Fare evasion has become widespread on buses, particularly in the years following the COVID-19 pandemic, when the MTA allowed passengers to enter through buses’ back doors without paying to avoid spreading the virus to drivers, agency officials have said.
Because there is no way to verify MetroCard or coin payments, fare dodgers can get around paying simply by slipping through a bus’ back door when other riders are exiting or walking past the fare box at the front.
But tap-and-pay — a completely electronic system where riders can use OMNY cards, credit/debit cards, or their smartphones to pay — now gives the MTA the ability to check if they actually coughed up the $3 fare.
The agency has been piloting electronic pay verification for a few months by equipping its pre-existing bus fare enforcement brigades, known as Evasion And Graffiti Lawlessness Eradication (EAGLE) Teams, with handheld technology to check if riders paid — and issue summonses to those who did not.
“We were introducing, like, a new software, and these devices – it’s the device that they actually use to check or validate that a person has paid their fare by either tapping or having an OMNY card or using their devices,” said New York City Transit President Demetrius Crichlow, in an interview with amNewYork, in which he explained the current state of the pilot program.
MTA Chair and CEO Janno Lieber began teasing the agency’s shift to the enforcement model, which he referred to as “European style” of fare enforcement, late last year.
Crichlow said the EAGLE teams are testing the technology primarily on MTA Select Bus Service (SBS) routes, which serve as the city’s version of bus rapid transit, with some presence on local buses as well. He said SBS lines are a good starting point because their riders were already used to showing proof of payment, making them an ideal environment to test new software on technology known as “Onboard Validation Devices.”
The handheld devices resemble a smartphone and can scan riders’ OMNY cards, credit/debit cards, or phones to show if they tapped in, he said. For those found to have skipped the fare, EAGLE team members carry a separate “e-citation device,” which can scan a person’s identification and print out a warning or a summons on the spot.
The rider would then pay the summons later on.
“It tells them if its person’s first offense and they get a warning or the actual summons, it will just say this is a warning,” Crichlow said. “Or if the person has multiple summonses, it will tell them this fine is A, B, C. They don’t pay the EAGLE Team member, but it’ll note the person’s citation or infraction.”
Crichlow said EAGLE Teams are currently utilizing about 200 of the devices. He added that, using data, the MTA deploys teams specifically to “fare evasion hot-spots,” to best utilize limited personnel.
“We have data that essentially tells us where fair evasion hotspots are, so they do not spend any time at just one location; they rotate the locations that they go to,” he said.
Additionally, Crichlow claimed the civilian fare agents have been a welcome sight amongst bus riders tired of seeing others skip the fare when they paid.
“Most people that see it are saying ‘it’s about time,’” Crichlow said. “They see people that have been fare evading for a very long time, and they’re like, ‘it’s just, it’s not fair.’ And so a good portion of people are seeing it and are saying, ‘thank you for doing this.’”
The MTA official also noted that while the agency is preparing for when to scale up the program when it no longer accepts MetroCards and coin payments, it is still unclear when that will happen. The MTA stopped selling MetroCards at the end of last year, but continues to accept them as a form of payment.
“We already started hiring people and training people, because it takes time to get people in place,” Crichlow said. “We already started working to increase the numbers, but we still don’t have a definitive time where MetroCard will not be in use. We’re still monitoring the data of how many cards are still out there, the percentage of people that are still that still have active cards sitting in their drawers.”