The fare hike hasn’t been halted – in fact, millions of the most frequent subway and bus riders may get socked even harder than before, transit officials said yesterday.
By keeping the base fare at $2 rather than raising it to $2.25, Gov. Spitzer may have forced the MTA to increase the price of seven-day, 30-day and bonus MetroCards even higher than originally planned.
Under the fare-hike proposal shot down by Spitzer, weekly and monthly cards would have increased 4 percent – now it could be as much as 6 percent, officials conceded yesterday.
As a result, 6 million of the 7 million straphangers who ride buses and subways each day should expect to start paying more next year. Spitzer this week told the MTA to use an extra $220 million the agency discovered in its coffers to reduce the estimated $580 million budget shortfall for 2008-09 and keep the fare stable at $2 through the end of 2009 by reducing discounts.
That puts the burden of the hike on the 85 percent of riders who buy some form of multiple-ride or weekly and monthly MetroCard. The MTA will crunch the numbers and announce the terms of the new hike in two weeks.
Astute straphangers saw right through the proposal. “It is a fare hike,” said Heidi Octave, 25, a teaching assistant from Queens. “They are covering it up to make it look like it isn’t, but it is.”
Transit advocates have long argued that fare increases should be kindest to the riders who use the system most. In London, for example, the base fare is exorbitant, but there are deep discounts for regular riders.
Roughly half of all transit riders use weekly or monthly MetroCards, and 40 percent pay $1.67 a ride with MetroCard purchases of $10 or more.
Of the 15 percent who pay full price, more than half buy $4, $6 or $8 MetroCards that carry no discount, about a third are bus riders without a MetroCard who have to pay cash and the rest buy single-ride MetroCards.
Some advocates have said that keeping the base fare down helps lower-income riders who cannot afford the discount cards. But a Straphangers Campaign study done in 2002, when discounts were relatively new, found nearly two-thirds of low-income riders took advantage of the discounts.
“Just because they are poor does not mean they are stupid,” MTA Board member Andrew Albert said. “They know a good deal when they see it.”
Albert questioned the wisdom of Spitzer’s policy.
. “Since the vast majority of riders buy bonus cards, why we are keeping the base fare artificially low is anybody’s guess,” he said.
Gene Russianoff of the Straphangers Campaign said he is most concerned about the threat of eliminating the 20 percent discount for MetroCards over $10.
“I’d rather they do more to save the pay-per-ride bonus than the unlimited card rides because that is the most popular discount for lower income riders,” he said.