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Fare evasion on buses is at a five-year high, and the MTA fears the cure may be worse than the disease.
Last year, the MTA instructed drivers on local buses to keep the rear doors closed unless passengers are getting off. The move was part of an effort to deter fare evasion, but also meant that the OMNY readers the MTA finished installing at the rear doors of local buses in 2020 are effectively useless. The agency still hasn’t turned them on.
New York City Transit President Richard Davey implied in December that the agency might allow rear-door boarding on local buses if more people used OMNY.
“That’s our focus right now, ensuring that folks have the ability to pay in that back door and about a third or less of our customers right now on [the] bus are using OMNY,” he said.
That’s a far cry from 2021, when the MTA said all-door boarding on buses was “one of the most anticipated features” of OMNY.
But recent statistics show many bus riders aren’t using OMNY – or any other payment method.
The MTA says it lost an estimated $315 million in bus fares in 2022. MTA Chair Janno Lieber has called fare evasion “an existential threat to providing public transit.”
Yet the agency refuses to turn on the OMNY readers on local buses, a measure that would make it easier for riders to actually pay the fare.
“All-door boarding works on the subway… and should be turned on tomorrow on every local bus in the city,” Danny Pearlstein, a spokesperson for the transit advocacy group Riders Alliance, wrote in an email. “What better way to encourage bus riders to start using OMNY than to open up the OMNY-only back door for faster boarding and speedier overall trips?”
The MTA’s experience with Select…
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