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Comment by heliodor | Hacker News Reader

I wanted to see just how true MoveNY's claim is that the price is skyrocketing.

Here'a a graph with some quick data grabbed off the internet:

http://i.imgur.com/qbhSNbH.png

The fare was $0.30 in 1970. From there, I applied the inflation rate to compare with the fare prices. The price of a ride should be reduced on this graph once unlimited metrocards were introduced because those are cheaper and account for a big chunk of the usage.

Regarding the chart above, the slope of the "line" for the fare is 5.4 cents/year and the slope for the price index "line" is 3.6 cents/year.

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I think the price is fair. But the ridership, growing or not, is already HUGE. Multiple lines are packed multiple times every single weekday and sometimes on weekends too. Whether people are paying $116.50 monthly or $2.75 per-ride, the MTA must have huge revenues. Wikipedia says "operating revenue" in 2011 was $6.5 billion.

That's a huge amount of money. Sure, it's a big system, with a lot of costs, but... so much money... and there's no easy way to apply competitive pressure, you can't have a literal competitor, so I don't know what could be done, but it has to be possible to have better maintained stations, even more frequent trains during rush hours when certain lines are literally overflowing, and have money left over.

And somehow they were losing money in 2011. Well, individually, I suppose not...

That price is competitive with many systems in other major international cities[1] --many international cities have fares based on distance. Flat fares are nice (contrast with tokyo, wash DC, london, stockholm)

[1] http://www.priceoftravel.com/595/public-transportation-price...

I doubt the accuracy of that table. It's been a number of years since I regularly took CityRail but I remember the price of trains in Sydney to go up pretty drastically the further into the suburbs you got. Like, $5/ride and such. Though maybe that was for fares all the way out to Wollongong.

I've always found the flat fee nature of the NY subway to be wonderfully egalitarian, since the high fees tend to be a regressive tax on those who can't afford to live close to the city.

Tokyo has 3 railway operators: Japan Railways (above-ground rail, but it runs the Yamanote line which hits all the important stops and it's packed like sardines in rush hour), Tokyo Metro, and Toei Subway.

I know that competing operators from Yokohama->Tokyo were putting up some combatative ads earlier this year, so this competition must actually help.

More people rode this same system in 1956 and I seriously doubt they had all the routes and trains they have available now.

The subsidy on fares is such that fares themselves only pay forty percent of the cost to run the agency.

So there is an upside and downside to all of this, the upside is more people use it, the downside as they do it costs everyone more.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/20/nyregion/delays-and-costs-...

To be fair... the price was artificially kept at $0.05 from when the subway system was opened in 1904 until some point in the 50's - which in the process helped drive the private operators of the system out of business.

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