As New York city and the MTA continue the painfully slow rollout of Select Bus Service offerings and pre-boarding fare payment systems, recurring problems are popping up. New York 1’s Tina Redwine yesterday produced a story on SBS riders getting summonses through no faults of their own. It’s a familiar tale: A rider holding a 30-day MetroCard finds that both SBS ticket machines are broken, boards the bus and receives a summons. “I am upset, because as a paying MTA customer, I should not be subjected to a $100 summons when I have proof I didn’t steal services that I’m being accused of stealing,” Aaron Goldberg, one of the riders highlighted, said.
The MTA isn’t too sympathetic to these plights. While authority officials said the summonses would likely be dropped and admitted that the machines were out of order, the folks who were ticketed on the Upper East Side still have to appear before the Transit Adjudication Board in Brooklyn. But that strikes me as an unfair result. The MTA’s proof-of-payment system is an antiquated one that relies on paper confirmation. If the authority isn’t going to stock the paper machines in a timely fashion so that people can board without risking a summons, something has to give. Goldberg and others are getting ticketing for being victims of the MTA’s own shortcomings.
38 comments
Who gets to keep the fines? Dont you realize there is an incentive to keep the machines broken?
I hope you were saying that with tungue & cheek.
Can you get a receipt when you buy your monthly card? That could be presented as proof to the checkers. What exactly is the checkers title and under what authority do they issue tickets?
I have an employee pass and have yet to ride SBS. Frankly I’m afraid I would get a ticket because the letter of the law says you’re supposed to swipe in every time you enter “the property”. It’s the sort of thing I expect when dealing with the TA.
Wouldn’t you get an SBS receipt when you swipe your pass at the ticket machine? I don’t think showing your pass to a checker would get you out of a ticket.
Who are the inspectors? What is their title? Have they just been hired? Are they part timers?
So a NYCTA employee pass is no good on SBS? You are retired TA, right? Do you know this for sure?
Your pass is valid at the curb machine. (I’ve watched employees use their passes successfully.)
Whether an inspector would let you go if you showed a pass but didn’t have a receipt, I can’t say. So get a receipt and you’ll be fine.
You need a receipt no matter what. A pass is sufficient to get a receipt.
Somebody with a monthly pass should be able to tag and go at the machine (if even that). The fare inspectors not being able to electronically verify a pass on their metrocard is unforgivable.
I’m Aaron from the NY1 report. I still have to appear in front of the Transit Adjudication Board and I haven’t heard anything from the MTA. It’s amazing that they admit that I shouldn’t have gotten the summons and still are requiring that I show up. I’m wondering if they can also call my boss and explain why I’ll be out of work or if they can pay me the wages I won’t be getting for the day. If this is how they treat customers, I’d hate to be actually caught evading the fare. If anyone out there had advice, feel free.
Hi Aaron, I’m fighting an SBS summons right now, and although I didn’t have my ticket at the time, I submitted proof that my fare was paid by submitting my metrocard serial number and it showed that I had just paid the fare less than 1/2 hour before I got the summons, but they still found me guilty and fined me. I’m trying to fight it, but it is such a tangled weave. Anyone have any suggestions on which court to go to to fight the unfair decision? Thanks
This happened to me, minus the summons. I put my Metrocard in and it printed… nothing. It didn’t even say out of service. The other TVM was broken as well. I reluctantly boarded, only because several other passengers were there and told me they spoke with someone from the MTA who had “radioed in” to security that the TVMs were broken there.
Even so, one stop later, I quickly got out and tried to get a receipt only to see the JUST USED message. I made it to 42nd St. without security raiding the bus, but if they had, I imagine the “radio message” would’ve meant nothing and I would have ended up at TAB.
I don’t see how the TAB is legal, by the way. From what I’ve read, they don’t even offer interpreters, so how is that letting somebody defend themselves?
Philip, TAB now offers interpreters free of charge in every language via the AT&T Language Line, thanks in part to intervention by the New York Civil Liberties Union.
TAB is also open to the public like any criminal court– a ruling from the Second Circuit last month reaffirmed this fundamental First Amendment right. See http://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-.....74819.html.
If anyone has due process concerns at TAB, I encourage you to contact NYCLU.
Great way to roll out a new service, customer focused as always!
The machines should be really be foolproof and functioning 99.9% of the time. There must be technology that would prevent these from breaking and a system to make sure they always have paper.
Meanwhile, thousands of riders jump the turnstile or downright refuse to pay fares by brazenly walking on buses in all five boros. But the MTA “police” troll the M15 because they know most of the riders are middle class and going to/from work. Why not giive them a ticket, they can afford the fine. But thugs riding free hundreds of times a year get a free pass. This city is getting ridiculous.
POP doesn’t work without inspectors. There are inspectors assigned specifically to SBS. (They are not police.)
SBS is also in effect on the Bx12. Next year it will also be running on the B44. Time to stop the classism, perhaps?
So how many fines are handed out at Fordham Road on the “D” train? Why don’t these “inspectors” stand near the front on the S40 bus on Staten Island, where thugs routinely walk on without so much as trying to show their Metrocard (if indeed, they’ve ever bought one)? It’s not classism if riders with no class at all routinely steal $2.25 a pop thousands of times a day while people who pay by the rules get hauled into court and fined $100.
Because the inspectors do SBS. The subway and regular buses don’t do POP.
Glad somebody can read. For a minute I thought I was writing in a foreign language.
That makes little sense but it shows the ineptitude of the MTA bueracracy on an immediate level
I thought the fare inspectors were restricted to SBS by statute.
And regardless, the Transit Police merged into the NYPD in the 1990s. There are no inspectors on the subway, though they do eagerly await turnstile jumpers at many stations.
http://www.mta.info/nyct/sbs/sbs_payM15.htm – scroll down to the bottom: “If a machine is not working, please board the bus and tell the bus operator.”
Even if you’re not aware of the policy, that seems like a common-sense approach. The bus operator can call in the machine and give further instructions – and, more importantly, can inform the inspector that one of the upstream stops had broken machines, so that, if he has any sense, he won’t ticket people who boarded at that stop.
The inspector, unfortunately, has no way of knowing what’s encoded on the magnetic strip of your MetroCard. To him it’s just a piece of plastic.
“The inspector, unfortunately, has no way of knowing what’s encoded on the magnetic strip of your MetroCard. To him it’s just a piece of plastic.”
…And that’s the core problem. These machines should become irrelevant with the next generation fare payment method. In London, for example, the Docklands Light Railway is POP and the inspector just holds your Oyster Card up to his device.
American transit agencies, unfortunately, have little sense too. 😐
MTA Customer service at work.
I’m fallen victim to this, and I wouldn’t put it past the organization to schedule inspections on the days when the machines are not working.
Not to excuse the MTA for failing to provide working machines, but I don’t have much sympathy for people who fail to alert the bus operator when they board and take their chances. If you had a problem with the card mechanism at a ‘pay at the pump’ gas station, would you just think to yourself ‘Oh well, I tried’ and drive off? No – you would go inside and alert the attendant. The bus operator functions in the same role – he or she is a an MTA representative and should be alerted to the problem.
The driver was alerted and aware of the situation. At the next stop, only one of the machines was working. At least 25 people waiting for a receipt. Driver advises passengers to not get off the bus because of overcrowding. You going to get off the bus and wait on a line stretching all the way to down 1st Ave to 14th street?
If that’s the procedure, then the procedure is messed up.
The driver should inform the inspector that the machines at (name stop here) are out of order. Then when the inspector encounters someone without a receipt, ask where he boarded. If he gives the correct answer, he gets to ride free.
Or, if that’s too ripe for abuse, dispense transfers from the farebox to each person who boards, and note the time. Then inform the inspector that a transfer stamped with the appropriate time (give or take a few minutes) should be treated as a valid receipt.
But making people get off the bus at the next stop to pay is unacceptable. It’s a major inconvenience, and it either delays service or forces those riders to wait for another bus. And what happens if the inspectors are waiting to pounce at the next stop?
As someone who rides the m15 5x+ a week, that is indeed the procedure. You tell the (often non-responsive) drive that the machines are busted, and then he (sometimes) tells everyone to get off at the next stop to get their receipts. Of course it’s a 50 person line there and he immediately pulls off and you have to go to work, but hey! go MTA!
If the driver told you to stay on the bus despite not having proof of payment, did you or any of the other passengers insist that the inspector talk to the driver to confirm your story?
Though the inspectors have no way to look at your metro card, they should. The better implementation should be for the inspectors to swipe your card and see if it was used instead of wasting paper and having to rely on the machines being properly serviced and stocked. Further if a person has an unlimited they should allow the swipe to occur then and since they wouldn’t be looking at receipts a person couldn’t be trying to get multiple riders on with their card. One of the great things about having a monthly on say metro north is that you don’t need to buy a ticket before boarding, but rather you can just get on. The final change I would make to their system is to put a fare collection machine onboard, they do this in Melbourne for their light rail, essentially everyone board and the light rail goes while people use the machine, this has a few advantages, first these machines can receive regular maintenance much more easily, second they allow people to hop on, and thirdly they allow for when machines are broken at stops for fares to still be collected. Of course if a person gets caught not having paid (if all they have is a none unlimited metro card) they should be fined and not given a chance to use the machine.
Remember, the MTA likes it when people buy unlimited, regardless of racist and classcist the pricing schemes work out to being.
You know, a lot of New York’s transportation problems would be solved if the MTA were as competent as Australian operators. Didn’t Melbourne manage to increase its transit mode share by, like, 4 percentage points over the decade while New York’s mode share stayed constant?
I thought New York City’s share grew. New York’s metro area’s did not.
That would be the ideal system, but Cubic (the proprietary MetroCard vendor) doesn’t produce portable MetroCard readers. If the MetroCard system were going to be around for a while, it would make sense to design such a reader – but MetroCard is on its way out in a few years.
You will get what you want when smartcards come along.
The alternative would have been delaying SBS entirely until after the smartcard system is fully deployed.
[…] the tale from last week of Aaron Goldberg? He was the man ticketed on a Select Bus Service bus because he had no proof of payment due to the MTA’s faulty equipment. Today, NY1 has a follow up, and Goldberg’s tale, at […]
Allan Rosen of the Commute blog has written about the SBS:
http://www.sheepsheadbites.com.....more-20313
The MTA is planning to roll out SBS on the B44 Nostrand Avenue route in Brooklyn, and Rosen has some great questions about punishing riders with summons for broken fare machines:
http://www.sheepsheadbites.com.....t-and-mta/
I got a summons this week, when one of two machines was broken. A line of people formed in front of the single working machine. I was faced with the choice of being late for work or getting a summons, when I already have an unlimited monthly MetroCard. If you ride the BX12 regularly, you know that broken fare machines are routine. On top of the $100 fine, I must lose a day and miss work to go down to the TAB in Brooklyn to tussle with bureaucracy.
The summons and broken fare machines are a cash cow for the MTA — Woe to the poor rider who has to take the SBS, the least reliable and most punishing route.