55

Fifty-Five. The magic number. The most important number you need to know about the transit system.

It’s called the Farebox Recovery Ratio.

Simply put, if you take the total revenues any transportation system receives over a given period of time, and figure out that part of the total contributed by fares and tolls as a percentage, that number is the Farebox Recovery Ratio. The average FRR for a major American city’s transit system is 37%, about three-eighths of all revenues. New York’s FRR is 55%, 50 percent more than average, and the highest ratio in the United States.

Why do we pay more? Simple. The subways are run by a corporation, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, that is more interested in shielding whoever happens to be governor at any time than in serving the needs of the people of New York. It seems that many predecessors of Gov. Elliot Spitzer, particularly George Pataki, wanted to contribute as little as possible in state funds to the system — and the MTA board members were much too gentlemanly to insist that the state pay its fair share. They therefore did the only thing they could think of doing to pay the bills: borrow more and more and more money, through bonds. (Being an “authority,” rather than a state agency, makes it easier to do this.)

Now the MTA is drowning in two decades’ worth of debt… and most of the money that goes into our Metrocards comes out the other end as debt service. If we, the transit riders of this city, allow the fare hike to go through, this will maintain (and even perhaps increase) the insanely high Farebox Recovery Ratio with which the ridership is now burdened. In other words, we will continue to pay more than our fair share because other major stakeholders in the system – corporations, state taxpayers — will still pay less.

That is why the Fight the Hike campaign is advocating that the fares be rolled back, so that Gov. Spitzer will be forced, in order to keep the system solvent, to come out from behind the protective shield that the MTA has placed around him and accede to our demand that the state government and New York State-based corporations bear this fiscal burden equally with the long-suffering riders of the buses and subways, and commuter railroads, of New York.