You may not have noticed all the extra seats or elbow room on your local commute, but according to the MTA, bus and subway ridership is down, substantially. After climbing to “record highs” since 2009, the number of straphangers leveled off and started to decline in 2016. Bus and subway “farebox” revenue — the money that the MTA collects from each rider — is running nearly 6 percent lower than expected through April. And compared to 2017, subway ridership for April was down 1.7 percent.
At the same time, the city’s population is at an all-time high of 8.6 million, employment is at a high of 4.4 million jobs and the city received almost 63 million tourists in 2017, the eighth consecutive year of record-breaking numbers. So how does it make sense that fewer people are taking public transit, especially when the MTA itself has blamed an increasing number of its delays on “overcrowding”? This sounds like what Yogi Berra said about a restaurant: “Nobody ever goes there anymore; it’s too crowded.”
“Bus and subway “farebox” revenue — the money that the MTA collects from each rider — is running nearly 6 percent lower than expected through April. ”
Some transportation-industry experts have pointed to the rise of e-hail services like Lyft and Uber eating into transit ridership. And the expansion of bike lanes and increased access to Citi Bike may have also pushed some subway riders to switch to pedal power. While all that may account for some of the decline, the data is insufficient to draw firm conclusions.
One explanation for why official ridership numbers are down while the trains feel more crowded could be that some riders are riding free, under the radar of the MTA. Farebeating — jumping the turnstile or, more commonly, walking through an open exit gate — is less punished, less stigmatized and seemingly more common now than ever.
Farebeating is no longer restricted to youths, hustlers, or scammers leaping acrobatically over the turnstile into a train’s open doors; now it’s not uncommon to see whole families waiting patiently at emergency exits for someone to open the door for them to troop smilingly through. And with the disappearance of token booth clerks at many stations, there’s no longer even anyone present to shame them with an official stinkeye. On buses, too, plenty of commuters stroll past the box without fear, as drivers avoid confrontation with fare-evaders.
Even before Manhattan DA Cy Vance and Brooklyn DA Eric Gonzales announced last summer that they would stop prosecuting arrests for fare beating, and before the NYPD changed its policy in February to arrest fewer turnstile jumpers, it was clear that enforcement was down. Arrests in the transit system for “theft of service” (i.e., fare beating) were down about 30 percent between 2016 and 2017. And through May this year, TOS arrests are down 61 percent compared to the same period last year; Transit Adjudication Bureau summonses are down more than 20 percent.
If enforcement of fare evasion has dropped so sharply, it is reasonable to assume that not only are many habitual farebeaters not getting caught, but that, given the slimmer likelihood of getting pinched, more people are doing it. Most people pay the fare because it’s the law, and the potential penalty outweighs the benefit. But if the chance of getting caught is increasingly slim, the penalty is no longer grave and the practice is more common and less stigmatized, then more people will start doing it.
Notably, one category of ridership hasn’t declined: paratransit. Access-a-Ride, for disabled people, is holding steady, and actually showed a 0.4 percent increase in usage over April 2017. Paratransit, remember, isn’t subject to fare beating.
And the city may have just made matters worse by funding the new “Fair Fares” program. This initiative, championed by City Council Speaker Corey Johnson, will offer half-price transit fares to almost 1 million low-income New Yorkers. The merits of the policy aside, the name of the program is problematic: If cutting the fare in half is “fair,” that means that paying the full fare is “unfair.” The city is telling New Yorkers that the fare is arbitrarily high, and signaling to a certain percentage of the population that it’s basically a rip-off — and “fair” to ignore.
But since there is no way to quantify how many people on your sardine-can commute are free riders, you can just take comfort in the MTA’s monthly statistical reports. Trust them: Ridership is down, there are plenty of seats and what seems like overcrowding is really a question of how you slice the data.
This piece originally appeared in the New York Post
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Seth Barron is associate editor of City Journal.
This piece originally appeared in New York Post