M.T.A. Says No More Free Bus Rides for Fare Evaders
The New York Times
Transit officials announced an effort to curb rampant fare evasion on city buses that has cost the agency hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenue.
On Thursday, a group of eight police officers and eight transit workers stood waiting for a crosstown bus on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, some with ticket-writing pads in hand.
When the bus arrived, they boarded and led a woman in black scrubs out onto the street and issued her a $100 summons for skipping the fare. The officers and transit officials had singled the woman out after receiving cues from an undercover inspector who was observing riders on the bus.
The woman appeared stunned and burst into tears. She was still crying when she boarded the next M96 bus that pulled up. This time she paid her fare.
While most of New York’s enforcement initiatives have focused on the subway, fare evasion is much more prevalent on city buses, and transit leaders this week expanded efforts on buses, where one out of two passengers fails to pay. According to the latest statistics from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the state agency lost $285 million in 2022 to fare evasion in the subway system and $315 million on buses, even as roughly twice as many passengers rode the trains.
The police officers and transit workers stationed at the corner of Fifth Avenue and East 97th Street were part of a team assigned to stop fare beaters. Similar groups will continue to be deployed throughout the bus system permanently, according to an M.T.A. spokesman. On Thursday, teams fanned out across 41 of the bus system’s 314 routes in Manhattan, the Bronx, Queens and Staten Island. Brooklyn is scheduled to be targeted on Friday.
“A lot of our customers have been saying, you know, ‘Why am I paying a fare and others aren’t?” said Demetrius Crichlow, the interim president of New York City Transit, the M.T.A. division that manages the subway and bus systems. “This is really our response to those customers.”
