48% of NYC riders do not pay the bus fare
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Nobody worries about whether the fire department is “breaking even”, you just pay for it through taxes because it’s essential
I wish they would also kick off people who eat on the train and leave their mess behind, but they never confront nuisance-makers.
That's what the NYC MTA is... and they're $42 billion in debt. And they need to "borrow" another $23 billion from taxpayers to fund themselves for 2025-2030.
[0] https://www.osc.ny.gov/files/reports/osdc/pdf/report-3-2025....
[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-02-23/in-nyc-su...
But unfortunately most cities are nowhere near the size and prosperity of Tokyo.
Then that's not a private entity, that's a government funded contractor, with the government shelling out the money with no accountability.
As a currently popular example, most of the contracts around SLS, with Boeing and other companies, are like this. They consistently mess up, have quality and speed issues and overrun costs, and the government never exercises the option to cut their profit share, even when the overruns reach several times the original agreed upon cost.
I would not describe it as “infinitely inefficient”.
Given the massive public interest, there is probably at least an order of magnitude more oversight of public offices than there is for private companies.
In the end it’s the same challenge that every team, department, company has to solve: how to have people that care about their job?
Here my impression is that that’s often not the case, leading to the effects you described.
Given the often severely reduced pay in public jobs, compared with industry, I don’t find that overly surprising, you get what you pay for.
I have lived in communities where buses were free to ride, and it was a great option to get around. But these were relatively small and wealthy communities where demand for public transportation was relatively low. I'm not sure the same system could work in NYC.
And most buses are not going to be 100% full most of the time. So if you have an empty seat, the cost is zero. If you don't have an empty seat, now you can justify another bus/train, which reduces latency and causes several more people to take mass transit, which is good.
Huh - are you being serious? Of course the number of seats on a bus is finite. And the number of buses in a city are finite. The raw materials and energy used to produce and power the bus are finite. The pool of labor needed to drive and maintain the bus is finite. The tax revenue to fund all of this is finite.
Yes, it is possible to add more buses. But doing so requires drawing from a finite pool of resources. So it makes sense to incentivize people to use public resources more efficiently.
> And most buses are not going to be 100% full most of the time. So if you have an empty seat, the cost is zero.
I think this is a very good argument for time-of-use based fares. (Of course you don't want to gouge people who are commuting to work/school, but if there's a way to incentivize people to spread out the load while still keeping things affordable, I think that would be a good thing).
Just to be clear, since you have kind of made this about cars vs. mass transit, I'm not at all against mass transit. I'm in favor of applying the same principals to roads to incentivize people to use cars more efficiently as well. Tolls and parking meters (with time-of-use pricing), gasoline surcharges, etc.
It's possible to run more buses and thereby get arbitrarily more seats. The ultimate limits placed on this by the laws of physics are irrelevant because the actual rate limit on how many seats you need is how many people you can get to ride the bus.
> I think this is a very good argument for time-of-use based fares.
But peak hours are the times at which you most want people to take the bus, so they don't clog the roads with cars. It implies that's when they should most be free.
Then off peak will be more likely to have empty seats, implying they should be free then too, i.e. they should be free all the time.
> I'm in favor of applying the same principals to roads to incentivize people to use cars more efficiently as well. Tolls and parking meters (with time-of-use pricing), gasoline surcharges, etc.
And I'm in favor of the same "have the government build this and pay for it entirely from taxes" for roads. The construction cost and most of the maintenance is a sunk cost that doesn't depend on usage. The benefit of their existence accrues to people who don't drive and the benefit of roads to various motorists is proportional to the value of the activity they're engaged in rather than how many miles they drive, which is a much better fit for general taxes than road usage fees.
Also, the collections infrastructure for these things is a large expense, whereas we already have a collections infrastructure for general taxes, so when the incremental cost is negligible and the benefit goes to approximately the entire public it makes much more sense to use the latter. And collecting tolls/fares characteristically involves a significant privacy invasion, because the payments system will then tie your identity to your location history, which we could certainly do without. The main exception to this would be gas tax, which is cheap to collect (gas station is already remitting other taxes), serves as a de facto carbon tax (serving an independent purpose) and avoids most of the location tracking issues.
It otherwise doesn't make sense to waste the public's money and invade their privacy just so they can pay a higher amount for the same thing.
The solution to the MTA being exceedingly wasteful and unwilling to enforce rules isn't to just make it easier for them to be even worse.
If these people already feel such little civic responsibility for city infrastructure as to be skipping the fare and effectively taking advantage of everyone else, it's going to get much worse if it appears to them that they aren't even being asked to pay. Deciding to just make it 'free' would be the same as deciding just not to measure things that reveal inconvenient facts and celebrating that as having solved the problem.
If you need an ambulance ride, that bill can be thousands, but is covered by health insurance.
Toxic empathy, ironically, is antithetical to building functioning transit systems. To get buy-in from the public to direct tax dollars to transit, you need to have pleasant, orderly, clean systems that people who can afford to drive want to use instead of driving. You can’t get that if half your riders are law breakers.
Do not forget that NYC charges a substantial income tax, and also a substantial sales tax. As such, the empathy is 100% justifiable.
Even in my home country of Bangladesh, which is extremely poor and dysfunctionally anti-social, I would guess fare evasion isn’t as high as in NYC (including the people riding on top of the bus).
Don't kid yourself. No one is going to pay 5x to ride the bus. It doesn't cost that much to offer a local bus ride.
I don't think you realize where the money really goes. It goes to pay huge pensions, not to benefit the rider.
The IRS certainly taxes an annual income of ~$30k, basically anything above $11k. Any benefits require jumping through a lot of hoops. Moreover, like everyone else, they also have to pay a sales tax for every non-food item they buy. There is also a property tax that they're indirectly responsible for if they're renting. When choosing between rent and bus fare, the choice is obvious.
When public transportation gets the reputation of being the place of juvenile delinquents and petty criminals, people start to ask why their tax money is spent on it, and it becomes a self-reinforcing cycle.
I may sound like a cold bastard but I'd rather have public transportation system frequented by middle class families and commuters, because that's how you get these people to demand more public transportation.
But if you're not actually excluding the deplorables then the fare is just a regressive tax and a deterrent to mass transit use for everyone.
The real problem is that you have unsheltered people without taking effective action against it and then the subway is a form of shelter. If you want to help them then you fix the zoning so more housing can be built, provide shelters, etc. If you want to be a cold bastard then you give them a one way ticket to a lower density city. Charging 10% of the cost of the transit system as a fare, which costs about as much to collect as it generates if not more, is neither of those things and counterproductive.
If it’s not worth minimum wage it’s been judged as not worth doing like that. You can automate picking up trash which is exactly the kinds of thing you avoid doing if labor is cheap enough. As such the wage floor is very much a benefit to society by opening a wedge for automation rather than having people do such tasks.
It’s backed up by the finite supply of unemployed people willing and able to work below minimum wage.
As to your obsession with clean streets, the government does spend money on it the general public doesn’t actually care enough to spend more on it. It doesn’t matter how cheap it is as long as nobody is willing to fund it.
That’s literally the first time you made that argument, so obviously I didn’t counter it.
If you argument was simply to send these people to prison then just suggest that. The only thing worth discussing is non prison labor and thus non forced labor.
Nope, the original context:
There are no jobs that want jobless people. There's few that even want 18 year olds
Your response was: Plenty of work for prison laborers.
My response of “at 20-50 cents an hour, but that’s not really relevant here.“ Obviously 20-50 cents is the nominal prison labor rate, but it also excludes the overhead of keeping prisoners which is what makes it “irrelevant” as a cost.
Thus by responding to the nominal rate you implicitly acknowledged we are no longer talking about prisoners because the actual cost of prison labor is ~64,000$ / year / inmate not their nominal wage.
Not a 64,000$ drain on society. There’s roughly 1 correction officer per 4.9 inmates and that excludes many jobs associated with prisoners like administrative staff etc.
Inmates are really fucking expensive.
> a single shelter bed could cost up to $70,000
https://sfstandard.com/2022/12/30/ending-homelessness-in-san...
You are basing things on economics 101 models, demand curves max out. People don’t drink infinite water when it gets cheap enough. I don’t think streets need to be cleaned as much as they are, and that’s not based on how much it costs to clean them.
Long term homeless are on the streets almost exclusively for reasons of severe mental illness not lack of skills etc.
Further most homeless end up in paying jobs, which says something about those who don’t make that transition.
You might say "don't treat humans as commodities"; well, reality doesn't care specially about humans; we are just animals even if we like to think we aren't.
I never thought I'd see someone unironically epouse the ideas of Ebeneezer Scrooge, but here we are.
As a starting point to benefiting from society there is a reasonable expectation that people put a couple of hours a day into making life better for others. Prisoners can achieve that lofty goal. So can people travelling on the NY Metro without paying. There is a lot of room to haggle over the details, but argument from chubby ghost of Christmas present is not really the path to a good compromise.
Where community service works if for e.g. misbehaving kids with non-absentee parents. Because then the parents make sure the kid actually does the community service, and the kid is thereby deterred from doing it again.
If you do the same thing for someone who is going to blow off the community service, then you'd need the police to make them do the community service, and police get six figures in salary and benefits, so that's a very expensive babysitter and you've eliminated any kind of net benefit.
I’m not proposing moving from these people providing $0.00 to taking whatever a person to monitor their work and provide institutional food costs, I’m proposing we move from these people costing a society a shitload, both financially and health/safety wise, to perhaps similar financially, but removing the health and safety burden and finally putting them on a path to success.
It also costs a lot more than building homeless shelters. It even costs more than mental health services and welfare programs, neither of which are cheap. It is quite possibly the most expensive option that anyone regularly proposes.
Maybe people will tire of this and hold officials accountable --but it will take a change of perspective from bleeding hearts and lots of time as well. It can be done. The wild west was tamed. This can be tamed as well but it takes will and commitment.
Do you have any sources for that?
I was only able to find numbers on violent crime, which have gone down recently, and weren't as bad as thirty years ago. The 70s through 90s were pretty rough.
I've heard other people say that these minor crimes go unreported and undercounted, but then it's difficult to get past anecdotes without some kind of meaurement, for example perceptions may have shofted due to more news coverage, or as we've gotten older.
I notice more beggars in general. I take that as mental health, drug and poverty than crime. I also notice less traffic law enforcement and more reckless driving. A lot of other things seem to depend on the neighborhood.
I agree that mistakes have been made in some localities. Some of problems are too big to sweep under the rug.
the labor force participation percentage is a slight of hand. You're including children (who receive free metro cards), retirees (including social security beneficiaries, pensions), and people who might just be rich. 40% has nothing to do with people's ability to make or have money.
$60/month is not a lot to me.
$60/month can be an infinite amount of money if you are poor, which I have been.
The 7-day MetroCard (for unlimited rides) costs $34, which comes out to $4.85 per day, or $6.80 per working day -- closer to 40 min of work per day (after taxes). Mind you these people are likely paying half their income on rent at that wage, and a very significant chunk of what's left just on food and other necessities.
In other words - 4x your estimate. (BTW if you work 40 hours per week, or even 25 per week you do not qualify for the subsidized fares program).
This is real money to them. If you don't understand this (or you do in principle, but can't be bothered to get your math ballpark correct) then you have no business chiding them for not pulling their weight.
- should that matter? And if so, how much?
Because at the end of the day, there is a (small) percentage of the population that will do the absolute minimum they can get away with. Or even less than that (criminals).
So you’ll get what you tolerate, and often somewhat worse (depending on strength of enforcement).
Is that fair? In at least some cases, probably not.
Should that matter enough to stop enforcement? That is the classic ‘the road to hell is paved with good intentions’.
That's asking a lot when people are living on the edge. In Les Misérables, Jean Valjean wasn't sent to prison for nothing: it was for stealing bread for his starving sister and her family.
(Yes, we can debate how many Americans are truly living on the edge — but everyone makes that judgment for themselves.)
What's your proposed solution? The Puritans tried, and the Taliban are trying, to change human nature, with only limited "success" (if you want to call it that).
https://new.mta.info/agency/new-york-city-transit/subway-bus...
This is about just the demographic that rely on and use the bus.
I find it hard to believe that ~7% of the population can't afford to pay for transit considering the discount programs (~250k low income people get 50% reduced fares, seniors and people with disabilities also get 50% reduced fares, students get free rides).
What's the point of wasting increasing amounts of money on escalating enforcement against people behaving socially because they were pushed out of society instead of working to being them back into society first?
"Being poor" isn't an activity, it's a lack of life resources, and that can certainly be a contributing factor. Analogously, lack of exercise doesn't "cause" heart attacks, but it's widely accepted as being a contributing factor. Sure, some individuals live to be 100 years old with no more exercise than lifting their forks. But that doesn't alter the general case.
Public disorder is primarily a sociological and cultural problem, not an economic one.
Countries like Thailand also have very high inequality—many city dwellers have family living in literal villages. And even if inequality was higher in NYC—doesn’t that prove it’s a moral and cultural issue rather than an economic one?
This is an excuse to fund more cops. Transit should be free, like sidewalks and parks.
Sidewalks and parks cost $0 for people to walk on, or let their dog shit in. Maybe $15/hour for the guys in blue jumpsuits to clean it up once a week?
NYC has the largest subway system in the world _by_far_ (and also one of the oldest). It's extremely expensive to operate.
Don't compare it to walking around on sidewalks or in parks.
An extra walker a day on a sidewalk costs the same marginal $0 or so an extra rider on the trains does. Both are expensive to run on large scale.
Not the case with the 4 train, or the L, or the 2-3. Those trains can't fail. So it's very expensive to make sure they don't. Nobody cares if Madison Square Park is blocked off for a day. (Maybe except the vagrants).
But the city will literally grind to a halt if the green or red lines aren't running.
It absolutely does not. It is the 12th in length and 10th by ridership: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metro_systems
There are neighborhoods in Queens and Brooklyn where the closest subway station can be miles away, and there is an entire borough in NYC that has no general subway access at all, so not buying that one either.
And most similarly, roads. The theoretical 'farebox recovery ratio' of most roads is 0, but this is never part of the conversation. Maybe if it were, transit would look much better in comparison.
By design problems I mean... For a while my bank's ATM gave me only large-denomination notes and the bus company's machine didn't accept those. So I'd stand there, money in hand and unable to pay.
Later, when I had my first child, a few of the tube station entrances only had ticket-stamping machines at the stairs, not at the path I had to use with my baby pram.
Do NY buses have that sort of problem?
Doo-wah diddy and bust in with the pre-roll
I used to have to take a bus to a train and it was normal to have people get in through the exit doors in the back because the front of the bus was too packed to get through (people not moving to the back because they're old or want to be close to the exit to get off). Almost everyone got off on the last stop that was next to a train stop where they would go down and pay to get on the subway.
I also used to take another bus down metropolitan ave in Queens, which usually only had 5-10 people on it at a time but would be stuck in heavy traffic due to all of the people driving down the avenue from Queens to Brooklyn, and it made me wonder how much time everyone would save if we made the bus free to incentivize more of the drivers to take the bus instead.
Is there really no way to charge for bus rides via smartphones, and track those who are on buses but don’t pay?
And if you don’t, it’s one line on your record, just like you were speeding or peeing on the streets. I’m not against treating buses as something we pay with taxes. But as long as we are required to buy a bus ticket, I think we should track those who don’t.
Half of riders evading bus fare is third-world country levels of dysfunction. How does a developed country get to that point? And is it even possible to get things back on track? I imagine you could institute harsh punishments for fare evaders, but if you need to do that, you’ve already lost. You can’t beat orderliness into people.
On the other end of the spectrum, Istanbul has turnstiles at bus stops, just like a subway.
Interestingly, until recently fare evasion on Caltrain was a criminal infraction. In the past few years, Caltrain has moved to a flat $75 civil penalty instead (like a parking ticket), which I believe ended up earning Caltrain more money overall because it's less hassle for conductors.
This is why we can’t have nice things.
That population happens to also include pretty much all of the thugs in the NYPD.
There's a history of bus drivers being attacked pretty badly for ticking off the wrong traveler. So they don't enforce this for the sake of their safety; they're supposed to just make a record of it and move on.
https://gothamist.com/news/why-the-mtas-bus-drivers-dont-enf...
Previously the consideration used to be nice because it was possible to end up in a situation where your metrocard was too low on balance, too far away from a machine to add more money to it, and you didn't have change. But nowadays most busses have tap-to-pay, so there shouldn't be many excuses.
the amount of time, effort, and money spent on fare collection is absurd! taxes are more efficient
Also there a lot of new drivers these days ... there's more than enough for them to learn and watch ... policing should be low priority. Kids (IIRC) are free-riding anyway.