MTA Will Now Give You Money You Can’t Use
The official numbers are out for the MTA’s new fare hike proposal, which keeps the base fare (which nobody but tourists actually pays) at $2.00 and raises the cost of a monthly pass (which most regular riders of the subway actually use) by 6.6%.
But those in-betweeners - the ones who criticized me earlier for saying that you’d be stupid to pay-per-ride - the ones who use the subway regularly, but not enough to get monthly passes - are also going to get screwed by the fare hike. Currently, if you put $10 or more on a Metrocard, you get a 20% bonus. In other words, if you pay $10 for a Metrocard, you get a $12 Metrocard. The MTA, looking to screw all New Yorkers instead of just some of them, has decided to reduce the amount of the bonus from 20% to 15%. Looking to save the day, they say the trade-off is that the bonus will now kick in if you put $7 or more on your Metrocard.
If you pay $7 for a Metrocard, you get an $8.05 Metrocard.
Five cents! Great! What can you do with that five cents on the MTA? Nothing. That extra will sit on your Metrocard as long as you have it. If you want that spare change to amount to something worthwhile - the cost of a ride - you’ll have to fill up your Metrocard forty times with $7.
With the new fare hike, in order to get a free ride with the new bonus, you will have to put at least $13.30 on a Metrocard. That’s up from $10. That’s a 33% increase in the cost to get a bonus ride.
To add insult to injury, if you want to ask questions about this in the MTA’s “Public Engagement Webinar” today, you better be brief in your questioning. Your question or comment is limited to 256 characters - barely enough to even begin to describe the problems with their new proposal.
As usual, the MTA is looking to screw us in every way humanly possible.
This entry was posted on Monday, December 10th, 2007 at 11:20 am and is filed under Subway Stupidity. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
December 10th, 2007 at 11:39 am
Sarah says:Okay, Chris, I’m going to point out the one line of reasoning that supports the MTA approach, and you can do with it what you will.
Regular commuters, like you and me, presumably have jobs. In fact, we probably have jobs that offer eTrac. Who are the single-ride ticket buyers? (1) Random tourists (who I agree should be soaked without mercy to compensate for the fact that I can’t go shopping around my job at lunchtime due to the hordes of slack-jawed gawkers) and (2) people whose budgets don’t allow them to tie up $76 at a time–the lowest-income people in the city. If you ask who is more able to bear a fare increase, the monthly-pass commuters (with eTrac, a raise of $5 is effectively only $3, mind you) or the cleaning staff trying to get from their apartments in Queens into Midtown to clean up after us, it’s got to be the former.
The percentage changes on the bonuses still make no sense, though.
December 10th, 2007 at 11:46 am
lozo says:you know what the MTA needs? a facebook page.
December 10th, 2007 at 11:57 am
Chris says:Sarah: Your item (2), people with limited budgets, are mostly buying Metrocards with a bonus on them. And my point is that they’re getting screwed now, too. Considering just how many people buy those monthly passes, I can’t imagine there aren’t a lot whose own budgets are pushed to the limit already, and will soon be stretched even more.
December 10th, 2007 at 12:10 pm
Chris says:lozo: OMG, like, totally. I’d post on its wall every day! We’d be, like, BFFs!
December 10th, 2007 at 1:11 pm
Ryan says:This has my blood boiling. Is there any sort of live forum that I can go to, besides the webinar, where I can look someone in the eyes and put some serious fear of bodily harm into these people?
December 10th, 2007 at 1:52 pm
Todd says:I think The MTA doesn’t give a shit. Live forum, web forum, meetings, or whatever.