MTA v SEPTA

NYC's MTA is reducing fares from Thanksgiving through New Year's Day.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority yesterday laid out a plan so unexpected that it left even the authority's most hardened critics dumbfounded: lowering subway and bus fares.

The fare reduction will, alas, be temporary. The authority intends to reduce the base fare by half - to $1 - on weekends between Thanksgiving and New Year's Day and throughout the last week of December, using part of an unforeseen surplus that could reach $928 million by the end of the year.

An unforseen surplus of nearly $1B!?!? WHAT THE FUCK!?!?

How in the fuck did that happen? According to the article, "The surplus is mostly attributable to unexpectedly high real estate taxes and low interest rates." Wow.

Meanwhile, SEPTA's rates are gonna rise and they want to fuck over their workers while their managers [I hear that the ratio of managers to workers is an absurd 1:1] live nice and fat.

MTA 1 SEPTA -1

Comments

[acm]

Yeah, a number of years back they had a blue-ribbon commission make recommendations for how to increase ridership, income, and general system health, and the #1 recommendation was to cut fares -- many studies had shown that you would increase ridership by more than enough to make up the difference (and that's not counting the value of a greater support base for expansion or other issues). A couple of months later they raise fares.

sigh.

I sympathize with the fact that it's hard to make an apparent cut in your revenue stream when you're already operating in the red, but surely at some point it's worth some semi-brave person's taking a leap of faith (?!) in the science...