Fare Evasion May Be A Bigger Problem Than The MTA Knows

NEW YORK — The MTA may be underestimating subway and bus fare evasion because its methods for tracking the problem are full of holes, according to an audit released Thursday.

The MTA Inspector General's Office raised several questions about how transit officials estimate the number of people who ride New York City's subways and buses without paying after reviewing the agency's decade-old methodology.

Workers have skipped many fare evasion surveys and are likely missing many straphangers who enter the transit system illegally, according to the watchdog's review of six quarterly fare-beating reports from mid-2017 to the end of last year.

New York City Transit brass admitted that the findings confirmed suspicions that they may be undercounting fare evasion, which has the potential to poke a sizeable hole in the MTA's budget. The agency has already taken steps to improve its methods, transit officials said.

"Accurate and reliable data is the foundation of the MTA’s critical efforts to prevent fare evasion," MTA Inspector General Carolyn Pokorny said in a statement. "... We applaud the MTA and NYCT for their responsiveness to our recommendations and for their continued vital efforts in fighting fare evasion."

The MTA has sought to crack down on fare evasion in recent months after losing $225 million to the practice last year. Some 25 percent of bus riders and 3.9 percent of subway riders skipped the fare in the first three months of this year, landing a financial blow of $65 million, according to MTA figures.

But those numbers could be off base for several reasons, the IG's analysis suggests. For one, NYC Transit staff only performed about 60 percent of the subway fare-evasion checks that they were supposed to in the period auditors reviewed.

Subway monitors assigned to stations with multiple entry points are told to watch only one set of turnstiles, meaning they likely miss many illegal pass-throughs, according to auditors. Moreover, workers watching the subways have to look for 20 different types of entries, while those on buses keep track of 13 types, the IG's office says.

"Although some of this detail is useful for management decision-making, both surveys may benefit from simplification to make data collection less burdensome and thereby improve the accuracy of the overall fare evasion estimates," Elizabeth Keating, the executive deputy inspector general, wrote to NYC Transit in July.

Transit officials say they have already made changes to improve their counts of fare evasion, including some that simplify the survey workers perform, according to a response to the audit from Tim Mulligan, NYC Transit's senior vice president of operations support.

The agency has also established a "combined subway and bus fare evasion cadre" with many more workers dedicated to tracking fare-beating, Mulligan wrote.

"The IG did give us some useful advice in how we might make our fare evasion methodology even more granular," NYC Transit President Andy Byford said Thursday at an unrelated news conference. "We’ve said for months now that this is an issue that we can’t ignore."