Nearly 30 percent of NYC bus riders aren’t paying their fare — costing the transit authority $56 million in the last three months of 2021 alone, according to the MTA’s latest fare evasion survey.
Transit number-crunchers estimated some 29.3 percent of riders on local bus routes did not pay the fare in the final three months of 2021 — up from 25.2 percent in the three months before that, the report showed.
The troubling spike brings the reported local bus fare evasion to the highest it’s been in at least a decade, according to a source familiar with the agency’s survey methodology.
“The high rate is mostly being driven by [an approximately] 50 percent non-payment rate in the Bronx, and a jump in non-payment on Staten Island,” the source said.
Transit coffers lost more funding to bus fare evasion in the final quarter of 2021 than from subway fare beaters. Even though there are nearly three times as many subway riders as bus riders, the evasion rate underground was below 8 percent over the same period, costing the authority $41 million.
“If you can get away with not paying your fare on the bus, chances are you’ll also try it on subways,” warned MTA board member Andrew Albert. “We’re talking about massive fare loss on buses, which hurts the people who need it the most — the poor and those who cannot afford massive fare increases.”
MTA leaders have been sounding the alarm about fare evasion since 2017, but with little success. An audit last year by state Comptroller Tom DiNapoli noted that farebeating had actually increased since the $24 million-per-year enforcement effort began.
Two of the city’s five district attorneys, in Manhattan and Brooklyn, stopped prosecuting transit “theft of services” in 2018.
The NYPD, however, still gives tickets for the violation on subways — some 14,573 in the fourth quarter of 2021 — and occasionally makes arrests. Bus enforcement, however, is non-existent: The Transit Bureau did not issue a single bus fare evasion summons in all of 2021, according to publicly available stats.
An MTA rep said enforcement teams are deployed to local buses each day. Transit inspectors issued 39,055 summonses to bus fare beaters in 2021, of which “a vast majority” carried $100 fines, the MTA said.
“By starving the public transportation system of funds, fare evasion is a crime against ordinary New Yorkers who pay their fare,” spokesman Aaron Donovan said in a statement. “That’s why NYC Transit deploys enforcement teams to combat bus fare evasion on a daily basis. It’s easier to pay a $2.75 fare than a $100 fine.”
MTA Chair Janno Lieber acknowledged the persistence of bus fare evasion during testimony before the state Legislature last Tuesday.
Lieber attributed the increased noncompliance in part to the five-month period in 2020 when buses went fare-free to limit interactions between drivers and riders amid the ongoing spread of COVID-19.
“There’s no question that we had a very confusing fare payment period with the bus system in particular, where we closed down the front door to protect the drivers, and then everybody got on the back, they didn’t pay for a while,” he said. “The whole fare payment system has slightly broken down on buses, in my view.”
TWU Local 100 vice president JP Patafio, who represents Brooklyn bus drivers, said the problem has gotten so out of hand that he is skeptical that enforcement would help.
“I don’t know that there’s a police solution to 29 percent fare evasion,” Patafio said. “They should look at making local bus service free. As we saw during the pandemic, it’s an essential public service — like, the most essential of the essential.”
