The head of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority is not on board with expanding a pilot program that would bring fare-free buses to 15 more city routes, a position that comes amid eleventh-hour state budget talks to potentially expand the program.
“I have reservation, the MTA has reservations about expanding the free bus system,” MTA Chair and Chief Executive Janno Lieber said during a Sunday interview on CBS2’s The Point with Marcia Kramer. “We cannot continue confusing people about fare payment. I respect the folks who have proposed it; they are pro-transit and they’re trying to help people.”
Last year, the state legislature enacted a fare-free bus pilot program — bus riders are the MTA’s lowest-income riders who tend to be from communities of color — that currently encompasses one free route in each borough. However, Lieber said “some confusion coming out of Covid-19” when the MTA briefly waived the bus fares at the beginning of the pandemic has complicated matters. Nearly four years after the MTA resumed collecting bus fares, the city’s bus network is approaching nearly half of all citywide riders skipping the fare.
In the fourth quarter of 2023, 46.1% of all bus riders did not pay the fare — a 8.9% rise from the same time in 2022 and a 16.1% jump compared to the same period in 2021, MTA data shows. In 2022, unpaid bus fares cost the MTA roughly $315 million in revenue, said the authority.
Lieber added that he’s not sure continuing with the fare-free bus pilot is “worth how much it costs to continue exploding the confusion about fare payment.” State Sen. Michael Gianaris and Assembly Member Zohran Mamdani, who both represent parts of Queens, proposed expanding the fare-free bus pilot to 15 new routes in the state budget at a cost of $45 million.
The MTA has not shared data from the fare-free bus pilot, but in December New York City Transit President Richard Davey told Our Town that ridership has risen between 7 percent and 20 percent on the five free bus routes. Lieber said Sunday that the ridership increase is mostly from riders shifting from paid to unpaid lines, not new riders outright, which is a priority.
“So far, the free bus experiment, there is a growth in ridership but our analysis so far, and it’s still underway, is [showing] not a lot of new riders,” Lieber said. “They’re people who are coming from other lines or other ways of getting around.”
“I’m in the transit business; I want to grow service,” Lieber added.
Lieber’s lackluster take on growing the fare-free bus pilot comes as state lawmakers in the Assembly and Senate weigh how best to provide discounted transit fares to New Yorkers. Options on the table include investing to expand the city’s Fair Fares program that subsidizes rides for low-income commuters and other discount ticket programs for commuter rail.
Caroline Spivack , 2024-04-08 19:02:00
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