Public transit agencies are getting creative in the effort to bring riders back to buses and trains.
"Starting March 1, officials intend to put a weekly fare cap on trips made with OMNY, the 'tap-and-go' fare system," reports Ana Ley for The New York Times.
The threshold for unlimited rides in a seven day period will be set at $33, according to Ley.
The new fare cap is intended to lure riders back to public transit in New York City, where ridership hasn't fully recovered to pre-pandemic levels. Depending on the popularity of the program, and its effects on the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's budget, the fare cap could also be made permanent. For now, the program is scheduled to expire on June 30.
"Although the numbers in New York are climbing, subway ridership in recent weeks has only been hovering at about 58 percent of prepandemic levels, when over five million people packed the trains every weekday," writes Ley.
The state of public transit in the United States at the conclusion of 2021 is tenuous: driver shortages are contributing to service cuts in cities all over the country, and an infusion of federal money has buoyed agencies through declines in ridership and a resulting loss of revenue. Some cities are experimenting with free, or reduced-fare, transit as an enticement to get riders back on buses and trains.
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