Admin
What an insult to the law-abiding: The MTA’s taking a look at fare hikes over 5% to protect present service ranges — however the added burden on paying straphangers is lower than half what the system is shedding to farebeaters.
The will increase — 15 cents on a single ride, $1 on a weekly move and $5 on a month-to-month — ought to usher in about $305 million a 12 months.
Farebeaters stole round $690 million last year, an outrageous quantity and up $190 million from the 12 months earlier than. (The breakdown: $285 million on buses, $315 million on the subway.)
It’s onerous in charge MTA chief Janno Lieber or the company’s board: They’ve received plans to scale back farebeating (which drives Lieber completely bonkers) in the long term, and the Legislature and gov within the new state price range simply ordered the MTA to up its earnings from fares and tolls by $300 million a 12 months.
The actual villains listed below are, after all, the farebeaters themselves — and extra so their enablers within the soft-on-crime crowd.
We proceed to fault then-Manhattan DA Cy Vance’s 2017 transfer to largely cease prosecuting farebeating, which most different DAs ultimately adopted.
It was plainly an effort to appease the left (which failed; he nonetheless wound up not working for re-election).
At the identical time, progressives within the Legislature and City Council (with the cooperation of then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo and then-Mayor Bill de Blasio) started a number of silly strikes on prison justice and policing.
Crime and dysfunction began rising pre-COVID — then the lockdowns incubated a drastic rise in criminality.
And New York’s legislators nonetheless haven’t modified their soft-on-crime tune.
People who pay the fare having to fork over extra as a result of so many others aren’t is just one outrageous piece of what common New Yorkers must pay for this insanity.
Lieber fumes that farebeating “tears on the social cloth.” That holds for each “reform” the progressives inflict — and never simply on crime.
