(The following article by Ralph Ranalli was posted on the Boston Globe website on May 16.)
BOSTON — MBTA bus, subway, and train riders are paying too much for inadequate service, and a fare hike would drive users from the system, commuters and public transit advocates said yesterday.
Faced with a looming $70 million budget shortfall, MBTA officials last month proposed increasing fares in January on subways and trolleys from $1.25 to $1.70 per ride. Under the proposal, bus fares would go from 90 cents to $1.25, and most commuter rail passes would cost 22 percent more.
”It’s going to be more expensive for me to take the train than to drive,” Taylor Hill, a 29-year-old Newton resident who works in Boston, said at the agency-sponsored meeting. ”I think you’re going to lose a lot of people.”
Yesterday’s meeting at the state Transportation Building was one of 11 public workshops being held this month by MBTA officials to solicit input on the fare increase, which officials say could be altered if there is enough public outcry.
The agency will hold at least five formal public hearings on the issue next month.
Both riders and transit advocates called the proposed increase ill-timed, given that $3-a-gallon gasoline should be spurring an increase in ridership.
”This should be a terrific time for recruiting riders,” said former governor Michael S. Dukakis. ”But if we’re hiking fares, we’re losing out on an opportunity.”
Dennis DiZoglio, the MBTA’s deputy general manager for development, said studies showed that overall ridership could dip as much as 6 percent if the fare increase goes forward.
But he said the alternative would be cuts in bus routes and subway service and deferred maintenance on the system, because the agency has been required by the Legislature to have a balanced budget since 2000.
Dukakis and other representatives of environmental and transit groups also called on the Legislature to give the agency additional financial help to stave off the fare increase.
”To ask riders to give more while you are giving them less is simply not appropriate,” said Carrie Russell, a staff attorney with the Conservation Law Foundation. ”We’re looking at the possibility of tens of thousands of additional drivers on the roads.”
The MBTA board is expected to vote in November on the proposal, which also includes even higher additional charges for riders who do not use new automated fare CharlieCards.