December 14, 2024 / Francis Menton
This may be a problem that readers outside of New York don’t care much about, but it is symptomatic of important issues in our society.
The MTA (Metropolitan Transportation Authority) is the New York State (not City) agency that runs our transit system — subways, buses, and commuter rail lines. To ride the subways and buses, you are supposed to pay the fare on entering the subway system or boarding the bus. The MTA has long had a problem with customers who don’t pay the fare, either evading the turnstiles in the subway or just boarding the bus without paying. During the Covid period, the MTA for some time waived payment of the fares on buses (I never understood why); and then after Covid many people did not resume paying, and the fare evasion rates soared.
Over the years since the pandemic, there have been regular news reports about the increase in fare evasion. Most recently, in August of this year, the MTA released the latest data to the news media, and this information was then widely reported in many outlets. The short version is that this is no longer a small problem. Here is the New York Times article from August 26. Excerpt:
Every weekday in New York City, close to one million bus riders — roughly one out of every two passengers — board without paying. The skipped fares are a crucial and growing loss of revenue for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which is under severe financial pressure. . . . During the first three months of this year, 48 percent of bus riders did not pay, according to the latest available statistics from the transit authority, while 14 percent of subway riders evaded fares.
The internal link there goes to a chart of MTA data showing fare evasion rates on buses over the period 2019 to 2024. Over that interval, the rate increased from just over 20% to almost 50%. At one million non-paying passengers per day on the buses alone, and almost $3 per ride, this would appear to be approximately a $1 billion per year issue for the agency. A 14% evasion rate on the subways could add another half a billion. It’s real money.
Initially, I was surprised by these very high reported rates of fare evasion. After all, as a Manhattan resident, I regularly use both the subways and buses. Yes, I would observe the occasional rider jumping the turnstile, or boarding a bus without paying. But the rate of fare evasion I would observe was around 5% or less of the passengers. Where did the MTA come up with these very high numbers?
I began to learn the answer last year, when my chorus had several rehearsals and a couple of concerts in Harlem, a neighborhood where the large majority (but not all) of the population is black. The venues were near the subway station at 135th Street and Lenox Avenue, a busy station right in the middle of Harlem, so I went through that station half a dozen times. At that station, a vagrant (not always the same one) would hold a fare gate open, and almost every entering passenger went through that open gate without paying, instead of using the turnstiles. The vagrants solicited contributions, which a minority gave them. They also looked disapprovingly on the small number of people like myself who opted to pay the MTA instead of themselves. In my observation of about a hundred or so people entering over several visits, a small number of people at that station paid the MTA, but not a single black person paid.
A few weeks ago, in light of the recent reporting as to the situation on buses in particular, I decided that it was time for a Manhattan Contrarian investigation. So on a quiet Sunday afternoon, I went out to take a long bus ride across Brooklyn; and then I repeated the trip two weeks later. For my experiment, I chose a route known as the B6 — a very long and busy route where passengers get on and off regularly along the full length. (You can find the route on the Brooklyn bus map here.). An important reason why I chose this route is that, going East to West, it passes through a long stretch of majority-black neighborhoods (Northern Canarsie and East Flatbush), followed by an equally long stretch of majority white/Asian neighborhoods (Flatbush, Midwood, Borough Park, Bensonhurst). Another reason I chose this route is that I knew that the black neighborhoods in question are not particularly poor neighborhoods. Here is a picture from Google Maps of a few homes along Avenue H in East Flatbush (along the B6 route) , typical of miles of similar ones that you will see in this area:
If you look on Zillow, you will find that the prices for these types of houses in this area are in the range of about $500,000 to $1 million — well above the median value of a single family house in the U.S. as a whole.
And here are the results of my investigation: On my first trip, I was amazed to observe that on the first half of the bus route (the majority-black neighborhoods), almost nobody paid. Then suddenly, the bus crossed Flatbush Avenue, and the ethnicity of the neighborhood changed. After that, almost (but not quite) everybody paid. But on that first trip, I had not positioned myself to make a perfect count of who paid and who did not. So the second trip, I made sure take a seat where I could get an exact count of payers and non-payers by observed race. This time, more riders were paying, but still, 25 of 44 black riders did not pay, and only 4 of 40 from other races. Yes, I may have mis-identified a few people, but not enough to change the overall gist of the result.
Which brings me to the cover story in today’s New York Post. The online headline is “MTA wasting $1M to study ‘psychology’ of fare beaters — as agency cries poverty, pushes for congestion pricing.” It appears that the MTA thinks that it can reduce fare evasion through better understanding of the psychology of the perpetrators:
The agency said in the proposal that they had already done some of their own research into people who skip the $2.90 fare — and have already categorized them as either “opportunists,” “rebels,” “idealists,” “youth,” “unintentional” or “low-income” They said they had found “rebels,” idealists,” and the more obvious “low income” brackets are most likely not to pay.
The Post rightly makes fun of this ridiculous research proposal. It has its own answer to the MTA’s fare evasion problem (appearing on the front cover of the print edition, but not in the online version):
MTA offers $1 million to study why people evade subway cost. ANSWER: Because nobody arrests them.
An accompanying Post editorial makes some obvious points:
Chronic fare-beating is jut societal disorder; the only fix is to confront it. The way to get people to obey the law is to make them believe they’ll pay for breaking it. That’s how Bill Bratton broke rampant fare-beating three decades ago — high-profile mass arrests changed the public psychology.
But even the Post, in both its editorial and news pieces, is not willing to talk honestly about the association of race and fare-beating. Neither their news article nor editorial says a word about the race of the fare beaters. The subject is too sensitive even for them. But the problem is that until we can have an honest discussion about the association of race and fare-beating, it is almost impossible to address the issue.
If the MTA today were to launch a program of mass arrests of fare-beaters, as the Post recommends, it would be immediately obvious that a large majority of the arrestees are black, far higher than their proportion of the City’s population as a whole. Cries of “racism!” would resound. At least several of the DAs (certainly, Manhattan’s Alvin Bragg) would refuse to prosecute. And the program would crumble.
To enable such a program to begin and to move forward, it is necessary for the issue of refusal to pay fares by race to enter the public consciousness. Someone first must collect systematic data and report it and point out what is actually going on. If it is too sensitive to report by race per se, then how about reporting by zip code? And then the newspapers and TV stations and podcasts and websites would need to pick up the story and make something out of it. That would give the MTA the ammunition it needs to move forward. Until that happens, I’m afraid that the problem will only get worse.
Meanwhile, who thinks that giving blacks, and particularly young blacks, a free pass on paying MTA fares is doing them some kind of a favor?
Right now, it seems that the Manhattan Contrarian is the only one willing to talk about this issue.
Source (Archive)
This may be a problem that readers outside of New York don’t care much about, but it is symptomatic of important issues in our society.
The MTA (Metropolitan Transportation Authority) is the New York State (not City) agency that runs our transit system — subways, buses, and commuter rail lines. To ride the subways and buses, you are supposed to pay the fare on entering the subway system or boarding the bus. The MTA has long had a problem with customers who don’t pay the fare, either evading the turnstiles in the subway or just boarding the bus without paying. During the Covid period, the MTA for some time waived payment of the fares on buses (I never understood why); and then after Covid many people did not resume paying, and the fare evasion rates soared.
Over the years since the pandemic, there have been regular news reports about the increase in fare evasion. Most recently, in August of this year, the MTA released the latest data to the news media, and this information was then widely reported in many outlets. The short version is that this is no longer a small problem. Here is the New York Times article from August 26. Excerpt:
Every weekday in New York City, close to one million bus riders — roughly one out of every two passengers — board without paying. The skipped fares are a crucial and growing loss of revenue for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which is under severe financial pressure. . . . During the first three months of this year, 48 percent of bus riders did not pay, according to the latest available statistics from the transit authority, while 14 percent of subway riders evaded fares.
The internal link there goes to a chart of MTA data showing fare evasion rates on buses over the period 2019 to 2024. Over that interval, the rate increased from just over 20% to almost 50%. At one million non-paying passengers per day on the buses alone, and almost $3 per ride, this would appear to be approximately a $1 billion per year issue for the agency. A 14% evasion rate on the subways could add another half a billion. It’s real money.
Initially, I was surprised by these very high reported rates of fare evasion. After all, as a Manhattan resident, I regularly use both the subways and buses. Yes, I would observe the occasional rider jumping the turnstile, or boarding a bus without paying. But the rate of fare evasion I would observe was around 5% or less of the passengers. Where did the MTA come up with these very high numbers?
I began to learn the answer last year, when my chorus had several rehearsals and a couple of concerts in Harlem, a neighborhood where the large majority (but not all) of the population is black. The venues were near the subway station at 135th Street and Lenox Avenue, a busy station right in the middle of Harlem, so I went through that station half a dozen times. At that station, a vagrant (not always the same one) would hold a fare gate open, and almost every entering passenger went through that open gate without paying, instead of using the turnstiles. The vagrants solicited contributions, which a minority gave them. They also looked disapprovingly on the small number of people like myself who opted to pay the MTA instead of themselves. In my observation of about a hundred or so people entering over several visits, a small number of people at that station paid the MTA, but not a single black person paid.
A few weeks ago, in light of the recent reporting as to the situation on buses in particular, I decided that it was time for a Manhattan Contrarian investigation. So on a quiet Sunday afternoon, I went out to take a long bus ride across Brooklyn; and then I repeated the trip two weeks later. For my experiment, I chose a route known as the B6 — a very long and busy route where passengers get on and off regularly along the full length. (You can find the route on the Brooklyn bus map here.). An important reason why I chose this route is that, going East to West, it passes through a long stretch of majority-black neighborhoods (Northern Canarsie and East Flatbush), followed by an equally long stretch of majority white/Asian neighborhoods (Flatbush, Midwood, Borough Park, Bensonhurst). Another reason I chose this route is that I knew that the black neighborhoods in question are not particularly poor neighborhoods. Here is a picture from Google Maps of a few homes along Avenue H in East Flatbush (along the B6 route) , typical of miles of similar ones that you will see in this area:
If you look on Zillow, you will find that the prices for these types of houses in this area are in the range of about $500,000 to $1 million — well above the median value of a single family house in the U.S. as a whole.
And here are the results of my investigation: On my first trip, I was amazed to observe that on the first half of the bus route (the majority-black neighborhoods), almost nobody paid. Then suddenly, the bus crossed Flatbush Avenue, and the ethnicity of the neighborhood changed. After that, almost (but not quite) everybody paid. But on that first trip, I had not positioned myself to make a perfect count of who paid and who did not. So the second trip, I made sure take a seat where I could get an exact count of payers and non-payers by observed race. This time, more riders were paying, but still, 25 of 44 black riders did not pay, and only 4 of 40 from other races. Yes, I may have mis-identified a few people, but not enough to change the overall gist of the result.
Which brings me to the cover story in today’s New York Post. The online headline is “MTA wasting $1M to study ‘psychology’ of fare beaters — as agency cries poverty, pushes for congestion pricing.” It appears that the MTA thinks that it can reduce fare evasion through better understanding of the psychology of the perpetrators:
The agency said in the proposal that they had already done some of their own research into people who skip the $2.90 fare — and have already categorized them as either “opportunists,” “rebels,” “idealists,” “youth,” “unintentional” or “low-income” They said they had found “rebels,” idealists,” and the more obvious “low income” brackets are most likely not to pay.
The Post rightly makes fun of this ridiculous research proposal. It has its own answer to the MTA’s fare evasion problem (appearing on the front cover of the print edition, but not in the online version):
MTA offers $1 million to study why people evade subway cost. ANSWER: Because nobody arrests them.
An accompanying Post editorial makes some obvious points:
Chronic fare-beating is jut societal disorder; the only fix is to confront it. The way to get people to obey the law is to make them believe they’ll pay for breaking it. That’s how Bill Bratton broke rampant fare-beating three decades ago — high-profile mass arrests changed the public psychology.
But even the Post, in both its editorial and news pieces, is not willing to talk honestly about the association of race and fare-beating. Neither their news article nor editorial says a word about the race of the fare beaters. The subject is too sensitive even for them. But the problem is that until we can have an honest discussion about the association of race and fare-beating, it is almost impossible to address the issue.
If the MTA today were to launch a program of mass arrests of fare-beaters, as the Post recommends, it would be immediately obvious that a large majority of the arrestees are black, far higher than their proportion of the City’s population as a whole. Cries of “racism!” would resound. At least several of the DAs (certainly, Manhattan’s Alvin Bragg) would refuse to prosecute. And the program would crumble.
To enable such a program to begin and to move forward, it is necessary for the issue of refusal to pay fares by race to enter the public consciousness. Someone first must collect systematic data and report it and point out what is actually going on. If it is too sensitive to report by race per se, then how about reporting by zip code? And then the newspapers and TV stations and podcasts and websites would need to pick up the story and make something out of it. That would give the MTA the ammunition it needs to move forward. Until that happens, I’m afraid that the problem will only get worse.
Meanwhile, who thinks that giving blacks, and particularly young blacks, a free pass on paying MTA fares is doing them some kind of a favor?
Right now, it seems that the Manhattan Contrarian is the only one willing to talk about this issue.
Source (Archive)
