Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) Chair and CEO Janno Lieber made a live morning television appearance on NY1’s Mornings on 1 with Shannan Ferry and Jamie Stelter to discuss fare and toll increases, fare evasion, and congestion pricing.
A transcript of the interview appears below.
Shannan Ferry: The MTA’s full board voted unanimously yesterday to approve the first increase in the base subway and bus fare in eight years. Starting on August 20, fares for subway and bus rides are going up by 15 cents, so that brings the cost of a single ride to $2.90. Unlimited MetroCards and express bus fares are also going up, some by just a few cents, others by a few dollars. And you could see on your screen, there will also be increases in E-ZPass toll hikes on all MTA bridges and tunnels. You can see the list of these changes, again these changes taking effect on August 6. So, a lot happening in August and MTA Chair Janno Lieber, Janno Lieber, joining me now to talk about this and so much more. First of all, thank you for coming, I know it's been a busy couple of days. Good to see you, too. You compared mass transit to air and water yesterday. I think everyone can agree that it is the lifeline of the city. Nobody likes to hear about an increase, but you say this is going to dramatically improve service for customers.
Janno Lieber: Yeah, I mean, this is the last ingredient in a much bigger effort led by Governor Hochul to make sure that the MTA didn't go down the tubes because of COVID. We were looking at a $2 billion annual deficit brought on by the ridership drop post-COVID. And we're coming back with ridership. But as the Comptroller of the State of New York said, that meant that we were looking at maybe a dollar increase in the subway fare. We had to stave that off. Governor Hochul got the legislature to go along with the plan to fill the gap. But the last ingredient, and a condition of this whole plan, was that we resumed the small increases in fares every two years. That's what we did yesterday.
Ferry: I know the MTA has been trying hard to get people back after the pandemic. How do you lure people back, though, with another fare increase?
Lieber: Listen, New Yorkers are smart. They understand a bargain when they see it. You know, our fares are way cheaper than London and a lot of other worlds cities. You can go from end to end of the city, and we've added a lot of discounts. Now that seven day, what we call the lucky 13, the automatic free weekly when you get after 13 rides that, you know, that is becoming even more appealing because the seven day starts whenever you first tap. So, we're getting a lot of discounts for our most frequent users. That is our priority, that has an equity value, to make sure that people who are our biggest users, most depending on the subway, will get the best deal.
Jamie Stelter: We've been reporting on all the various ways that people evade the fare. And as some have come to light more recently, and you're trying to do things about that. What about raising the prices? Do you think that that's going to encourage people further who can't afford the fare already?
Lieber: We've made, we were advocates for not just the discounts I'm talking about with the weekly and making the weekly easier to get and so on, but also for Fair Fares, the City program that gives people of real low income 50% discount in fares. We never want fare evasion to be a crime of poverty. I think that the issue that we're struggling with, though, is not mostly people who can't pay. It's just that the rules were broken down a little bit during COVID, and you see people taking their whole family through the gate, through the exit gate where people walking up who have their OMNY open on their phone or their MetroCard in their hand, and, all of a sudden, they see the gate open and they go for it. So, we're trying to discourage that behavior by closing down the gates a little bit, by having people stand there and just say -- hey, please exit through the turnstile. But, also by discouraging back cocking you saw on your screen right now you're seeing that we've got a plan. You know, the folks at subways developed the strategy for making it harder to twist the gears, so we're going, you know, fare evasion is not just a financial issue for the MTA. You know, how we share the public space, in the sense that we're in this all together, we all play by the same rules, as kind of fundamental to New York, because we share the public space so intensely. And, fare evasion kind of discourages and undermines that sense of community and mutual respect. That's one of the reasons we’ve got to do some about it.
Ferry: What about buses? I mean, how can you discourage that? You see people walking on constantly and not tapping. And if you don't get caught, and you see others not getting caught, people are encouraged to do it. And plus, the way that they check now, it slows down service because those agents have to come on board and check people.
Lieber: Yeah, listen, you know, when I was a kid, if you if you didn't pay your full fare, the driver would say, hey, kid, you owe me a nickel, right? That doesn't happen anymore because we've had some bad experiences with drivers, and we don't want to put drivers in harm's way. What we are doing is, for the first time at scale, we're gonna have revenue enforcement agents, unarmed. They're not like the NYPD, they're not carrying guns. But, we're gonna have people on regular local buses to make sure that folks don't engage in that behavior and to discourage that kind of fare evasion. We have to turn on -- buses have gone from being not so big a fare evasion problem with being the largest single contributor to the 700 million the MTA’s losing from fare evasion. You got to turn that around.
Stelter: Another of your favorite topics, congestion pricing. Yesterday, we showed a list of the groups who were asking for exemptions from the toll, and we know the list is long. We know everyone thinks that they're deserving of it, and without getting into, you know, whether or not farmers or parents deserve that, we know that the board is meeting to talk about the actual fare, and who will be exempt. Talk about your interactions with them, and how this will be determined.
Lieber: Listen, I saw you and Pat talking about that, that list a couple days ago. The bottom line is everybody has a good reason why, you know, paying a little more, it doesn't make sense for them, or they should be exempted. But the big picture, which came out yesterday at this board meeting, was that every one of those proposed discounts and exemptions end up raising the base toll for everybody else. And that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to make sure that the system's really fair, and everybody feels, who has to contribute does, and that we have the lowest possible toll. But the process is underway. We've moved from being stuck in the federal environmental review process to moving on to the next phase, which is this expert panel who's gonna advise us on how to set the tolls. I think we're gonna we're staying on schedule to get congestion pricing going next spring and, you know, that means safer streets, better air quality, better transit, less congestion. That's what we're doing this for, to make sure that the business district and our economy works better than it does, right now.
Ferry: And you're gonna continue to hear from those drivers and people protesting until this very long process continues.
Lieber: Absolutely. We respect them. Thank you, Shannan.
Ferry: Thank you for being here.