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Fair Fares Coalition steps up fight for half-price MetroCards

Proposal calls for reduced fares for low-income New Yorkers

April 11, 2018 By Paula Katinas Brooklyn Daily Eagle
John Raskin, executive director of the Riders Alliance, speaks at the rally at City Hall. Photo courtesy of Riders Alliance
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Proponents of a controversial proposal to allow low-income New Yorkers to buy MetroCards at half-price are stepping up the pressure on Mayor Bill de Blasio to support the measure ahead of what is expected to be an intense city budget negotiation.

In the latest development, leaders of the Fair Fares Coalition, the group pushing the half-price MetroCard proposal, held a rally on the steps of City Hall Wednesday morning.

The city budget is due to be finalized in June. fiscal year 2019 begins on July 1. 

The Fair Fares plan would cost the city $200 million a year, according to an estimate from the Fair Fares Coalition. Under the plan, New Yorkers living at or below the federal poverty level ($25,100 for a family of four) would be able to purchase MetroCards at a 50-percent discount. 

Approximately 800,000 residents would be eligible for the program. 

Elaina Boone, a member of the group Fast Food Justice, said a half-fare program would help her a great deal.

“I end up spending so much of what I earn just to get to and from work. A half-price MetroCard would offer some relief in my tight budget,” she said at the rally.

At a cost of $200 million a year, the program would come to quarter of 1 percent of the city’s estimated $90 billion budget, supporters said.

Leaders of the Fair Fare Coalition said their proposal is gaining more support by the day from elected officials, labor unions, anti-poverty groups, civil rights organizations and transit advocacy groups.

John Raskin, executive director of the Riders Alliance, one of the groups in the Fair Fares Coalition, said cities like San Francisco, Seattle and Toronto have programs allowing low-income residents to travel at reduced rates. New York should do the same, he said. 

“Our transit system should be a source of opportunity for low-income New Yorkers, not another barrier that keeps people away from jobs, education and vital public services. In New York, geographic mobility is economic mobility too,” Raskin said.

The Fair Fares proposal was developed in the wake of a study conducted by the nonprofit organization Community Services Society (CSS), which concluded that paying $2.75 for a ride on the subway or bus is a hardship for New York’s working poor.

The transit fare often stymies a resident’s income, according to CSS, because it forces a worker to stay in their own neighborhood so that the job is within walking distance rather than seek a higher paying position requiring travel to get back and forth to work.

David R. Jones, president and CEO of the Community Service Society, praised a recent move by the City Council to include the Fair Fares plan in its proposed city budget.

“The Council’s budget proposal to fully fund half-priced bus and subway fares for working-age New Yorkers with incomes at or below poverty takes dead aim at the city’s affordability crisis, offering relief to hundreds of thousands of low-income New Yorkers struggling to get to work, commute to college, to medical appointments and home to their families. It will save poor transit riders $726 annually off the cost of a monthly MetroCard, a real and effective means of removing barriers to opportunities and expanding economic mobility for our neediest residents,” Jones said. 

David G Greenfield, the CEO of the Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty, estimated that the Fair Fares program could help as many as 225,000 people that his nonprofit organization assists. 

“Needy New Yorkers deserve access to public transportation as much as anyone else,” he said, calling the proposal “smart and progressive public policy.” 

The elected officials supporting Fair Fares include: Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez,
Council Speaker Corey Johnson, Council Majority Leader Laurie Cumbo, Public Advocate Letitia James, Comptroller Scott Stringer, Councilmember Justin Brannan, Councilmember Mark Treyger, Councilmember Alicka Ampry-Samuel and Councilmember Jumaane Williams. 

Leaders 1199SEIU, Brooklyn Defender Services and the Red Hook Initiative have also endorsed the half-fare proposal.

Freddi Goldstein, the mayor’s deputy press secretary, recently told the Brooklyn Eagle that de Blasio supports the idea of allowing low-income New Yorkers to purchase cheaper MetroCards, but added that the mayor believes that the city would require help paying for the program.

“The mayor, of course, wants to provide relief to those in need, which is why he included Fair Fares in his Fair Fix plan. Given serious budgetary threats from Washington and Albany, this is not something the city can fund on its own,” Goldstein told the Eagle in an email.

 

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