A New Fare Hike Calls for an Improved Fair Fares Program
David R. Jones, The Urban Agenda
New York City bus and subway commuters are bracing for the first fare hike since 2015.
Starting on August 20, subway and bus fares will increase from $2.75 to $2.90. The impact of this fare increase will be felt hardest by the city’s low-income residents, who are caught between the rock of increasing unaffordability and the hard place of worsening employment prospects, while struggling since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic with the rising cost of living and a housing affordability crisis that threatens the city’s equitable and inclusive economic recovery.
A fare increase was inevitable. As a member of the MTA Board, I voted in favor of raising bus and subway fares. It was not an easy vote. But farebox revenue is an important part of maintaining our mass transit system, which is the economic lifeblood of our city and the region. Fares will also rise on MetroNorth, the Long Island Railroad, express bus service and on the tolls at MTA bridges and tunnels.
There are ways, however, to mitigate the impact of the fare hike on our most vulnerable residents.
Unknown to many of the city’s low-income residents is a program called Fair Fares that could effectively nullify the looming fare increase and significantly offset transportation hardship for many mass transit users. The city should do more to ensure that eligible New Yorkers know about the Fair Fares program and consider providing further relief to more low-income New Yorkers who are currently ineligible by increasing the program’s income cutoff from 100 percent to 200 percent of the Federal Poverty Level (FPL).
The Fair Fares program was established in 2018 by Mayor de Blasio and New York City Council to provide half-priced MetroCards for New Yorkers living at or below the poverty line. The program is a critical lifeline to education, employment, medical care and other basic necessities for low-income New Yorkers. But an estimated 652,000 eligible New Yorkers remained unenrolled because of lack of outreach and enrollment barriers.
According to findings from our latest Unheard Third survey, roughly half of the eligible respondents said they had not applied to the Fair Fares transit discount program with 14 percent reporting that they did not know how to apply. We also know from our research that Queens residents were the least aware of the program with only a quarter of the eligible population reporting that they had applied or were already enrolled in the program. Brooklyn had the highest share (39 percent) of eligible respondents either already enrolled or in the process of enrolling.
If we want to see more people take advantage of this program, then we must conduct more aggressive targeted outreach and education, especially in neighborhoods with high need, to increase awareness and streamline the administrative processes involved in obtaining and renewing a Fair Fares card.
An overhaul of the City’s outreach and enrollment efforts for Fair Fares should be coupled with an expansion of the program. Mayor Adams and the City Council, under the leadership of Speaker Adams, made the smart decision to include an additional $20 million for the program in the FY24 Adopted City Budget. But the real potential and transformational power of the program will only be unlocked if those with incomes under 200 percent of the FPL – a large swath of whom are working class New Yorkers who rely on the transit system to get to work, school, medical appointments, etc. – can access the benefits of the program.
The current funding for Fair Fares should not be an impediment for the city to experiment with opening up the program to more low-income residents. Although the $95 million allocated for the program in FY24 is not enough to enroll every eligible New Yorker under 200 percent of the FPL, the current or even a slightly higher take-up rate should allow the city to expand the program to more New Yorkers who fall under this income threshold, with the option to cap enrollment if funding is exhausted or increase it through a budget modification. Also, it should not be overlooked that such an expansion would also provide a steady stream of revenue for the MTA, making it a win-win situation.
There’s no question that the fare increase will be a burden for our lowest-income residents. These New Yorkers are already struggling with the high cost of living brought on by inflation and the housing affordability crisis. But there is an opportunity for the city to provide some relief by unleashing the full potential of Fair Fares as the poverty reduction tool that it was intended to be.