The MTA is all talk on all-door bus boarding.
MTA Chairman and CEO Janno Lieber said on Wednesday that he still has no interest in letting customers board his buses more efficiently by using all doors — the latest episode in a years-long resistance by Lieber that is motivated by concerns about fare evasion.
Wednesday's remarks come even as the agency acknowledges that all-door boarding has reduced dwell times on some Select Bus Service routes by 40 percent.
In March 2022, the MTA Chairman announced that the previously scheduled all-door boarding pilot was shelved. A year later, Lieber again dismissed calls to turn on the already-installed back-of-the-bus OMNY readers.
This time Lieber's opposition is driven by what he says has been payment-related confusion for bus riders. Is it that confusing? You be the judge: In 2008, the MTA introduced Select Bus Service, which allowed riders on those routes to pay before boarding the bus and then enter through any door. Then, during COVID, fares were waived entirely and riders could board through the back door in order to avoid breathing on bus drivers. Eventually, fares were restored, but in 2024, the MTA created a completely free line in each of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx.
"I'm not going to confuse New Yorkers more with having different rules," said Lieber. "That's one of the disadvantages of this one-off free bus thing, that everybody's continuing to be confused. The reason there's a sign on the front that says 'fare required' is that there are too many things which have confused people. One of them was the SBS system. Then COVID came and we said, 'Don't pay, get on the back.' And then we had the free busses that they heard about and they weren't sure which bus was free.
"We're going to stop confusing the riders and we're going to start enforcing fare payment, that's the goal. And I'll take my lumps on the back door in the meantime," he added.
Lieber also said he wanted to wait until bus fare evasion rate was lower than the current 44 percent. But he didn't say what level of fare evasion number would make him comfortable with introducing all-door boarding to even a handful of bus lines across the system.
The agency's own good work is undercutting Lieber's stubbornness to explore the idea. Previously, the MTA big boss had said that even doing an all-door boarding pilot would be unfair to people using Reduced Fare, Fair Fares and student MetroCards because less than half of all bus rides taken in the city were full-fare trips and the agency had not made discount trips easily accessible with OMNY.
But since then, those fare groups have been integrated into OMNY, and MTA President of Construction and Development Jamie Torres-Springer gave a presentation on Monday that specifically highlighted the progress the agency had made with the new fare collection system in the last few months.
"On Friday, we mailed out the one-millionth Reduced Fare OMNY card, with the remaining 500,000 expected to be mailed out in the next two weeks," said Torres-Springer. "We're approaching the point where every fare class and group will be able to use OMNY seamlessly."
New York wouldn't be taking a leap of faith by instituting the system on its bus routes, as all door boarding is a well-known policy used in backwaters like San Francisco, Paris, Oslo, Copenhagen and Berlin.
Bus riders are of course, already getting on via the back door on local and limited buses, which is why advocates are continuing to say the MTA should work in the real world and at least give people the option to pay there.
"Like it or not, especially when the bus is crowded, riders are going to board through the back door," said Riders Alliance Director of Policy and Communication Danny Pearlstein. "Making it official will help the MTA collect more fares and speed up service. It's not confusing, it's just the reality of the situation."
