Stop the presses! There’s actual talk of making the subway FREE to ride. I know, it makes me a little nauseous too.
Theodore Kheel donated $100,000 to the Institute for Rational Urban Mobility to fund a study about making the subway free to ride. Kheel believes that it can be done.
Hold on to your seats because here comes the scary logic:
If New Yorkers don’t pay a fee to use the police and fire departments, they should not have to pay to use the city’s mass transit system.
Ok, that makes sense. SUBWAYblogger can get behind that. It just really freaks us out to think of all the people getting on the train for free, that’s all. People overload. All of a sudden, our subway will look like the Tokyo subway. We’ll have to hire the little men with white gloves to stuff people into the trains!
At this point, it is just a study. Kheel believes that the whole thing could be funded by charging drivers to drive on the busiest streets of the city. All that revenue would offset the subway costs.
It certainly would have a lot of revenue to generate. What few people don’t realize is that the hundreds of millions in subway fares collected each year hardly gets put back into the system. Much of the revenue generated today goes to fund other city projects. That’s part of the reason the city suffered the TWU strike. The money that could have paid for wages and benefits was essentially already tied up in funding other city projects.
The fact is that the transit system is quite the nest egg for the city. Getting rid of that gold paved money road would cause quite the uproar. So the city street car tolls will have to really make up the missing cash.
Ok, my head hurts.
SUBWAYblogger 