There are plenty of downsides to being a lifer for the MTA—like spending your youth vole-like in the city’s subterranean passages—but unlimited cards for life have always been a light at the end of the tunnel. Maybe not for much longer though, since Mayor Bloomberg said recently that if free student cards go, so should MetroCards for agency retirees.
On his weekly radio show the mayor posed the following question and then answered it: "Does it make any sense to give retirees passes for the rest of their lives and not give our kids passes so they can go to school?” No, according to Bloomberg, it does not make sense. Right now 20,000 retired bus, subway and commuter train workers get travel passes if they don’t quit NY for Florida. About 585,000 students have free or discounted travel passes, but stand to lose them.
For decades the MetroCards-for-life clause has been part of MTA union contracts, reports the NY Daily News, and it won’t go without a fight. Kids aside, Transport Workers Union Local 100 President John Samuelsen says Bloomberg should keep giving up city seats to the agency’s elderly. "After years of fiscal irresponsibility by the state government and the MTA, Mayor Bloomberg wants to hang the current fiscal woes around the necks of the elderly, our retirees, and that's not right," he said.
