(The New York Times posted the following column by Randy Kennedy on its website on May 6.)
NEW YORK — Barring a 12th-hour decision by a judge this month, the $2 subway fare is here to stay. So for the moment, let us put aside the report of the state comptroller and the report of the city comptroller and the hearings by state lawmakers and the case pending in state court and conduct a really important inquiry regarding the Metropolitan Transportation Authority: When will it raise your fares again and by how much?
The following analysis can be treated something like the statistics in the Daily Racing Form. As in horse racing and mutual funds, of course, past performance is not always predictive of future results. But at this point, the past seems to be the best guide we have. So let us begin.
When the subway opened in 1904, the fare was a nickel, about the same as the cost of a ham sandwich. (The tried-and-true parallel between the cost of a subway ride and a pizza slice was not yet valid; Gennaro Lombardi introduced pizza to the city the following year.)
For 44 years, the fare remained at a nickel, an unwise bargain that greatly helped politicians, badly hurt the subway and will undoubtedly never happen again.
So for all practical purposes, historical comparisons begin in 1948. And in a way, modern subway riders should feel better when looking back at that watershed year. The fare made up for lost time and rose to 10 cents, a 100 percent jump, the largest percentage increase in the subway’s history and much greater than the 33 percent increase that went into effect Sunday.
After the 1948 increase, the fare looked as if it could be counted on to rise reliably only once a decade. It went up once in the 1940’s, once in the 1950’s (to 15 cents) and once in the 1960’s (to 20 cents.)
But then came the fiscal crisis and the crumbling of the subways, and the genteel once-a-decade tradition fell beneath the wheels of the train. The fare went up three times in the 1970’s, four times in the 1980’s and three times in the 1990’s.
Which brings us to the 21st century and the bad news. Actually, make that bad news and worse news. If the fare increases by the same percentage that it did in the 1990’s — 30 percent — a subway ride in 2010 will cost $2.60. But if it follows the pattern of both the 1970’s and 1980’s — 66 percent increases in each decade — the fare will be $3.32 by decade’s end, enough to have paid your way back and forth to work for more than a month in 1904. (Of course, $3.50 also would have bought you a very nice men’s dress shirt at Sak’s back then.) Follow?
Of course, all of this is somewhat academic now that the protean MetroCard has fully supplanted the inflexible token. For those flush enough to afford a monthly pass, the fare on Sunday increased by 11 percent, not 33 percent. Weekly passes went up by 23 percent.
And because those passes are unlimited, M.T.A. officials can now argue that any rider with enough pluck and stamina has the ability to roll back prices by decades.
For example, if you buy a monthly card and ride 70 times a month — in other words, a little more than two times every day — your trips will cost only a dollar, the same as they did in 1986. If you double the number of trips, the price drops to 50 cents and you have boarded the soul train back to the disco era. And if you swipe 1,400 times during the course of a month, which is theoretically possible given that a turnstile will accept a swipe every 18 minutes, you could even travel all the way back to 1904 and a nickel a ride.
This would, however, require you to live full-time in the subway, which would probably incur many hidden costs of its own.
Looking even farther into the future, what can New York straphangers expect to pull from their pockets in the coming decades? Again, let us use history as our guide. From 1904 to 2003, the fare has risen from 5 cents to $2, a 3,900 percent increase. If it were to do the same over the next 99 years, a swipe in the year 2103 would cost — please be seated if you can find a seat — $80.
Not to worry, though. You could buy an unlimited monthly MetroCard for $2,800 and use it 1,400 times a month, rolling back your fare to a mere $2.
What a bargain that would be.