Faced with a budget gap of a few hundred million dollars, the MTA may be targeting a politically sensitive giveaway that is bound to get New Yorkers riled up over the looming service cuts. According to a report in the Daily News, the authority is considering eliminating student MetroCards as part of a multi-faceted approach to closing its new-found budget gap.
Amongst the TWU’s arbitration award, the payroll tax short fall and the state appropriations cut, the MTA may face a budget gap as large as $500 million this year, and the Student MetroCards have long been a sore subject for the agency. According to Pete Donohue, the authority doles out approximately 550,000 Student MetroCards each year that allow the city’s pupils to ride the rails for free. Once jointly fully funded by the city and state, both political bodies have cut back their student-based contributions to the MTA, and the agency runs annual deficits on this program.
In fact, two years ago, City Comptroller William Thompson reported on the student MetroCard funding programs. Because the city and state contribute just $90 million to a program that costs $161.5 million to administer, the agency effectively loses $71.5 million per year on Student MetroCards. To make matters worse, this has been the status quo for these student passes since the mid-1990s. Why should an authority tasked with balancing its budget dole out free rides when the city and state have long ago reneged on their pledges to fully fund student transit subsidies?
The Student MetroCard program is based solely on how far away a student lives from his or her school and not on need, and parents are up in arms over the rumored cuts to it. The comments three Daily News reporters dug up are as expected. Parents say they won’t be able to afford to send their children to school via public transit, and kids say some of their classmates simply won’t go to school because they would have way to get there. Education experts too worry about the loss of free transit.
“If you’re going to eliminate neighborhood high schools as the mayor has in most of the city, it’s absolutely critical to have free transportation for kids, especially because children are required by law to go to school,” Clara Hemphill, a New School education expert, said. “Some kids are traveling up to 90 minutes by public transportation. There’s absolutely no way to get there without the subway and bus.”
In a rather absurd column, Michael Daly goes after the MTA for this plan as well. He claims that smart kids may “risk arrest” by jumping turnstiles to get to school and that the city will lose federal education funding because the authority’s cuts to the MetroCard program will cause truancy rates to rise. With this charge, we might be nearing the point where someone has managed to blame the MTA for just about any potential problem in the city.
The reality, though, is far from simple. It’s true that, for an eight-month school year, 30-day unlimited ride MetroCards would cost families $712 per child, but the MTA could opt to go for a reduced rate for students. Even a $1 or 50-cent student ride would enable the MTA to capture additional revenue while eliminating a $70-million loss from the agency’s books.
Furthermore, the agency should not be expected to simply foot the bill when the city and state refuse to pony up for a program they originally promised to fund. The MTA provides student MetroCards at the request of New York’s politicians. It is under no legal obligation to do so, and it is well within its right to threaten to eliminate this program as a way to draw more attention to its fiscal plight and more funds for its severely strained coffers.
Cutting Student MetroCards and those three free rides a day will hurt. Families will be forced to pay more money to send their children to school, and others won’t be able to attend schools far from home. But the MTA has its back against the wall, and it is fighting back with all of its might. End the great student MetroCard swindle and that huge budget gap will look a little bit smaller.
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