have to worry if a collapse in subway collections will be next.
COVID struck a fatal blow to busfare collection: Half of all riders no longer pay, while subway evasion is closer to (a still-troubling) 10%.
The MTA saw some progress with the 350-member EAGLE force,which upped collection 7% where deployed, but that’s off for the foreseeable future.
Which means worse than lost revenue: It invites the worst antisocial behavior, harassing other riders and endangering drivers — discouraging the very people Mamdani wants to help by making buses free.
This is ultimately up to Mamdani and Gov. Kathy Hochul: If he won’t support the NYPD stepping in, she (or her successor) must support the dispatch of armed, trained MTA cops to turn things around, or at the very least a ramp-up of the EAGLE program,not a surrender.
If the politicians won’t stand up for making public transit work, first the buses and then the subways will spiral downward — at dire cost to every working New Yorker.
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