Can technology solve the MTA’s ongoing problem of fare evasion?

For years, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority has largely relied on the same approach to deter people from sneaking onto New York City’s subways without paying. As passengers trickle in, police officers stand next to turnstiles and issue tickets to those who jump on them.

But even after a dramatic increase in enforcement, the transportation system lost $690 million in fare evasion last year, officials say. Now the MTA wrestles with a more existential question that is not about how to tackle fare evasion, but whether criminal enforcement is the right thing to do at all.

A report released by the authority last month proposed a series of new solutions, including directing more funds to buses, where most fare evasion occurs, promoting a program that subsidizes public transportation costs for low-income New Yorkers, running more ads urging passengers to pay, and adding new rate gates that are more difficult to climb.

While some riders who do pay feel cheated by the idea of ​​letting others go off the hook, left-wing politicians and advocates for poor New Yorkers have denounced aggressive policing, saying it unfairly targets America’s most vulnerable people. the city and, crucially, is not really effective.

Many U.S. cities like New York are struggling to rein in losses from fare evasion, in part because the cost of penalizing public transport users may exceed the amount of money collected from the fine them. As a result, some places, such as San Francisco and Seattle, have relaxed enforcement.

For New York, police enforcement is “part of the long-term solution,” Janno Lieber, the authority’s chairman, said at a news conference about the new study. But he also stressed that the authority and police should consider an “approach that has many different components beyond NYPD enforcement.”

Concerns about the price-fixing grew in New York last year as government officials searched luring riders back who avoided public transportation, in part because they feared crime. This has been stated by police officials crackdown on so-called quality-of-life crimes in March 2022, and enforcement increased about 28 percent that year to 80,000 subpoenas for rate evasion, compared to 62,380 in 2021, according to the MTA

Arrests and subpoenas for rate evasion have fallen disproportionately on black and Latino New Yorkers, fueling critics of the approach. By 2022, they accounted for 73 percent of people arrested and subpoenaed for fare evasion from all incidents involving race and ethnicity reported by police, according to an analysis by Harold Stolper, an economist at Columbia University who researches fare evasion. patterns in the city.

“You have people who really can’t afford the cost of public transportation because they can’t afford the cost of living in New York City,” said Molly Griffard, an attorney with the Legal Aid Society, who said that funds spent on tariff evasion, should be redirected to address the root causes of the behavior.

“There’s a kind of knee-jerk reaction to just relying on the police to help us out of a problem that the police can’t solve,” she said.

A spokesman for Mayor Eric Adams said the city has been trying to help poor riders through the city’s Fair Fares program, which subsidizes public transportation fares for New Yorkers whose income falls below the federal poverty line — about $30,000 a year for a family of four.

But he didn’t address the report’s suggestion that the city should double the income threshold needed to qualify for Fair Fares, which the study authors say provides significantly less aid than comparable transit subsidy programs in other cities.

He also said it is unacceptable for people to refuse to pay for rides, calling it a concern for the city’s public safety.

The MTA last year appointed a group of scientists, urban policy experts and public transportation advocates to study the problem of tariff evasion and come up with ideas to stop it. Their recently released report provides the clearest picture of how and where the MTA is losing money and what tools the authority is experimenting with besides policing.

The study found that most of the fare hit occurs on buses, where the system lost about $315 million in revenue last year. Still, efforts to contain the problem have largely focused on subways, where the cost was $285 million, according to the report. Commuter rail lines lost another $44 million, and the authority also lost $46 million in vehicle tolls on bridges and tunnels.

“The panel was convened because it is extremely important for the MTA to be able to collect fees, but it is just as important for the MTA not to be seen as a means of sending more and more people into criminal justice without them being have to do. so,” said Roger Maldonado, panel co-chair and former president of the New York City Bar Association.

“That’s why it was so important to look at the underlying reasons for evasion and to make recommendations for solutions that would address that evasion without entering the criminal justice process.”

About 700,000 bus passengers do not pay the fare on an average weekday. Skipping the fare on buses is as easy as boarding without paying or dropping less than the full cost of a farebox ride. The authority counts incidents of fare evasion on buses with automated fare counters and with sensors above doors that count the number of people on board a bus.

Despite that statistic, the study found little enforcement on local buses, which make up the vast majority of the system’s routes and make the most frequent stops. The authors called on officials to deploy more fare checkers on local buses and to improve the technology used by bus fare checkers.

For example, they suggested that the authority give them access to the MTA database of offenders on their mobile phones. They also said that because the authority briefly exempted buses at the height of the coronavirus pandemic to encourage social distancing, it must now launch a messaging campaign to remind people to pay.

On subways, most passengers evade the fare by walking through open emergency exit gates or by jumping over, diving under, or squeezing at turnstiles. To measure incidents, the MTA deploys about 10 people each quarter to spend about 600 hours at randomly selected stations, where they manually count how many people skip the fare and compare it to the totals from the fare collection system.

The authority is also experimenting with camera technology, which has shown that more than 50 percent of subway ticket evasion occurs at the gates.

The panel recommended replacing the system’s turnstiles with what it described as “entrance gates of the future,” tall, motorized Plexiglas doors that are harder to sneak up on. The study noted that variations of the technology have been installed in Amsterdam, Paris, New Jersey and San Francisco.

And the panel urged police to warn first-time offenders in hopes of forcing them to pay, rather than immediately punishing them with a $100 subpoena. Those who do receive and pay a subpoena would be charged $50 in credit to ride the system, while repeat offenders and those who commit more serious crimes in the system should receive harsher sentences, the authors wrote.

Some recommendations are missing important details; for example, there is no price tag or specific timeline for the turnstile project.

Officials have not specified how much they have spent fighting fare evasion, but at a city council meeting in DecemberRichard Davey, the president of New York City Transit, the MTA division that oversees the city’s subway and buses, said the authority paid about $1 million a month for 200 private security guards to guard subway turnstiles.

The guards have little power to enforce the law or the rules of the MTA, which has raised questions about whether the cost of hiring them was justified.

The purpose of flooding the New York City subway with police officers last year was not just to stop the fare beaters, but to make the system feel safer after a series of high-profile crimes deterred many travelers from using public transportation.

The security of the system has been a concern during the pandemic following a series of shocking crimes on platforms and trains. Last month, a woman was pushed into a speeding subway train on her way to work in what prosecutors called a “completely unprovoked” attack.

Dorothy Schulz, a retired captain with the Metro-North Police Department and professor emeritus at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, echoed the mayor’s complaints about “a sense of disorderly conduct” in the subway, saying a boost in enforcement of fare evasion was needed to make riders feel safe.

“You have to pay to get in,” Mrs. Schulz said. “It’s not a free system.”