THE INEVITABLE FARE INCREASE

 Sorry.  You’re too late.  You missed your chance: the deadline has passed for offering “public comment” on the upcoming fare hikes on Metro-North.

Not that anything you might have said would have made a difference to the inevitable:  a 5% fare hike on September 1^st of this year and another 5% jump in July of 2026.  But don’t blame the railroad or CDOT.

You should really blame the legislature.  The budget they wrote this year practically required a fare increase as they under-funded the CDOT’s operating budget requests for our trains… Metro-North, Shore Line East and The Hartford Line.

So these recent hearings on a “proposed” fare increase were really for show, required by law, but mostly “political theater” (as I described it 12 years ago).

I’ve been through this charade before, attending and testifying at many, many such hearings over the past 25 years… all with the same outcome:  what was proposed was always what happened. This round, I didn’t even bother.

So why does the agency even go to the time and expense of this exercise when we know the inevitable?

Why do they prepare a 25-page Service Equity Analysis (in two languages) explaining the impact of the increased ticket costs on the poor and minorities?

Why does a team of CDOT managers travel across the state, holding these fare hearings in-person and online, basically signaling to the few people who show up to testify that they’ve wasted their time… that anything they might say can’t stop what’s coming down the track?

That seems like such a waste of the agency’s talents.  These CDOT managers want to run a good railroad but aren’t adequately funded by lawmakers.  The railroad takes the heat but shouldn’t take the blame as they were given no real choice but to raise the fares.

Sure, alternatively, they could cut service, but nobody wants that. 

While the CDOT staff did not share any analysis of the effect of higher fares on ridership, they did remind us that in the last seven years fares have only gone up 14% while inflation has hit us with a 28% jump.

If fares must go up, what riders would really want would be more service and faster trains, maybe even a Quiet Car.  But the CDOT can’t deliver on those dreams.

The problem is that fares don’t even come close to covering the cost of running a railroad.  Pre-pandemic Metro-North boasted a 70+% “farebox return”, meaning that most of the operating costs for the trains were covered by ticket revenue.

But we all know what happened to ridership in the past five years.  And while it is slowly building back up (it’s up 6% in the past six months since congestion pricing began), the farebox return today is only about 38%.  Someone has to make up the difference: us riders.

And those millions of dollars being collected in tolls from drivers in midtown Manhattan?  Those can only be spent on capital improvements, not subsidies for operating costs, i.e. lowering fares.

For NYC-bound commuters, there’s little choice.  They’re a captive audience of 23,000 daily riders dealing with a monopoly that can raise prices without really  losing customers.

Driving isn’t an option, especially with an additional $9 toll now added to your daily drive into Manhattan.  And work from home was great, while it lasted.  But now you have to show up at the office in person at least a few days a week.

The CDOT now will analyze the testimony from the hearings and issue a final recommendation to the Commissioner, who will make the fare hike official.

So when your ticket price jumps, don’t blame the conductor.  Blame your elected officials for under-funding this crucial transportation resource.