Fare Evasion Getting Even Worse On NYC Buses, MTA Figures Show

NEW YORK — A quarter of riders skipped the fare on New York City's local buses in the first three months of 2019, according to new MTA figures showing increased fare evasion across the public transit system.

The fare evasion rate on local buses from January to March was 25 percent, up from 24.2 percent in the final quarter of 2018, according to the data published Friday. The rate on Select Bus Service routes, which require riders to pay before boarding, also rose slightly to 2.6 percent from 2.5 percent.

Those figures gave the MTA bus system an overall fare evasion rate of 22.5 percent, up from 21.9 percent in the previous quarter, the figures show. The transit agency estimates that it lost $36 million to bus fare-beating in the first three months of the year.

Fare evasion also jumped in the subways, where it is far less widespread, the data show. The subway fare-beating rate rose to 3.9 percent from 3.5 percent in the previous quarter, costing the MTA an estimated $29 million, according to the agency's figures.

The figures were revealed days after Gov. Andrew Cuomo and MTA Chairman Patrick Foye announced that a team of 500 cops would be disptached to the subways and buses to tackle fare evasion. Cuomo cast fare-beating, along with assaults on transit workers, as a persistent scourge of the transit system.

"Paying your subway or bus fare isn't optional, and evading it harms all our customers," Foye said in a statement last week.

But the MTA should be focusing more on fixing the subways and buses rather than trying to blame riders for their problems, said Danny Pearlstein, a spokesman for the transit advocacy group Riders Alliance.

There are also holes in how the MTA counts fare evasion, Pearlstein said. For instance, he said, the agency doesn't know who's hopping through the back door of the bus without swiping an unlimited MetroCard, which would entitle them to a ride anyway.

"I don’t trust the numbers on fare evasion, and I think that placing too much stock in them is a distraction from the transit crisis, which is a crisis of both speed and reliability on the subway and bus," Pearlstein said.

The jump in fare evasion came amid a continued decline in bus ridership despite recent improvements in service. About 1.75 million people rode the local buses on an average weekday in April, down 4.2 percent from the same month last year, MTA figures show.

But the bus system ran 97.1 percent of all its scheduled rush-hour trips in May, a slight improvement from the rate of 96.7 percent in May 2018, according to the MTA.

New York City Transit, the MTA branch that runs the buses, is working to redesign the bus routes in all five boroughs. City officials are also making efforts to improve bus speeds 25 percent by 2020.

"We can transform bus ridership in this city and we're going to do that," NYC Transit President Andy Byford said at an MTA Board meeting Monday.