What an insult to the law-abiding: The MTA’s looking at fare hikes over 5% to preserve current service levels — but the added burden on paying straphangers is less than half what the system is losing to farebeaters.
The increases — 15 cents on a single ride, $1 on a weekly pass and $5 on a monthly — should bring in about $305 million a year.
Farebeaters stole around $690 million last year, an outrageous amount and up $190 million from the year before. (The breakdown: $285 million on buses, $315 million on the subway.)
It’s hard to blame MTA chief Janno Lieber or the agency’s board: They’ve got plans to reduce farebeating (which drives Lieber absolutely bonkers) in the long run, and the Legislature and gov in the new state budget just ordered the MTA to up its income from fares and tolls by $300 million a year.
The real villains here are, of course, the farebeaters themselves — and more so their enablers in the soft-on-crime crowd.
We continue to fault then-Manhattan DA Cy Vance’s 2017 move to largely stop prosecuting farebeating, which most other DAs eventually followed.
It was plainly an effort to appease the left (which failed; he still wound up not running for re-election).
At the same time, progressives in the Legislature and City Council (with the cooperation of then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo and then-Mayor Bill de Blasio) began a host of foolish moves on criminal justice and policing.
Crime and disorder started rising pre-COVID — then the lockdowns incubated a drastic rise in criminality.
And New York’s legislators still haven’t changed their soft-on-crime tune.
People who pay the fare having to fork over more because so many others aren’t is only one outrageous piece of what regular New Yorkers have to pay for this madness.
Lieber fumes that farebeating “tears at the social fabric.” That holds for every “reform” the progressives inflict — and not just on crime.