MTA Fare Evasion Down Thanks to Crackdown but Losses Still Staggering
Gov. Hochul said new enforcement efforts have curtailed some fare evaders over the past year, but the fares lost by some estimates could reach $800 million, outstripping the $600 million expected from congestion pricing tolls on drivers.
| 03 Feb 2025 | 02:37
Riders on a recent SBS M60 bus in Manhattan have the option of getting a ride ticket at stops or using their OMNY cards or phones to pay. The MTA estimates that 40 percent of bus riders don’t pay. (
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Riders board an SBS express bus on West 34th Street, March 6, 2020. (
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While the numbers for bus and subway fare-beating are down somewhat, one out of 10 subway riders is not paying their legal fare, and four out of every 10 on the buses are simply bypassing the fare box.
The takeaway after Gov. Kathy Hochul announced the fare-beater numbers for calendar year 2024 was that it was down from a year ago, but still a significant number.
There was no official tally on the dollar amount released on the fare evasion at this time, but in the spring of 2024 the MTA estimated that fare beaters could cost the agency up to $800 million annually. A Blue Ribbon Report last year that used figures from 2022 had pegged the number at that time at around $690 million.
Hochul said the MTA made progress on efforts to combat MTA fare evasion in the six months from June 2024 through December 2024. In that six-month snapshot, she said, subway fare evasion is down 26 percent. On local and express surface transit, fare evasion is down by 9.1 percent in that same timeframe. This follows implementation by the Governor, MTA and the NYPD of deployment of enforcement staff, fare-gate modifications and further measures to reduce theft of service.
This year, the MTA has begun installing new anti-fare-evasion measures at all subway turnstiles; at 20 high-traffic stations, fare gates are now being installed to make it tougher for fare beaters to climb over or through.
“We’re turning the tide against fare evasion to help protect transit riders and taxpayers and continue strengthening our transit system,” noted the Governor, who dropped in on Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch’s first “State of the NYPD,” held at the Cipriani across from Grand Central Terminal.
While the fare-evasion numbers have diminished somewhat, the MTA budget drama that sees 40 percent of the 40 million yearly bus riders and 10 percent of a billion subway riders not paying for their transportation, is not expected to go away in the foreseeable future.
Critics of congestion pricing point out that while the MTA expects to get $600 million a year from the tolls on drivers, they feel the agency would be better served by cracking down on fare-beaters.
The MTA issued a request for proposals for a behavioral consultant for a study of the psychology of fare evaders, although a spokesman told Straus News recently that no commitment has been made on this specific initiative.
Hochul said the crackdown effort has also included strengthening coordination with NYPD to boost on-the-ground resources and increase the number of summonses for fare evasion.
The NYPD issued 143,100 Transit Adjudication Bureau summonses for subway-fare evasion in 2024, a 96 percent increase from 2019. And they have created a new uniformed Bus Enforcement Unit that has been deployed alongside the MTA’s “EAGLE Team” to support fare compliance across all five boroughs.