The MTA’s False Fare Evasion Narrative Harold Stolper January 29th, 2020

The MTA has been pushing a false fare evasion narrative. The narrative goes like this: fare evasion is on the rise, and there is no excuse for it. Fare evasion is costing the MTA inordinate amounts of money. The “problem” of fare evasion can be policed away.

No credible evidence supports this narrative. The MTA released slides showing fare evasion rising to historically high levels on subways and even more so on buses. But their survey data doesn’t pass the sniff test. The MTA’s own Inspector General cited numerous serious flaws, along with an MTA staffer’s assessment that the survey was never intended to be an “official analysis whose results would formally [be] reported to the MTA Board or considered a robust and reliable estimate of revenue loss.” Yet that’s exactly what happened: the MTA has used this survey to claim they would lose nearly $300 million in revenue in 2019, even though no credible basis for that claim has been presented to the public. Fare evasion is clearly happening, but the MTA does not know how much it’s costing them in lost revenue.

Fare evasion can’t be policed away, since the NYPD can’t solve poverty and can’t improve fare collection systems, two of the major drivers of fare evasion. We might not have credible fare evasion data from the MTA, but we still know that fare evasion is in large part “a function of poverty and inconvenience.” People arrested for fare evasion rely on public defenders, a pretty good sign they are struggling to make ends meet. And most New Yorkers can share their own stories about how inconvenient it can be to pay the fare—at times nearly impossible—thanks to chronically broken MetroCard machines, broken MetroCard readers, bus stops with no MetroCard machines and limited nearby vendors, limited rollout of contactless payment options, and double-charging at transfer stations.

The press gives legs to the narrative that we have a fare evasion problem by writing about the MTA’s claims. Riders see dehumanizing ads on subways warning against fare evasion. The police keep criminalizing struggling New Yorkers at the turnstile. The fare evasion “problem” is seared into the public consciousness. And then appointed MTA board members authorize a budget with hundreds of millions in funding to try to police away a fare evasion problem that we’re not sure exists to begin with and can’t be addressed by police.

So what is really happening? In the absence of credible data on fare evasion, we have to work with data on fare evasion enforcement—which the NYPD has long fought to withhold. As a workaround, our previous research on the topic used client data from public defenders in Brooklyn. We found disproportionately high fare evasion arrest rates at high-poverty subway stations in predominantly black neighborhoods compared to high-poverty Latinx and white neighborhoods.

Finally, a new NYPD dataset gives us an opportunity to analyze where subway fare evasion is enforced systemwide, including both arrests and summonses, and to learn more about the nature of the real socioeconomic problems playing out at the turnstile.

We got this data only after a prolonged legal battle with the NYPD to provide the transparency they are required to by law. After our previous research documenting racially biased enforcement, the Community Service Society and City Council Member Rory Lancman sued the NYPD to publicly release information on subway fare evasion enforcement for every station, as required by Local Law 147. The NYPD has gone to great lengths to prevent the public from learning about where they are enforcing fare evasion. The data analyzed here comes from a court order requiring the NYPD to comply with a Freedom of Information Act request, which they had previously ignored for months.

What follows is a first read of our findings, with more analysis to come.

We used this new data to analyze the subway stations—and by extension surrounding neighborhoods—where fare evasion enforcement occurred during the fourth quarter of 2017 and first quarter of 2018. While this period is before the public face of any fare evasion crackdown began, this data allows us to identify 24,788 subway fare evasion enforcement actions over this period. This includes 19,512 summonses and 5,276 arrests. (The NYPD has yet to release any data on bus fare evasion enforcement.)

We compute a measure of enforcement intensity for each subway station over this six-month period: combined summonses and arrests at a station divided by half of 2018 annual ridership at that station (ridership refers to the number of riders who enter the subway system, henceforth referred to as the number of “swipes” for shorthand). This is a measure of fare evasion enforcement relative to ridership, not relative to actual fare evasion, since that has not been measured.

Subway station areas are defined to include census tracts for which the geographic center falls within 0.6km of a given station. This radius was chosen as the minimum distance necessary to get demographics for every subway station, with the exception of Mets-Willets Point and Broad Channel, which are excluded from the station-level analysis. Demographic data comes from the 2018 5-year American Community Survey. In order to look at the relationship between racial/ethnic neighborhood composition and enforcement, the station-level analysis also excludes the 29 busiest stations with more than 10,000,000 in annual ridership (where riders converge from other neighborhoods). This leaves 392 stations for which enforcement, ridership, and demographics can be compiled (out of 423 stations citywide), using the same naming conventions as the MTA does in their ridership figures.[1] More details on the data used here can be found in the Data Notes.

Enforcement intensity (total summonses and arrests relative to annual ridership) in the city’s 130 stations in high-poverty neighborhoods (with poverty rates of at least 25 percent) are more than twice as high as the remaining 262 stations: 4.8 enforcement actions per 100,000 swipes in high-poverty stations compared to 2.2 elsewhere.[2] [3]

For all 423 stations, six of the top ten in terms of fare evasion enforcement relative to ridership are found along A train stops in Rockaway, Queens (NYPD-Transit Bureau District 23). Many of the Rockaway stations are among the least busy in the system in terms of ridership, only the A line terminus at Far Rockaway-Mott Av has annual ridership of at least 1 million; it is also a high-poverty (31 percent) and majority black station area. Other enforcement hot spots tend to be in lower-income communities throughout the city: in Brooklyn, the 3 and L train stops in East New York and Brownsville, and stops in Coney Island and Gravesend; multiple stations in Jamaica, Queens; 6 train stops in East Harlem; and numerous stations along the 4/B/D and 2/5 routes traversing low-income neighborhoods in the Bronx. The nearby Court St/Borough Hall R/2/3/4/5 and Hoyt-Schermerhorn Sts A/C/G stations, located close to NYPD Transit Bureau Headquarters and Kings County Criminal Court, are another enforcement hot spot. The former is among the stations excluded from the station-level analysis that follows, because it is a busy transit hub with more than 10 million in annual ridership. Thirty-six out of the 423 stations did not have any enforcement actions during the period in question.

The data confirms that fare evasion is to a large extent a “crime” of poverty—or so it is treated by the MTA and NYPD. New Yorkers of less economic means are often forced to choose between MetroCards and food or rent. This isn’t news to low-wage, underemployed or unemployed New Yorkers who can’t afford to pay up front for weekly or monthly unlimited passes. A year’s worth of daily, round-trip pay-per-ride MetroCards exceeds 11 percent of the income of a single earner at the Federal poverty level. You don’t need a comprehensive statistical analysis to understand that nobody can afford regular transit fare at this income level. The city’s Fair Fares program is intended to ease the cost of transit to hundreds of thousands of economically struggling New Yorkers through half-fare MetroCards, but the program did not exist over the period covered by this data and has yet to reach the overwhelming majority of residents it was designed to assist. While a full roll-out of Fair Fares is expected to have a dramatic impact for participants, a half-fare program for adults in poverty is not expected to eliminate transit affordability issues: hundreds of thousands of low-income New Yorkers who earn a bit more than the too-low federal poverty level (set at only $25,750 for a family of four, for example) are not eligible for Fair Fares but still struggle to make ends meet.

To analyze the role of race/ethnicity, we distinguish between station areas that are predominantly black and Latinx, and those that are predominantly non-Hispanic white and Asian. (There aren’t enough high-poverty, predominantly Asian station areas to analyze separately.) Future research will take a deeper look at how the relationship between poverty rates and enforcement varies by station area racial/ethnic composition.

Figure 1 shows that enforcement relative to ridership at the 109 stations in high-poverty black and Latinx neighborhoods is more than 60 percent higher than at the 21 stations in high-poverty white or Asian neighborhoods.[4] The average poverty rate for these two groups of stations is virtually identical at 32 and 33 percent, respectively.

Enforcement at high-poverty stations is also more likely to take the form of an arrest in a black or Latinx neighborhood than in a white or Asian neighborhood. Fare evasion arrests occur at a rate of 1.5 per 100,000 swipes at stations in high-poverty black and Latinx neighborhoods: that’s more than 31 percent of all enforcement actions at these stations, the other 69 percent are summonses. Compare that to stations in high-poverty white and Asian neighborhoods: there were 0.49 arrests per 100,000 swipes, only 16 percent of all enforcement actions at these stations.[5] This means that among people stopped for fare evasion enforcement, those in high-poverty black and Latinx neighborhoods are twice as likely to be arrested as those in high-poverty white and Asian neighborhoods.

Enforcement patterns also vary dramatically across the NYPD’s 12 transit districts. Over the fourth quarter of 2017 and first quarter of 2018, the NYPD Transit Bureau District with the most subway fare evasion enforcement actions (summonses and arrests) was TD1, which spans parts of midtown west and the Upper West Side. This is also one of the busiest parts of the subway system. After adjusting for ridership, TD1 has one of the lower rates of subway fare evasion enforcement. By contrast, TD23 in Queens, spanning from Rockaway up to Jamaica and Ozone Park, had far and away the highest enforcement relative to ridership: TD23 had the lowest ridership of any transit district, but more than twice as many enforcement actions per MetroCard swipe as any other district, and more than 4 times the citywide rate. TD11 in the Bronx had the second highest level of enforcement relative to ridership; the lowest was in TD2, spanning most of downtown Manhattan, from the west side of 34th street down to City Hall and Wall Street.

TD12 in the Bronx and TD33 in Brooklyn/Queens rely more heavily on arrests for enforcement than in other districts: 32 percent of enforcement actions in these districts were arrests rather than summonses, respectively, compared to 22 percent citywide.

NYPD Transit Bureau District Map



Source: NYPD



In some instances, high fare evasion enforcement relative to ridership appears to be driven by heightened enforcement activity in one period. Consider the Sutphin Blvd F station, which had the 11th highest enforcement relative to ridership over this period: 76 enforcement actions were reported for the fourth quarter of 2017, but only 10 for the first quarter of 2018. Assuming the data reported by the NYPD is accurate, this is a reminder that a targeted crackdown—which could occur over an unknown time frame at the discretion of local NYPD brass—can have a big impact with almost nothing in the way of public transparency.

These findings indicate that enforcement decisions have a disparate impact by race/ethnicity. This is hardly surprising when roughly 90 percent of those arrested are people of color. The sworn statements of former police officers confirm the existence and ongoing scope of explicitly race-based enforcement and quota-driven tactics. But even in the absence of explicit bias, these findings are an unfortunate reminder that racial disparities in enforcement are the consequence of years of broken windows policing that targets economically marginalized communities of color by design. Institutional racism can not only impact who the NYPD decides to stop for fare evasion and what penalty they issue, but also which neighborhoods they focus their enforcement on.

Below is a table listing the top stations citywide in terms of fare evasion enforcement relative to ridership, along with the total number of enforcement actions and ridership.

The MTA may or may not have a fare evasion problem—they have yet to provide credible evidence to support their claims. What is clear is that New York City faces several more fundamental problems at the turnstile that policing can’t fix.

First, there’s a poverty problem: fare evasion enforcement is more common in areas of high poverty, and survey evidence indicates that as many as 2 out of 5 low-income New Yorkers say they are often unable to afford subway and bus fares.

Second, there’s the problem of inadequate fare collection systems. Those who can easily afford the fare are still far less likely to pay it if there are no nearby MetroCard machines that actually work. Research from the District of Columbia found the highest fare evasion rates in census block groups that did not have a single ticketing machine or vendor. If the MTA wants to save money, they should prioritize the OMNY rollout on buses and in communities with fewer MetroCard vendors, and invest in fixing chronically broken ticketing machines and malfunctioning MetroCard readers. Paying to police fare evasion before paying to fix fare collection systems simply punishes riders for the MTA’s own mismanagement and amplifies the consequences of the MTA’s inequitable investment in fare collection systems.

Third, there’s the longstanding problem of racially biased fare evasion enforcement that disproportionately impacts low-income communities of color. The impact of this enforcement extends beyond the immediate consequences of a fare evasion summons or arrest: New Yorkers in overpoliced communities of color are at greater risk for police brutality, and exposed to a heightened police presence that generally makes them feel less safe. Yet the Chairman of the MTA says he doesn’t understand why some people would feel less safe with a heightened police presence on subways and buses. This tone-deafness is stunning.

Antiquated broken windows policing strategies that criminalize the poor do not begin to address any of the root problems playing out at the turnstile. They do not make transit more affordable. They do not make it easier for riders to pay. They do not reduce police bias, but rather enable it.

The solution starts with programs like Fair Fares that offer targeted fare subsidies to needy New Yorkers and more transparency in police enforcement, including full compliance with Local Law 147—which would mean the NYPD produces reliable and consistent enforcement data without the threat of a law suit. These measures should be coupled with equitable investment in improving fare collection systems—not just investing in fancy new stations in affluent or gentrifying communities. Invest in these strategies, then let’s assess the extent of any remaining fare evasion “problem”. . . if there even is one.

Yet the ongoing fare evasion crackdown that is being jointly implemented by the MTA and NYPD rolls on, a fiscally irresponsible, misguided use of funds. It locks in an inordinate amount of future spending to punish the poor and keep them from getting ahead. The consequences of this crackdown for individuals include fines and in some cases court costs, jail time and criminal records, which in turn make it harder for people to find work and pay their fares in the future. Heightened policing at the turnstile is destined to fail, because no amount of police can eliminate economic need or make it easier to pay the fare.

A full and speedy rollout of Fair Fares—which the city is finally set to do this month—is an important step. More policing, on the other hand, cannot address the underlying problem of affordability. It just makes riders angry and scared, and puts even more barriers in front of New Yorkers who are trying to get ahead.

Footnotes

[1] To the best of our knowledge, MTA ridership figures do not account for fare evasion.

[2] Averages for groups of stations are weighted by 2018 ridership.

[3] This difference is statistically significant at the .0001 level.

[4] Despite the relatively small number of stations in high-poverty white neighborhoods, this difference is statistically significant at the 5% level.

[5] This difference is statistically significant at the 1% level.