The free ride is about to be over on New York City’s buses, MTA Chair Janno Lieber declared on Tuesday.
Speaking at the New York Law School, the transit chief said next month’s retirement of the MetroCard will enable the agency to ramp up its crackdown on fare evaders. He said requiring all riders to use the digital tap-to-pay OMNY system makes it easier to check whether someone paid to ride.
“Once tap-and-ride is fully implemented, we're going to move to European-style fare payment enforcement, where you'll have fare agents, not cops, who can go up to people and say, ‘Can you show me your phone or your OMNY card and I can validate that you paid?’” Lieber said.
Lieber said the enforcement will be targeted at the MTA’s select bus service routes. More than half the riders on those lines skip the fare, according to agency estimates. The stops on those routes are equipped with kiosks that allow riders to swipe their MetroCards and receive paper receipts to prove they paid. OMNY users don’t use the kiosks, but tap their cards at fare readers near any of the bus doors.
Lieber’s remarks were the latest move in his yearslong push to address fare evasion, which he’s called an “existential threat” that costs the MTA upward of $700 million a year. The MTA last year also deployed enforcement agents on buses alongside cops to use devices to check whether people paid their fares — but the blitz correlated with only a minor drop in fare evasion.
His planned crackdown would also come right as Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani takes office following a campaign that promised to eliminate the fare on the MTA’s buses. (Lieber has dismissed the idea as infeasible.)
Lieber blamed the stubbornly high rates of fare evasion on a policy implemented during a six-month period in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic when buses were made free and riders were directed to board from the rear door to avoid contact with drivers.
“When we told people get on the back and don't pay, we never put the toothpaste back in the tube,” Lieber said, vowing things will change next year. “We have to do better on buses. I hope that the new administration will help us even though there's obviously some ideological debate to take place.”
Danny Pearlstein, a spokesperson for the advocacy group Riders Alliance, noted the MTA has already installed OMNY readers near the rear doors of local buses, similar to the select bus routes, but does not allow riders to use those readers to pay. He urged Lieber to allow for rear-door boarding in order to speed up bus service.
“Riders want all-door boarding starting yesterday and a robust policy process to get free buses right starting tomorrow. Riders are struggling, bus service is slow and unreliable and fare collection has been intermittent,” Pearlstein wrote in an email. “Today, by some estimates, little more than half of bus riders pay the fare. It's just not, at this point, a reliable revenue stream to fund public transit for millions of New Yorkers.”
While Lieber sees the conversion to OMNY as a silver bullet to fare evasion, the technology has been riddled with delays and bugs. The MTA’s previous plan to retire the MetroCard in 2023 was pushed back by more than two years. Riders this year have reported problems with the new payment system, with the system failing to accept their cards and, in some cases, seeing repeated charges for rides they did not take.
MTA representatives have repeatedly said the errors have been quickly resolved, and no one has been wrongfully charged a fare.
