Nearly half of New York City’s two million bus riders evaded paying fares over the last three months, a pattern that helps explain why the MTA reportedly hemorrhaged over $300 million due to bus freeloaders in the last year.
Law-abiding New Yorkers will pay for this type of revenue loss in the form of fare hikes and tax increases.
But just deploying more NYPD officers and fare-enforcement agents to combat fare evasion — as the transit authority announced last month they will do — won’t fix the problem.
Until Albany amends the 2020 “discovery law,” the actual consequences for farebeating won’t be enough to convince delinquents to cough up the $2.90 per ride.
In the state of New York, prosecuting “minor” crimes, like fare evasion, has become impossible under discovery reform, which advantages offenders often insurmountably.
Importantly, this is separate from the explicit policies for declining to prosecute fare evasion that district attorneys in Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Bronx have adopted since 2017.
Continue reading the entire piece here at the New York Post
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Hannah Meyers is director of the policing and public safety initiative at the Manhattan Institute.
Photo by Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images
