Will Subway Fares Rise? Check at Your Pizza Place
By CLYDE HABERMAN
NYC
The New York Times
July 27, 2007
The subway and bus fare will rise soon enough to $2.25, if not higher. How can we be so sure? To answer the question with another question, have you been to a pizza parlor lately?
Once again the Pizza Connection is kicking in.
As we noted in this space a few years ago, the transit fare and the price of a pizza slice have run remarkably parallel for decades. In 1960, a subway token cost a mere 15 cents. So did a slice — a regular slice, mind you, no extra toppings. In the early 1970s, the fare went up to 35 cents. So did pizza.
By 2003, pizza was selling for $2 in parts of the city, especially Midtown. The $1.50 fare, set in 1995, seemed doomed. And it was. In May 2003, it shot up to $2. There it remains.
But for how long?
These days, pizza routinely costs $2.25 in some neighborhoods. While a slice still goes for $2 in many places, and for even as little as $1.75, a charge of $2.25 is routine in Midtown. One pizzeria in Times Square demands $2.35. A parlor on the Upper West Side has the nerve — it’s hard to think of another word for it — to insist on $2.55.
Given these fundamentals of economics, the $2 fare seems as shaky as Lindsay Lohan’s hold on sobriety.
As it is, the panjandrums of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority are talking about imposing regular increases every two years or so to help cover rising costs, including the interest payments it must make on a debt that runs into the many billions of dollars.
The notion of relatively small, but steady, increases was advanced the other day by Elliot G. Sander, the transportation authority’s executive director. Mr. Sander is now the power at the authority. He was given his job by Gov. Eliot Spitzer, he who had promised that on “Day 1, everything changes.”
Indeed, everything has changed. You can see that in Mr. Spitzer’s choice for transportation authority chairman.
The former governor, George E. Pataki, appointed Peter S. Kalikow, a real estate man who was a political ally. In selecting the next chairman, Mr. Spitzer went the other way. He nominated H. Dale Hemmerdinger, a political ally who is a real estate man. Quite different, you see.
Actually, Mr. Sander’s approach to the fare echoes that of Mr. Kalikow, who said a few years ago that small increases at regular intervals made sense. Riders can adjust to them better than they did to the whopping 33 percent rise that hit them in 2003 after nearly eight years of no change.
How the transportation authority will bring in more revenue is unclear. Might it sock the commuter railroads harder than the city’s buses and subways? Will the burden fall heavily on bridge and tunnel tolls? How about fiddling with the discounts offered through weekly and monthly MetroCards? Or will the basic fare go up for the first time since 2003?
That the authority faces looming deficits despite present surpluses is not doubted by watchdogs like the riders’ advocacy group known as the Straphangers Campaign. Gene Russianoff, the campaign’s staff lawyer, had sympathetic words for Mr. Sander and his associates. Still, Mr. Russianoff said, “they have a ‘crying wolf’ problem, which is that they predicted deficits before that, because of the hot real estate market, just never materialized.”
“In all truth,” he said of the authority, “they were not forthcoming with the public for many years, and it’s resulted in a pretty cynical view of their credibility.” It certainly doesn’t take a clairvoyant to figure out how New Yorkers will react to higher fares. Not surprisingly, Mr. Sander got an earful from some riders when he went to Grand Central Terminal yesterday to make his case for regular increases in the name of reliable planning.
But the Pizza Connection is what it is. There are ways to tinker with it, though.
The city and state have not exactly tripped over themselves to increase subsidies for mass transit. Perhaps, instead, they could subsidize pizza parlors. If pizzeria prices stay stable, so might subway fares.
Alternatively, given the fact that the cost of pizza varies across the city, why not peg the fare at each station to “the local price of a slice.” That suggestion was offered in a letter to this newspaper five years ago by Gilbert M. Trachtman, a retired school psychologist in Manhattan.
“It was meant to be a jest,” Mr. Trachtman said yesterday, “but it sounded so reasonable.”
That it did, and does.
E-mail: haberman@nytimes.com
NYC
The New York Times
July 27, 2007
The subway and bus fare will rise soon enough to $2.25, if not higher. How can we be so sure? To answer the question with another question, have you been to a pizza parlor lately?
Once again the Pizza Connection is kicking in.
As we noted in this space a few years ago, the transit fare and the price of a pizza slice have run remarkably parallel for decades. In 1960, a subway token cost a mere 15 cents. So did a slice — a regular slice, mind you, no extra toppings. In the early 1970s, the fare went up to 35 cents. So did pizza.
By 2003, pizza was selling for $2 in parts of the city, especially Midtown. The $1.50 fare, set in 1995, seemed doomed. And it was. In May 2003, it shot up to $2. There it remains.
But for how long?
These days, pizza routinely costs $2.25 in some neighborhoods. While a slice still goes for $2 in many places, and for even as little as $1.75, a charge of $2.25 is routine in Midtown. One pizzeria in Times Square demands $2.35. A parlor on the Upper West Side has the nerve — it’s hard to think of another word for it — to insist on $2.55.
Given these fundamentals of economics, the $2 fare seems as shaky as Lindsay Lohan’s hold on sobriety.
As it is, the panjandrums of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority are talking about imposing regular increases every two years or so to help cover rising costs, including the interest payments it must make on a debt that runs into the many billions of dollars.
The notion of relatively small, but steady, increases was advanced the other day by Elliot G. Sander, the transportation authority’s executive director. Mr. Sander is now the power at the authority. He was given his job by Gov. Eliot Spitzer, he who had promised that on “Day 1, everything changes.”
Indeed, everything has changed. You can see that in Mr. Spitzer’s choice for transportation authority chairman.
The former governor, George E. Pataki, appointed Peter S. Kalikow, a real estate man who was a political ally. In selecting the next chairman, Mr. Spitzer went the other way. He nominated H. Dale Hemmerdinger, a political ally who is a real estate man. Quite different, you see.
Actually, Mr. Sander’s approach to the fare echoes that of Mr. Kalikow, who said a few years ago that small increases at regular intervals made sense. Riders can adjust to them better than they did to the whopping 33 percent rise that hit them in 2003 after nearly eight years of no change.
How the transportation authority will bring in more revenue is unclear. Might it sock the commuter railroads harder than the city’s buses and subways? Will the burden fall heavily on bridge and tunnel tolls? How about fiddling with the discounts offered through weekly and monthly MetroCards? Or will the basic fare go up for the first time since 2003?
That the authority faces looming deficits despite present surpluses is not doubted by watchdogs like the riders’ advocacy group known as the Straphangers Campaign. Gene Russianoff, the campaign’s staff lawyer, had sympathetic words for Mr. Sander and his associates. Still, Mr. Russianoff said, “they have a ‘crying wolf’ problem, which is that they predicted deficits before that, because of the hot real estate market, just never materialized.”
“In all truth,” he said of the authority, “they were not forthcoming with the public for many years, and it’s resulted in a pretty cynical view of their credibility.” It certainly doesn’t take a clairvoyant to figure out how New Yorkers will react to higher fares. Not surprisingly, Mr. Sander got an earful from some riders when he went to Grand Central Terminal yesterday to make his case for regular increases in the name of reliable planning.
But the Pizza Connection is what it is. There are ways to tinker with it, though.
The city and state have not exactly tripped over themselves to increase subsidies for mass transit. Perhaps, instead, they could subsidize pizza parlors. If pizzeria prices stay stable, so might subway fares.
Alternatively, given the fact that the cost of pizza varies across the city, why not peg the fare at each station to “the local price of a slice.” That suggestion was offered in a letter to this newspaper five years ago by Gilbert M. Trachtman, a retired school psychologist in Manhattan.
“It was meant to be a jest,” Mr. Trachtman said yesterday, “but it sounded so reasonable.”
That it did, and does.
E-mail: haberman@nytimes.com
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