MTA Chair Open To New Fare Structure Ahead Of 2027 Fare Hike
MTA Chairman and CEO Janno Lieber revealed a newfound interest in expanding his agency’s current fare-capping practices — marking the first time the transit boss has looked beyond OMNY’s sole option of a rolling weekly fare cap.
“We engage in a pretty detailed process with our board to study different fare approaches, and we’ve just started that,” Lieber said on Tuesday following an appearance in front of the Citizens Budget Commission. “There [are] different ways to use the technology that we have now,” he added, emphasizing the MTA’s wish to attract more passengers with an “equity oriented fare structure.”
The MTA currently provides every rider with the same and somewhat confusing fare structure: Take 12 subway or bus rides, and every subsequent ride within seven days of the first ride is completely free. The agency’s lack of any other payment structure, such as a monthly fare for unlimited rides, sets it apart from international peers that allow transit riders to get free rides after a maximum number of rides in a daily or monthly period.
In the past, Lieber has backed the agency’s move from prepaid MetroCards to the tap-and-go OMNY system as a way to avoid asking people to pay large sums of money upfront for an unlimited weekly or monthly card that they might not wind up using every day.
“There was something fundamentally inequitable about saying to people if you want a monthly, give me one hundred-plus dollars — that was unfair to a lot of people who don’t have cash in their pocket every day,” Lieber told reporters at a July press conference this year. “And even [with] a weekly — people were faced with the choice of, do I have the money in my pocket every day? We’re confident that this is the right way to go, to give people automatic discounts rather than asking them to prepay the MTA money and take a chance that they’re wasting money.”
But Lieber’s Tuesday comments heartened transit advocates who have called on the MTA to adopt a more flexible fare-capping scheme and reintroduce single-day and monthly fare caps.
“A 30-day fare cap is something we’ve heard a lot about,” said PCAC Executive Director Lisa Daglian. “We did a survey last year, but also in conversations with regular riders, from folks who just talk about how much it would mean to them to be able to count on a monthly discount.”
Lieber’s remarks come as the MTA is looking to shore up its budget as farebox revenue inches towards pre-pandemic levels and paid ridership on the bus and subway still sag beneath the highs of the mid-2010s. The agency is planning to raise the price of a transit trip in 2027 as part of its schedule of bi-annual fare hikes. That timeline makes the waning months of 2026 the ideal time to consider how to best tweak the fare structure to encourage ridership and support the operating budget.
Discounts encourage transit use, said Daglian, who pointed to an uptick in seniors riding the Long Island Rail Road once they could use their senior discounts on morning peak trains and a 38-percent increase in the use of the family fare on the LIRR when the MTA raised the included age covered by the discount from 12 to 17.
“It’s never too soon to start thinking about how fares can serve riders best,” she added. “We’ve seen that discounts help to attract people. We have seen that when you make it easier for people to ride, they’re going to ride. When you make it more affordable for people to ride, they’re going to ride.”
Daglian encouraged the agency to offer better transfer options, such as allowing people who take a transit trip that requires two transfers to get both transfers for free instead of just the first transfer.
In addition to talking about the MTA’s budget and other future plans at the CBC gathering, Lieber also told the assembled crowd of machers and poobahs that he had his first face-to-face meeting with Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy earlier this month, when the MTA boss was part of a delegation to Washington, DC with the American Public Transit Association. Lieber said he asked the erstwhile shit-talker of public transit to remove tariffs from components used by American manufacturers to build buses and rail cars, by noting that the import taxes dilute the efficacy of federal assistance that pays for rolling stock.
Lieber added that he and other transit executives asked Duffy to refrain from describing public transit as an unending nightmare hellscape.
“We were all talking to him about the same thing, which is, he’s been hard on not just New York but other major transit systems about the issue of safety,” he said. “We were all saying to him: here are the facts, here are the investments that are being made, here’s the progress that has been made. Maybe we could stop portraying transit systems as hellscapes from Death Wish or Escape from New York or some outdated Hollywood vision. He did hear it very politely.”
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