A somewhat elusive statistic is not likely to get much attention when the board of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority convenes Wednesday morning for its monthly session. Nonetheless, it is an intriguing number.

THE DAY Clyde Haberman offers his take on the news.

It even has a name, if an unwieldy one: farebox operating ratio. In recognizable English, this metric calculates the cost of running a mass transit system and the portion of it that riders pay with their coins and MetroCard swipes. For the city’s subway and bus passengers, who have seen government purse strings draw ever tighter at every level, the burden is high. The authority’s budget makers had expected it to clock in this year at 54 percent of overall costs. Instead, it is running at 64 percent.

That figure comes from a report prepared by the authority’s finance committee. It was brought to my attention by the ever-vigilant Gene Russianoff of the Straphangers Campaign, an advocacy group. It did not escape Mr. Russianoff’s notice that the comparable percentages are appreciably lower for suburban rail lines and the authority’s other divisions.

Not only that, but the burden is also lighter for subway and bus riders in other American cities. Statistics kept by the Federal Transit Administration put it in the range of 20 to 45 percent in Boston, Chicago, Atlanta, Philadelphia and Washington. For New Yorkers, the percentage has risen and fallen. It soared as high as 88 percent back in 1997.

Does the number mean much? Arguably, yes.

It is an indication of how energetically, or listlessly, government subsidizes mass transit, which cannot survive solely on receipts at the turnstile unless fares are raised to nosebleed-inducing levels. By the way, a fair number of turnstiles don’t work so well. Records show that chances are one in five that passengers must swipe their MetroCards more than once.

In New York, government subsidies have atrophied, and taxes dedicated to transit are not yielding as much revenue as originally hoped. And so the share of costs that fall on riders has grown.

No doubt, some would say it is only fair that those who use the system should be the ones who pay for it. But many people benefit from mass transit even if they never see the inside of a subway car.

A sound transportation network is essential for stores that want customers and for companies that expect employees to show up on time. It is vital as well for those who would practically give up an arm before giving up their cars. Traffic jams would be worse than ever if a transit system were so hopeless that it turned brigades of subway and bus riders into drivers.

There is an alternative to these concerns, though not everyone can take advantage of it for the daily commute. It’s called walking.

On that score, a Washington-based group called Transportation for America — focused on transportation policies, as the name suggests — issued a report on Wednesday that showed the New York region to be among the safest sections of the country for pedestrians.

(Word also came on Wednesday that Orlando, Fla., had beaten New York in the race to become the first city to attract 50 million visitors in a year. It might be noted that the transportation report identified the Orlando-Kissimmee area as the most dangerous for pedestrians. Just saying.)

The report did have some unhappy news for New Yorkers. Though traffic deaths here have declined significantly in the past decade, when fatal accidents do occur, pedestrians are more likely to be the victims than they are in other cities. That finding is supported by recent data from the city’s Transportation Department showing that 56 percent of traffic deaths in the city last year — 151 out of 269 — were people on foot.

This is hardly an argument against walking. But taking the subway, under-subsidized though it is, may in fact be safer.

For full local Times coverage, including the property-tax cap, the upstate upset in a special Congressional election with bad national implications for Republicans, one reporter’s own census of city blocks where the Census Bureau missed dozens of residents and another reporter’s experiment in illegal smoking, see the N.Y./Region section.

Here’s what City Room is reading in other papers and blogs this morning.

On Day 1 of the park smoking ban, no tickets were issued. [Daily News]

Beneficiaries of ticket-fixing include A-Rod, the late George Steinbrenner. And while Jay-Z may have 99 problems, his driver’s receiving a speeding ticket was not one. [Daily News]

Tickets to bicyclists, meanwhile, are up 48 percent so far this year. [New York Post]

Swarming bees shut down the busy intersection of Flatbush Avenue and Fulton Street in Brooklyn. [Fort Greene Local]

A Brooklyn man somehow convicted of assault charges that had already been dismissed was freed from prison after more than four years. [WABC-TV, Daily News]

For the 10th time since last year, a patient had possessions stolen at Methodist Hospital in Park Slope. [Brooklyn Paper]

A whirlwind tour of the city’s oldest hardware stores and their vintage signage. [Ephemeral New York]

The widow of Yankees pitcher Cory Lidle lost a lawsuit claiming that his fatal light-plane crash was caused by mechanical failure. [Daily News]

The feds broke up a multimillion-dollar gambling ring launched from a Staten Island strip-mall video store. [Staten Island Advance]

A holiday weekend guide to under-$4-a-gallon gas in the city. [Daily News]

And a look at that springtime city-waterway perennial, the floating corpse. [Wall Street Journal]