Second Ave. Sagas

Report: SBS fare enforcement netting $1.4M

Written by

Benjamin Kabak

in

,

Carly Baldwin in Metro today has one of those Select Bus Service fare enforcement stories I just love. Alexander Barton, a 27-year-old accountant who apparently had not heard about the new service, tried to hop on a bus without paying. He alleges that the bus driver waved him on and said the MetroCard reader was “broken.” Meanwhile, other passengers tried to explain the pre-board payment system to Barton, but MTA cops gave him a $100 ticket when he couldn’t procure his proof-of-payment receipt. “The thing that extremely frustrates me is, I was totally unaware I’d done anything wrong,” said Barton.

It’s easy to laugh at the he said-he said battle between a rider who didn’t know about the Select Bus Service changes and a bus rider who denied wrong-doing, but there’s a different story at work here. According to Baldwin, the MTA has issued over 14,000 $100 tickets to those who could not procure proof-of-payment on the M15 Select Bus Service routes since October. That’s a whopping $1.4 million in revenue and an average of around 94 tickets a day.

Customers can’t be happy about it, and advocacy groups aren’t either. Transportation Alternatives, a group that has long fought for faster buses, bemoaned enforcement while Gene Russianoff made a rather obtuse point to Metro. “Clearly, education is an issue,” he says. “I can’t imagine issuing a million dollars’ worth of tickets in a country like Sweden, where they’ve had off-board fare collection for years.” For now, though, if we want buses to move faster, if we want people to pay before they board and keep the new Select Bus Service moving, a ticket blitz has become a part of that education process. Talk about tough love.

Comments

50 responses to “Report: SBS fare enforcement netting $1.4M”

  1. Charles

    Personally, it’s difficult for me to understand how they’ve given out 14,000 tickets. I ride the bus between Chinatown and 14th Street around 9 times a week at various times, and I’ve only seen fare enforcement once.

    Does fair enforcement simply ignore this area of the route?

    Reply
    1. Avi

      Charles, considering that the story mentions issuing 11 tickets at once, it doesn’t shock me that you might have only seen enforcement once while there have been 14k tickets. There only needs to be 9 spot inspections/day to net 94 tickets. If anything, the number of tickets sounds very low given a rate of 11 tickets at a time.

      Reply
      1. Alon Levy

        On the other hand, if a bus with 100 passengers nets 11 tickets, it means that when they’re not doing inspections, the fare evasion rate is 11%. Even by American standards, it’s ridiculously high.

        Reply
        1. Bolwerk

          Yeah, that is pretty nuts. The fine should be high enough to cover at the very least the cost of the inspectors plus the remaining proportion of cheaters. $100 seems a bit low in that regard.

          Reply
          1. Alon Levy

            I think on urban transit in some German cities, the fine is €100. The way they reduce cheating there is by making it very attractive to get unlimited passes, so that a large majority of riders are already paid for and incapable of cheating.

            Cap’n, if you’re reading this, what’s the fine in Paris? And do you know if they keep stats on how many people dodge the fare?

            Reply
            1. Avi

              How did the tickets trend on Fordham rode? I’m not shocked by the initial numbers, but I wonder if they remained constant or trended down as people learned.

              Personally, I would say the fine should be set so that the expected cost of fare evasion is twice the cost of the ride. So the $100 ticket translates into a 4.5% chance of being caught. If inspections are less frequent than that, then the ticket needs to increase. And of course, if inspections are less than 2% then it makes economic sense for people to not pay.

              Reply
            2. ant6n

              In Berlin it’s 40 Euros, and the rate is 3.5~3.8% (2008). Although it seems that fare inspectors work on a commission basis, and are cheap, eager, and a tricky, mean bunch (mostly showing in plain clothes, only asking for tickets when the transit doors are shut).

              Reply
  2. Gary Wong

    No sympathy from me at all. What, did you think you could just ride for free?

    Reply
    1. Paul

      Maybe he really didn’t know about it.

      Also, in the past, I got on a few old busses where the metrocard readers were broken.

      Reply
  3. Charles

    Also, how much money have the MTA earned for bus lane enforcement along the route?

    Reply
  4. Brian

    While they may have given out 14,000 $100 tickets, I wonder how many people have actually paid their fines? How does the MTA collect from deadbeats?

    Reply
  5. DMIJohn

    I’m not sure that the MTA receives the revenue from tickets. Any confirmation on this?

    Reply
    1. AK

      The MTA receives the revenue for any/all tickets directed to the TAB (including SBS tickets). There is obviously a cost to the enforcement mechanism, but the money is the MTA’s. As for tracking down deadbeats, the MTA has authority to increase fines, put civil holds on NY state tax returns, etc.– though usually those steps only come after quite some time.

      Reply
  6. Bolwerk

    Transit advocates are often as hostile to transit as the semi-literate carheads who make up the New York Post op-ed pages.

    Here’s the thing: with POP, a certain percentage of fare evaders is a good thing. It means the fare inspectors get paid for, at least.

    Reply
    1. ant6n

      Except if the total fines are actually less than the lost revenue due to fare evasion + cost of inspectors.

      Reply
      1. Bolwerk

        This shouldn’t be hard. If there are 8000 riders/day on a given service and 1% are caught fare beating and get $100 tickets, that’s $8000/day. More than enough for a slew of POP checkers and a handsome return – which presumably, in part, pays for some of the ones who weren’t caught!

        Reply
        1. ant6n

          Well, so far they had 14000 tickets in ~140 days, so that’s ~100 a day, or 10.000$. With an average daily ridership of 45000 on the m15 (annual ridership/365), every 1% of fare evasion costs 900$ at 2$ per ride. So if the fare evasion is actually as high as 11%, then the fines barely cover the lost revenue. Although this might be a bit pessimistic, because the POP system does induce demand.

          Reply
          1. Bolwerk

            Average ridership of 45000 includes non-SBS services on that route, no?

            So, sticking to the number I pulled out of ass (8,000), if the fare evasion rate is 11% (880 people) and the capture rate is 1% of total riders (80 people), then the 1% should be paying a minimum of 11x the cost of their unpaid rides, plus a premium on the cost of fare inspectors, at a minimum.

            Reply
            1. ant6n

              oh yeah. tried to find the sbs route – but i guess these are 2009 figures.

              Reply
  7. ajedrez

    Personally, I think all local transit should be funded by taxpayers. We wouldn’t have to worry about these POP issues.

    Reply
    1. Bolwerk

      I like the idea, but I don’t think it’s smart to have riders not have to contribute something to their rides.

      Reply
      1. ajedrez

        I guess you’re right. A fare prevents people from using the service willy-nilly, and holding up the buses for short trips.

        But it would be nice if taxes covered most of the fare, and riders only had to pay $0.25-$0.50 for the ride.

        Reply
        1. Bolwerk

          I think it makes more sense to just take responsibility for your own riding. For those who really can’t afford it, subsidize it completely for them.

          That doesn’t mean there can’t be some exceptions. Old-fashioned, non-SBS, crosstown buses, for instance, may as well be free. A lot of the fares are probably capture on the subway anyway. It’s better to just have the buses move faster.

          Reply
          1. Hank

            I like the problem of the commons angle here, but there has to be at least be some charge for using it or people will abuse.

            As a semi-nonsequiter, we should all call our Congressmpeople on this, given the billions of NYC tax money we pour into the interstate highway system annually (where there is a VERY nominal user charge in the form of the gas tax). More MTA funding now!

            Reply
            1. Bolwerk

              I’m sure the Republikan Party will be very helpful on that. Afterall, they did promise to give a break to those who are getting a lot taken away. That would be NYC!

              Reply
          2. ajedrez

            But roads are already heavily subsidized. You can travel all the way across the borough and only have to pay for the cost of the gas in the car.

            Reply
            1. Bolwerk

              You won’t find me defending road subsidies..

              Transit is heavily subsidized too, though at least overall probably considerably less so than roads.

              Reply
  8. Hank

    Glad they are enforcing it, but given that the receipt machines are broken half the time and the fair enforcement people don’t have readers for people with passes…..

    torn between anger at mismanagement on the part of the MTA and a desire to see rules enforced.

    Reply
  9. Aaron

    I’m a little bit surprised at those numbers (working off of Alon’s percentage, as the raw number of tickets is unhelpful)… I know that LA is discontinuing its POP program due to some security theatre in Pershing Square, but I didn’t think evasion was that high there; most transit agencies to implement POP discover that the public is largely law-abiding, thus leading me to think that something is wrong with either implementation or rider education. I haven’t been up that way yet on my trips back to NYC but something definitely seems to be wrong here.

    Reply
    1. Alon Levy

      Yeah, in California the numbers are far lower. The figure I remember is 5% for LA and 2% for SF. But I may be confusing SF with the Zurich numbers, which are audited and are less than 2%.

      If SBS persistently has high fare evasion rates, probably the best solution is to temporarily hire a lot more inspectors (and tell them not to hold the bus…), as a loss leader that would get people more used to the idea of random inspections.

      Reply
      1. Bolwerk

        It would be a good way to put to use some spare token booth clerks. Of course, they’d have to locate the ones who aren’t morbidly obese.

        Reply
        1. Hank

          Maybe this could be part of the MTA’s healthcare cost cutting program. Get the lards off their butts and run them from bus stop to bus stop!

          Reply
          1. Bolwerk

            It’s not even a horrendous idea.

            And the idea that token booth clerks could be put to better use doing inspections is entirely reasonable (unless there’s really a physical barrier to them doing the job).

            Reply
            1. Hank

              The only physical barrier is about 100lbs and an inability fit through the bus doors:)

              In all seriousness, the MTA union would flip its collective sh!t if they asked people in essentially sedentary jobs to actually get out and do something ‘strenuous’ like enforcement

              Reply
              1. Bolwerk

                And that’s why the MTA union needs to be ignored sometimes.

                Reply
  10. Joe Steindam

    I love how the writer for this story got the guy who got the ticket to stand next to a sign which says to pay before you board and a SBS bus which says it’s an Select Bus on it’s route sign. Doesn’t make his argument look any better.

    Reply
  11. BrooklynBus

    Ben, serious question. When you say this is a story you just love, are you being serious or facetious? Because It’s a story I just hate, because I believe the guy, sort of.

    This is what I think happened. The guy gets in the bus not knowing about SBS, could have just been in a hurry or didn’t notice the sign and hadn’t heard of it. (I wouldn’t expect a tourist to automatically know about it either without stopping to read the signage, assuming they read English.) He attempts to pay the fare, but the driver doesn’t want to bother to explain SBS or tell him to get off and buy a ticket. In an effort to get the bus moving as quickly as possible, he motions for him to just get on without paying. The passenger interprets the driver’s gesture as the farebox being broken, which probably happened to him numerous times in the past.

    If the guy really intended not to pay his fare, he wouldn’t have attempted to do so. If this is what happened, I think the bus driver was wrong to mislead him. The man learned a difficult lesson.

    Reply
    1. ajedrez

      If the driver did that, could they’ve gotten in trouble for not informing the passenger of the POP system?

      Reply
      1. Donald

        If the driver had to start explaining the system to every passenger who did not know, the bus would never move.

        Reply
        1. BrooklynBus

          All he had to do was to tell the person to get off and read the sign, not to motion him to get on the bus.

          Reply
    2. Alon Levy

      Germany, too, has some American tourists who pretend not to know that they need a ticket to board a bus. It’s not a one-way thing.

      Reply
      1. BrooklynBus

        I’m sure that does happen. But there are also those who legitimately do not know.

        Reply
  12. nycpat

    MTA police issue these tickets?

    Reply
  13. IsaacB

    The pilot (and it is a pilot) of SBS is exposing problems: Machines are often sluggish, if not out of service. I’ve had to risk riding ticketless when no machines were working at my stop. My wife was once advised *by inspectors* to board a bus without ticket at a stop with no working machines, they assured her that they’d radio the other teams on the line, only to not get around to it. My wife was pulled off the bus further uptown. Thankfully, she was able to convince the inspector to radio downtown and confirm that the machine at her origin was, in fact, broken. The instructions are useless to people (ie, tourists) who do not speak the languages posted on the machines. There ought to have been a “soft” introduction of enforcement and a policy of “first offense free (with ID)”.

    That said, I find the “Metro” article’s slant disingenuous. As law abiding taxpayers and farepayers, we expect everyone to pay. The more people evade the fare, the more stupid the remaining fare-payers feel. Eventually, you have a downward spiral. In addition, lax fare policies encourage people with no legitimate business on the bus to make it their home. Transit Chief David Gunn and Police Chief Bill Bratton made a noticeable dent in subway crime when they renewed focus on intercepting fare evaders.

    Pre-boarding fare collection with on-board proof of payment allows the SBS service to run faster, to use less fuel, pollute less and also impede other traffic less. It also enables the same level of service with fewer buses (or expansion of service with the same number of buses).

    The claim that SBS enforcement is a “cash machine” is absurd. It probably costs the MTA about $100,000 per worker annually (if not more), if you count salary, benefits, pension and corporate overhead. If you have four teams of 6 inspectors (1 team per direction per shift), that costs $2.4 million (5 months of that is $1 million). And if the inspectors catch even 50% of fare cheats, at 14,000 x $2.25, that’s $31,500. Then factor in the cost of the specialized equipment, the training, the advertising. The TA is not making money on the program or enforcement.

    If I did not know better, I’d say that these pleas by transit and bike/ped advocates bear the fingerprints of the Transit Union(s). As some of you may know, “TA” and the “Straphangers’ Campaign” have allied themselves with the TWU in a program called “Rider Rebellion”. Mind you, I believe that unions are important and workers rights should be protected and under the right sircumstances, the “advocates” should ally with the unions for common cause. I’m also a long-time supporter of bike/ped/transit advocacy Transportation Alternatives, in word, deed and with my wallet. But the transit advocates forget that the unions obligation is to fight for the rights of *workers*, not riders. The advocacy groups must not forget that every push for transit innovation or flexibility has met union resistance, often under the guise of dire predictions of impact to the public (e.g., “people will get hurt if we automate the L train” or “people will die if we have one person crews”.) With the potential to reduce the number of buses required (and by extension, drivers), I suspect that the union would prefer to not see the SBS pilot succeed, let alone expand. As many of you know, unions are under fire by various vested interests and I, for one, am all for supporting them in this critical time. But the unions must know and the advocates must not forget, that for the good of all, “a little” union flexibility is in order and “a little” support for the rider agenda is to be expected. A first step would be to push for rider-friendly modifications to the SBS program, but not to engage in gratuitous smearing of SBS enforcement as a “money machine”.

    Reply
  14. Christopher Stephens

    I’ve noticed that enforcement, which was non-existent in the first few months of service, has really stepped up recently. I’m curious to know how much this has slowed down service – they stop the bus to check tickets, which can take a few minutes, even with the three inspectors who seem to work each checkpoint. Any statistics on this?

    Reply
  15. John Paul N.

    An idea: if you have a smartphone with a camera, if the machines aren’t working, take a picture of them, or, better yet, record video. And note the time, of course. Isn’t that enough persuasion for an inspector? You still have to tell the driver that the machines don’t work, the drivers need to be informed.

    Reply
    1. BrooklynBus

      If you read the Post article, it appears that fighting a TAB ticket may be as useless as fighting a PVB ticket. One of the commentators stated he had an unlimited card. If he was able to prove that in court by getting a letter from the MTA stating it was a valid unlimited card at the time of the incident, his ticket should have been dismissed since he really wasn’t evading the fare. Perhaps he had no proof and was just asking the court to believe him.

      Reply
      1. Alon Levy

        In New York everyone must swipe, even if they have an unlimited card. People get tickets for jumping the turnstiles even if they swiped and the turnstile said Please Swipe Again. Where do you think you are, some developed country?

        Reply
        1. BrooklynBus

          The fine is for riding without paying your fare, not for not swiping. If someone has an unlimited card, I don’t see how that can be construed as not paying your fare. I can see how someone who does not swipe can get a summons, but I don’t see how it would stand up in a court of law, unless the court does not believe he has or had an unlimited card.

          Reply
          1. Bolwerk

            I can’t remember if this was done legally or administratively, but policy was deliberately changed around 2004 because (again, can’t remember if common law or administrative) judges were throwing out tickets issued when unlimited pass holders jumped turnstiles because of technical difficulties. Now it’s flat out not allowed.

            Reply

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