Nearly half of New York City bus riders aren’t paying their fares — and the biggest problem with this mass-scale casual theft isn’t the $300 million-plus a year it costs the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.
No, the real crisis is that public contempt for the situation will eventually result in huge cuts to bus service.
Why should taxpayers pay to subsidize a service if riders don’t care enough to chip in?
But this isn’t hard to fix.
You could run a sociology course on all the proffered reasons that 47.8% of riders are now boarding for free , up from about ¼ before the pandemic.
People are poor.
We’ve become anti-social.
Trust in government is low.
Bus service is bad.
But the primary reason is obvious: People think they can get away with it.
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And they’re right: The $100 civil fine levied for evading the $2.90 fare means a scofflaw would have to get caught once every 35 times he skips the fare box for it to be worth it to actually pay.
That’s if he even bothers to pay the fine at all: Nearly half of the fare-evasion fines levied by the city go unpaid .
(Yes, the MTA can garnish your wages or your tax refund, but that assumes you work in the legal economy, not for cash, and that you file state taxes.)
Yet police focus most of their fare-evasion energy on the subway, so the MTA sends civilian “Eagle Teams” onto buses to ensure that fares are paid.
With only 200 such workers covering thousands of buses on 327 bus routes , that tiny task force is not much of a deterrence against a million fare evaders every day.
They’d have to give out 28,000 tickets daily to change the average fare evader’s cost-benefit calculus — when the entire transit system, both subways and buses, issues only about 600 violations a day.
High-profile media events, like the MTA’s mass-scale surge of fare enforcers on a few bus lines last week, won’t change people’s rational calculus.
The MTA did a similar high-profile crackdown during last August’s slow-news season, and . . . nothing happened.
The only thing that will change people’s minds is if they know that a penalty will be swift, certain and actually collected.
How?
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First, as the MTA phases out the MetroCard in favor of tap cards, it should switch to an electronic “proof of payment” fare-enforcement system, as other global systems use.
“Proof of payment” means that a fare enforcer doesn’t have to witness you evading the fare, or, on the pay-before-you-board “select bus,” ask for an easily lost paper receipt.
An Eagle Team member (or police officer) could just board a bus and ask, say, every fourth passenger to tap his card against a hand-held inspection machine to prove that he paid.
This would speed enforcement.
No longer would inspectors on “select bus” lines hold all passengers hostage on the bus, as people fumble for their receipts.
Second, introduce European-style, on-the-spot fine payment .
That is, if you didn’t pay your fare, you’ll pay it right now, the moment you’re caught, plus a high penalty.
This wouldn’t mean introducing a new fine for people without a credit card to tap or ready cash.
For example, a first-time (or first-time-caught) bus-fare evader could pay an immediate fine to the Eagle Team inspector of, say, $50 instead of the full, current $100 penalty.
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Or, she could choose to receive a ticket and pay the full $100 fine later, as is the current procedure.
So for trying to save three bucks, you’d face an immediate $50 squeeze if caught, rather than a bill that won’t come due for a while.
Finally, ensure a real penalty for repeat evasion.
Third-time evaders should face a misdemeanor “theft of services” charge — one that comes with an actual punishment.
No, that doesn’t mean jail; it could mean community service, picking up trash.
Although, to stick misdemeanor theft-of-services charges, the state must reform its new evidence-discovery laws, which consume weeks of prosecutorial resources for even minor offenses, as Hannah Meyers described recently.
Success could even bring a reward for bus riders.
Unlike cities like London and Boston, which charge lower fares for their buses than their train systems, New York charges the same fare for both subways and buses, even though buses are slower.
Once we get fare evasion to an acceptable rate — say, below 5% — why not celebrate with a lower bus fare, maybe $2.25 instead of $2.90?
The MTA could advertise this goal on the buses, so that every time a paying passenger sees a freeloader board, he’ll know what that freeloader is costing us all.
Nicole Gelinas is a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.
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