Live from New York, Higher Costs to Ride
Like other transit systems around the country, New York's is facing some budget difficulties, and it's considering raising fares. The Metropolitan Transit Authority feels that it's necessary to increase costs by between 6 and 8 percent, for bus, rail, and subway riders, in order to avert future budget problems even though the authority expects to receive a $1 billion surplus this year alone.
Of course, we've discussed the issue of fares on this site before, though in the past, we've considered whether or not free fares might make more sense than ones that actually cost money. The MTA thinks that New Yorkers need to pay up to $2.25 cents for the ride (though it looks like that increase, from $2, is more a consequence of deficiencies in the authority's machines than anything else). Lee Sander, Chairman, says the hike is necessary if we want to avoid the kind of crisis the New York Subway went through in the 70s and 80s, when basically all maintenance was simply ignored.
And of course, he's right. Most New Yorkers don't want to see their subway rot again, that's why they're so excited about the prospect for a new Second Avenue Subway and the extension of the 7 Line. And the authority isn't exactly doing a poor job in managing its existing money; the worst an auditor could come up when it investigated the spending of the agency with that the authority's museum train was losing about $10,000 a year; that's almost nothing for a huge operation like the MTA.
Nevertheless, the question we must ask ourselves is whether customers should be paying more to make sure the MTA stays healthy. Shouldn't the state and city, which benefit economically from a good transit network, be willing to pitch in more? And isn't the idea of increasing transit fees by 6-8% clearly regressive, targeting the poor rather than the rich? Considering the whole point of transit is to equalize the mobility playing field by making it cheap for everyone to get around, this cost increase seems anti-transit.
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ysf | 4:04 PM |
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