Jul 26, 2007 8:15 am US/Eastern
MTA Challenge: Convincing Riders Hike Is Needed
Officials Say Multi-Year Fare Changes Will Bridge Budget Gaps
by Magee Hickey
NEW YORK (CBS) ―
Senior staffers from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority are fanning out at stations across the city Thursday morning to educate commuters about a possible fare hike.
"Where's all the money going?" one commuter asked.
"Working people can only pay so much," another said.
MTA officials are going to have a tough sell Thursday morning trying to convince the city's subway and bus riders, as well as Metro-North and Long Island Rail Road commuters, that they should pay more for a service that most feel is mediocre at best.
The agency says the nation's biggest mass-transit system needs to increase fares to offset a looming budget deficit.
"We face $6 billion of deficits in the next four years," said MTA Executive Directive Elliot Sander, who will be speaking with commuters about the fare hike at Grand Central Terminal Thursday.
But the MTA was $937 million in the black last year, and it has a recent history of claiming to be on the edge of financial disaster, only to report a huge budget surplus at the end of the year.
"As consumers, we don't really know how much they really have," said one rider.
Another added, "I think the service needs to be improved before anything else changes."
Now, MTA officials are painting the potential increases as a way to keep the transit system moving ahead, instead of slipping backward.
"Nobody wants a fare increase," said the MTA's chairman, Peter S. Kalikow. But he said subway riders would rather pay a modest hike than tolerate a return to the days of spotty service and dirty trains.
"We do not want to go back to the 1970s," he said.
The MTA recently embarked upon one of its largest expansion projects in decades.
Specifically, the first increase would be the steepest: A 6.5 percent fare hike next year, and starting in 2010, fare hikes every two years tied to the rate of inflation.
The specific numbers for next year haven't been worked out yet, but the riding public is having a hard time accepting the need for a hike when there's a possible $1 billion surplus expected this year.
But if the 6.5 percent increase were applied across the board, a single bus or subway ride would cost $2.13, up from $2. A drive across the Triborough Bridge would be about $4.80, up from $4.50. A one-way rush hour ticket from Mineola to Manhattan on the Long Island Rail Road would cost $8.79, up from $8.25.
The MTA's board voted Wednesday to begin a series of public hearings on the still-developing proposal. A final decision about hikes won't be made until December.
The fare and toll hike is one of several plans in the works that would make it more expensive to get in and out of the city.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg is continuing to push for a high-tech system that would bill car drivers $8 to enter much of Manhattan, already one of the country's most expensive places to drive.
Much of the revenue of those tolls would be used to fund public transit, although the MTA said it wasn't counting on the money being available soon enough to avoid a fare hike.
New Jersey Transit, which operates trains across the Hudson River, increased fares systemwide by nearly 10 percent in June.
The MTA's proposed fare increases received a mixed response from politicians and public transit advocates.
City Councilman John Liu, who heads the council's transportation committee, called the timing of the proposed hike "awful."
"Before the MTA decides to once again hike transit fares, New Yorkers need to be assured that a thorough top-to-bottom review of potential cost-saving measures has taken place," Liu said in a statement.
Gene Russianoff, a staff lawyer for the Straphangers Campaign, an advocacy group, said a fare hike may, in fact, be needed. The MTA, he said, has taken on a dangerous amount of debt.
The authority is predicting that recent surpluses will turn into a $1.4 billion deficit by 2009 if nothing is done.
Sander said the surplus would evaporate because of increases in employee pension and health care costs, the size of the construction campaign and an expected leveling off of the revenue the MTA receives from the city's real estate transfer tax.
(© 2007 CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.)
