Realizing the Promise of Fair Fares
David R. Jones, La Nueva Mayoria / The New Majority
I’ve been a longtime advocate for a more affordable transit system because I understand our city’s public transportation system is a lifeline for low-income communities who rely on it to get to work, school, medical appointments, and much more. And as such, it is undoubtedly one of the most important engines for the local and regional economy.
In 2019, we took a big step in making our mass transit system more affordable to low-income residents with the creation of the NYC’s Fair Fares program. Since then, approximately 300,000 New York City residents have benefited from the reduced fare program that provides half-price MetroCards to all working age adults (18 to 64 years old) with household incomes below 120 percent of the Federal Poverty Line (FPL).
Sadly, there are still hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers who cannot fully take advantage of mass transit as the gateway to economic opportunity because they cannot afford the fare. The August 2023 fare hike from $2.75 to $2.90 coupled with the rising cost of living in NYC has made affording the mass transit fare even harder for residents with lower incomes.
This is exactly what we see in the Community Service Society of New York’s (CSS) most recent report, When You Can’t Afford the Fare: How Expanding Fair Fares can Help Working New Yorkers as Transit Hardships Persist. The report found that almost one in five New Yorkers are dealing with transit affordability hardship. The report uses data from the 2023 Unheard Third Survey, which polls New York City's low-income residents on their hardships and views on what programs and policies would help them get ahead. Thirty percent of all low-income survey respondents said that they experienced transit affordability hardship in 2023. And for low-income Latina/o/x New Yorkers, the number is even grimmer with 37 percent of them reporting transit affordability hardship, continuing a trend of increasing hardship since 2021.
At the heart of this problem is that the Fair Fares eligibility criteria is detached from reality. Think about this: A New Yorker working full-time, year-round, at the local minimum wage of $16/hour earns too much to qualify for the Fair Fares program. Another problem is that enrollment in Fair Fares, perhaps counterintuitively, remains low among the eligible population. It’s estimated that only 33 percent of the eligible population has enrolled in Fair Fares. In the Unheard Third Survey, the share of respondents who had not applied or did not know how to apply remained unchanged at 43 percent between 2022 and 2023. Although more people are now aware of the program, there is much more the city could do to improve on their outreach and promotion efforts.
Depriving low-income residents from having affordable access to our transportation system not only hurts their pockets and their prospect of financial security, but it also slows down the city’s economic recovery from the pandemic. That is why CSS and other advocates are calling for increasing Fair Fares eligibility to 200 percent of the federal poverty line (FPL) and implementing an aggressive public outreach and awareness campaign to promote Fair Fares.
The good news is that City and State leaders seem to be paying attention. Last week, New York City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams announced in her “State of the City” address that she wants the program to reach more New Yorkers and supports expanding eligibility to 200 percent of the FPL. Also last week, the State Assembly called for expanding eligibility to 200 percent of the FPL, adding funding of $127 million for the program in its one-house budget resolution (A8803B), which is in response to Governor Hochul’s FY25 budget proposal. The State Senate went even further by proposing to expand the Fair Fares program to commuter rail (S8308B) lines operating in NYC.
Two years ago, Mayor Adams joined Speaker Adams and the City Council to jointly announce that funding for Fair Fares would be baselined in the city budget to ensure a stable source of funding for the program going forward.
It was a statement on the importance of the program. We need that same leadership and vision now to expand the program, and take the next step to ensure that more low-income, working New Yorkers struggling with the cost of transportation can access the economic benefits of a program. Only then, we’ll be on the path of unleashing its true potential.
David R. Jones, Esq., is President and CEO of the Community Service Society (CSS), the leading voice on behalf of low-income New Yorkers for more than 175 years, and a member of the MTA Board. The views in this column are solely those of the writer. The New Majority is available on CSS’s Web site: www.cssny.org.