Nearly half of New York City bus riders aren’t paying their fares — and the biggest problem with this mass-scale casual theft isn’t the $300 million-plus a year it costs the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.
No, the real crisis is that public contempt for the situation will eventually result in huge cuts to bus service.
Why should taxpayers pay to subsidize a service if riders don’t care enough to chip in?
But this isn’t hard to fix.
You could run a sociology course on all the proffered reasons that 47.8% of riders are now boarding for free, up from about ¼ before the pandemic.
People are poor.
We’ve become anti-social.
Trust in government is low.
Bus service is bad.
Continue reading the entire piece here at the New York Post
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Nicole Gelinas is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor at City Journal. Follow her on Twitter here.
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