That said, I wouldn’t be completely opposed to the idea of peak fares. Make it $3 from 7 to 9 AM and 4 to 6 PM weekdays, $2.50 other times during the day, and leave it at $2 nights and weekends. That would be a more sensible way of varying the fare than adding zones. Oh, and it wouldn’t require exit swipes and thus wouldn’t require replacing thousands of turnstiles.

The political reason is as good as any.

The political reason, among others, explains why it will never change. It doesn’t explain why it was built that way in the first place.

A good analogy is the East River and Harlem River bridge tolls. There is no good reason why the there’s a toll on the Battery Tunnel, but no toll on the Brooklyn Bridge. It’s just historical, but certain politicians will argue to the death that it ought to stay that way.

The political reason is as good as any.

> you won’t have entering and exiting passengers staring each other
> down

Oh that would be NICE here.

A zone system would discourage people from living in the outer areas of the city. In smaller geographical cities, like DC, it helps the city by keeping people from living in Virginia. But here in NYC, the entire system lies within the city.

However, it is a political, a financial, and a practical non-starter. The politics are obvious, but the engineering problem is a nightmare. It isn’t just a matter of replacing every turnstile at 468 stations. You actually need more of them to maintain throughput, since exiting the system would be “harder” (i.e. would take longer) per person. In London, the larger stations have many more turnstiles than in New York, and they’re usually set to work only one way, so that you won’t have entering and exiting passengers staring each other down. New York doesn’t have that problem (or not to that extent) because exiting is easy.

The financial issue is that it would cost hundreds of millions, maybe a billion, and many years, to retrofit the whole system. Imagine the case for making that investment: “The great thing is, we’ll be able to charge more money in the outer boroughs.”

That said, I’m against zoning. This is *one* city, it should be one fare. Now is not the time to pit borough against borough. There’s already enough of that going on with the bridge tolls. Besides, it would be political suicide to support the idea…

The other sort of differential fare — the charge, say, $3 between, say, 7am and 9am Mondays through Fridays version — seems much more practicable. This even more so targets a user group that is overwhelmingly responsible for the MTA’s fixed costs. I suspect that the price elasticity of demand is low at that time of day, so it should actually raise some revenue.

And obviously, this would allow the $3 minus $2.50 (or whatever) to be multiplied by five-sevenths of the number of days on an unlimited; and then this be added to the price of those too in order not to skew the market.