Nobody worries about whether the fire department is “breaking even”, you just pay for it through taxes because it’s essential
Toxic empathy, ironically, is antithetical to building functioning transit systems. To get buy-in from the public to direct tax dollars to transit, you need to have pleasant, orderly, clean systems that people who can afford to drive want to use instead of driving. You can’t get that if half your riders are law breakers.
Do not forget that NYC charges a substantial income tax, and also a substantial sales tax. As such, the empathy is 100% justifiable.
Even in my home country of Bangladesh, which is extremely poor and dysfunctionally anti-social, I would guess fare evasion isn’t as high as in NYC (including the people riding on top of the bus).
Don't kid yourself. No one is going to pay 5x to ride the bus. It doesn't cost that much to offer a local bus ride.
I don't think you realize where the money really goes. It goes to pay huge pensions, not to benefit the rider.
The IRS certainly taxes an annual income of ~$30k, basically anything above $11k. Any benefits require jumping through a lot of hoops. Moreover, like everyone else, they also have to pay a sales tax for every non-food item they buy. There is also a property tax that they're indirectly responsible for if they're renting. When choosing between rent and bus fare, the choice is obvious.
When public transportation gets the reputation of being the place of juvenile delinquents and petty criminals, people start to ask why their tax money is spent on it, and it becomes a self-reinforcing cycle.
I may sound like a cold bastard but I'd rather have public transportation system frequented by middle class families and commuters, because that's how you get these people to demand more public transportation.
But if you're not actually excluding the deplorables then the fare is just a regressive tax and a deterrent to mass transit use for everyone.
The real problem is that you have unsheltered people without taking effective action against it and then the subway is a form of shelter. If you want to help them then you fix the zoning so more housing can be built, provide shelters, etc. If you want to be a cold bastard then you give them a one way ticket to a lower density city. Charging 10% of the cost of the transit system as a fare, which costs about as much to collect as it generates if not more, is neither of those things and counterproductive.
But unfortunately most cities are nowhere near the size and prosperity of Tokyo.
Then that's not a private entity, that's a government funded contractor, with the government shelling out the money with no accountability.
As a currently popular example, most of the contracts around SLS, with Boeing and other companies, are like this. They consistently mess up, have quality and speed issues and overrun costs, and the government never exercises the option to cut their profit share, even when the overruns reach several times the original agreed upon cost.
I would not describe it as “infinitely inefficient”.
Given the massive public interest, there is probably at least an order of magnitude more oversight of public offices than there is for private companies.
In the end it’s the same challenge that every team, department, company has to solve: how to have people that care about their job?
Here my impression is that that’s often not the case, leading to the effects you described.
Given the often severely reduced pay in public jobs, compared with industry, I don’t find that overly surprising, you get what you pay for.
The solution to the MTA being exceedingly wasteful and unwilling to enforce rules isn't to just make it easier for them to be even worse.
If these people already feel such little civic responsibility for city infrastructure as to be skipping the fare and effectively taking advantage of everyone else, it's going to get much worse if it appears to them that they aren't even being asked to pay. Deciding to just make it 'free' would be the same as deciding just not to measure things that reveal inconvenient facts and celebrating that as having solved the problem.
If you need an ambulance ride, that bill can be thousands, but is covered by health insurance.
I have lived in communities where buses were free to ride, and it was a great option to get around. But these were relatively small and wealthy communities where demand for public transportation was relatively low. I'm not sure the same system could work in NYC.
And most buses are not going to be 100% full most of the time. So if you have an empty seat, the cost is zero. If you don't have an empty seat, now you can justify another bus/train, which reduces latency and causes several more people to take mass transit, which is good.
Huh - are you being serious? Of course the number of seats on a bus is finite. And the number of buses in a city are finite. The raw materials and energy used to produce and power the bus are finite. The pool of labor needed to drive and maintain the bus is finite. The tax revenue to fund all of this is finite.
Yes, it is possible to add more buses. But doing so requires drawing from a finite pool of resources. So it makes sense to incentivize people to use public resources more efficiently.
> And most buses are not going to be 100% full most of the time. So if you have an empty seat, the cost is zero.
I think this is a very good argument for time-of-use based fares. (Of course you don't want to gouge people who are commuting to work/school, but if there's a way to incentivize people to spread out the load while still keeping things affordable, I think that would be a good thing).
Just to be clear, since you have kind of made this about cars vs. mass transit, I'm not at all against mass transit. I'm in favor of applying the same principals to roads to incentivize people to use cars more efficiently as well. Tolls and parking meters (with time-of-use pricing), gasoline surcharges, etc.
It's possible to run more buses and thereby get arbitrarily more seats. The ultimate limits placed on this by the laws of physics are irrelevant because the actual rate limit on how many seats you need is how many people you can get to ride the bus.
> I think this is a very good argument for time-of-use based fares.
But peak hours are the times at which you most want people to take the bus, so they don't clog the roads with cars. It implies that's when they should most be free.
Then off peak will be more likely to have empty seats, implying they should be free then too, i.e. they should be free all the time.
> I'm in favor of applying the same principals to roads to incentivize people to use cars more efficiently as well. Tolls and parking meters (with time-of-use pricing), gasoline surcharges, etc.
And I'm in favor of the same "have the government build this and pay for it entirely from taxes" for roads. The construction cost and most of the maintenance is a sunk cost that doesn't depend on usage. The benefit of their existence accrues to people who don't drive and the benefit of roads to various motorists is proportional to the value of the activity they're engaged in rather than how many miles they drive, which is a much better fit for general taxes than road usage fees.
Also, the collections infrastructure for these things is a large expense, whereas we already have a collections infrastructure for general taxes, so when the incremental cost is negligible and the benefit goes to approximately the entire public it makes much more sense to use the latter. And collecting tolls/fares characteristically involves a significant privacy invasion, because the payments system will then tie your identity to your location history, which we could certainly do without. The main exception to this would be gas tax, which is cheap to collect (gas station is already remitting other taxes), serves as a de facto carbon tax (serving an independent purpose) and avoids most of the location tracking issues.
It otherwise doesn't make sense to waste the public's money and invade their privacy just so they can pay a higher amount for the same thing.
I wish they would also kick off people who eat on the train and leave their mess behind, but they never confront nuisance-makers.
That's what the NYC MTA is... and they're $42 billion in debt. And they need to "borrow" another $23 billion from taxpayers to fund themselves for 2025-2030.
[0] https://www.osc.ny.gov/files/reports/osdc/pdf/report-3-2025....
[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-02-23/in-nyc-su...