MTA Will Not Raise Fares, For Now

By Yehudit Garmaise

   The board members of the Metropolitan Transportation Agency (MTA) board were scheduled to vote on Thursday on whether to increase fares and tolls, however, the agency has decided to push the vote to the back burner for now.

   Since 2009, the MTA has had the policy to increase fares and tolls every two years, but this year, the pandemic caused agency board members to debate whether to raise fares to increase revenue to lower fares to increase ridership.

    Some in the agency consider the MTA’s proposed 4% increases in fares and tolls as a potential source of revenue to compensate for the sharp decline in ridership caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, while others argue that fare hikes would not only hurt working people but would recover only a drop in the bucket of the MTA’s current $44.8 billion debt.

   Mayor Bill de Blasio has told BoroPark24 that only a federal stimulus could help the ailing MTA.

   Others point out that the MTA has already received several billions of dollars of federal aid, but the agency remains perennially broke.

   “The MTA’s gotten several billion dollars of federal aid,” Riders Alliance spokesman Danny Pearlstein said. [The MTA] needs several billion more. A fare hike that brings in a few million is small potatoes. These biannual fare hikes no longer make any sense.”

    In addition, Pearlstein adds that a fare increase in 2021 would most hurt the New Yorkers who are forced to continue using public transportation: those who are overwhelmingly working class.

     “Now is not the time for a fare hike that would have hurt working New Yorkers in the middle of a pandemic,” Pearlstein said.

     After conducting the MTA’s biennial review of fare and toll policy, MTA Chairman Pat Foye agreed. 

    “What we heard at these hearings was that people are suffering and cannot shoulder even a modest fare increase right now,” said Foye, who said that the agency assessed whether to increase fares by conducting eight public hearings and after receiving 2,100 public comments.

    Officials are, however, still moving forward with plans to vote next month on increasing bridge and tunnel tolls, whose price hikes would take place sometime in the spring.

Photo: Marc A. Hermann / MTA New York City Transit