Saving the subway
Celebrating that subway ridership got close to 4 million one day last week is a weak cheerleading effort by Gov. Hochul and the MTA to mask a huge problem: Before COVID permanently flipped office life and commuting on its head with remote work, the average weekday number of trips was 5.5 million, a number that had been fairly constant for years.
A million and half missing fares at $2.75 each exceeds $4 million a day missing from the farebox. Multiply that times 260 weekdays a year is a vanished billion dollars a year. Instead of bringing in $3.6 billion from straphangers to keep the trains running, the forecast this year is only for $2.6 billion. The billions in COVID aid from the feds will not be replenished.
Having the remaining passengers pick up the $1 billion slack would mean a 38% fare hike, an extra $1.05, for a $3.80 ride, a terribly regressive burden on those people who can’t work remotely. Another really bad option is slashing service. Which means the third way forward is to increase direct funding of transit, as critical a government function as schools or police and fire protection.
Hochul wisely proposed raising the MTA’s payroll tax, along with the shakier idea of relying on speculative one-time application fees from possible casinos and ongoing dedicated revenues from the gambling palaces. Making City Hall cover 100% of the cost of student MetroCards and the horrible Access-A-Ride paratransit system adds no new money to transit.
In their own budget plans, both the state Senate and the Assembly rejected the dunning of New York City, which was correct, but they also wrongly said no to boosting the payroll tax and the Senate made the hole even bigger by exempting some suburban counties from having to pay.
To bring in more money, the Legislature has floated increases in the corporate franchise surcharge, the corporate income tax rate and the personal income tax for millionaires. There’s also the sales tax that could be raised a bit.
Hochul and Legislature now must find the right mix.