The MTA is Finally Checking Fares Without Stopping Buses
The wheels on the bus go ’round and ’round, even during fare checks.
MTA bus fare enforcement “EAGLE teams” have begun to conduct some fare inspections on moving buses — departing from the MTA’s longstanding, frustrating practice of forcing riders to wait on stopped buses while fare inspectors check one-by-one if they paid.
“EAGLE teams … are also piloting giving summonses electronically, and part of the pilot will be doing it both while the bus is in motion, as well as what it takes to take people off [the bus],” MTA New York City Transit President Demtrius Crichlow said on Wednesday.
“Our goal at the end is to be able to say, here’s the data tied to both sides, can we do it successfully with a bus in motion?”
EAGLE teams consist of unarmed officers who stop buses, check fares on buses and give summonses to riders who haven’t paid.
For years, the teams have stopped buses in their tracks to check fares and pull off scofflaws. But MTA Chairman and CEO Janno Lieber finally teased the possibility of “European-style” bus fare validation last year — nearly a decade after MTA leaders announced plans to bring a digital “modern fare payment system” to the Big Apple.
The MTA still has technology kinks work out when it comes to moving fare checks, however.
OMNY has been notorious for charges showing up hours or even days after people tapped to pay with their card or phone. The MTA claimed to have taken care of that issue, but frustrations persist with the fare-checking tech employed by EAGLE teams.
Lindsay Parme, a professor at Brooklyn College, told Streetsblog that EAGLE team officers removed her and two others from the B44 earlier this month even though they’d all paid. Parme, who has to go to a hearing to prove she paid, said the officer told her the MTA’s system doesn’t always update to include an immediate payment from a phone or card.
“[The officer] was acting like it’s a minor inconvenience, but I just got off work, and now I have the stress every time I go to Brooklyn College that this going to happen to me, and I’m going to be late for teaching,” she said. “People who are are falsely accused that have set schedules, that have kids can’t spend the hours to fight their ticket.”
Lieber, who took over the agency in 2021, has insisted that “European-style” practices like moving fare checks and all-door bus boarding — an adjacent OMNY-related policy that also speeds up buses — depend on full OMNY implementation, since the MTA has no way to check if MetroCard users have paid. The MTA stopped selling MetroCards at the end of 2025, but riders can still use them to pay their fares, and officials have not said when that will change.
Generally, European transit agencies allow fare checks on moving buses and simply hand ticket to anyone who hasn’t paid. Other American transit agencies, such as San Francisco’s MUNI buses and Indianapolis’s IndyGo bus rapid transit, have similar policies to ensure riders can get where they’re going in a timely fashion, advocates noted.
“There’s a pretty clear preference for keeping vehicles moving during fare inspections, for obvious reasons,” said Effective Transit Alliance Executive Director Blair Lorenzo. “Both speed and reliability are key factors that drive ridership, and random, unpredictable stops to inspect everyone on a bus obviously harms both.”
Riders Alliance Digital Strategist Derrick Holmes recently tweeted that fare inspectors who boarded his B44 stopped the bus for five minutes to check if every rider paid. In response, MTA spokesperson Tim Minton claimed that Transport for London fare inspectors do the same thing, while noting that the United Kingdom is technically no longer part of Europe.
Minton wasn’t completely off-base with his observation that TfL sometimes stops buses to check fares, but the British capital’s “primary tactic” is to conduct checks without impacting service, according to officials across the pond.
“The primary tactic used by enforcement teams on the bus network is to carry out manual checks of all passengers on board while the bus continues its journey,” TfL spokesperson Sarika Patel told Streetsblog. “Targeted, intelligence‑led operations are also conducted. These include static checks, where buses are held at a stop so officers can check passengers have paid for their journey. These checks are designed to cause minimum delay to the service.”
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