#Mta mobility for free#
#Mta mobility update#

The agency did not respond to a question on whether OMNY use on the bus had gone up since March last year when the pilot was officially buried. “We also encourage the MTA to expand its public outreach campaigns to inform riders about the benefits of switching to OMNY.” “We urge the MTA to prioritize the adoption of OMNY and ensure that proof of payment is required for passengers boarding via the rear door,” said Liam Blank, the associate director of the Permanent Citizens Advisory Committee to the MTA. Advocates pressed the agency to make getting the word out about OMNY a top priority so that it could hurry up and actually start using the fare collection machines installed on all of its buses. But the MTA introduced a reduced fare OMNY option in late October 2022. Lieber’s justification in 2022 for not starting the pilot, which would have run on a minuscule 4 percent of the MTA’s local and limited bus routes, was that fewer than 20 percent of bus riders were using OMNY, and that the tap-and-go payment option wasn’t available to reduced-fare or student MetroCard holders. Instead, in its quest against fare evasion, we’re back to single-door, longer lines, more delays. After investments in OMNY, we were supposed to have “all-door boarding”-i.e., enter the bus at any door. The MTA had a plan to speed up buses & improve ridership. As a result, riders are still forced to stand in a line and board only at the front of the bus at local bus stops across the city, as Upper East Side resident and Manhattan Community Board 8 member Billy Freeland showed last Thursday. In a further odd twist to the saga, the agency actually finished installing OMMY readers on every bus in the MTA fleet in 2021, but it has not turned the machines on. But the MTA has resisted expanding all-door boarding to local or limited routes even though it works in little-known cities such as “London” and “San Francisco.” The practice has been used on Select Bus Service, and has even been found to reduce dwell times by as much as 40 percent on some of those routes because passengers were able to pay their fares at fareboxes located at bus stops.

#Mta mobility for free#

The longer the MTA fails to fix some of these well documented pain points with all-door boarding, the stronger the chorus for free buses will become.”Īll-door boarding has been pitched since at least 2016 as a way reduce dwell time by speeding up bus boarding. “There’s a growing chorus of advocates and legislators pushing for the MTA to make buses free in order to make them faster and easier to use. “The MTA ignores the need to implement rider-centric improvements like all-door boarding at their peril,” said TransitCenter Director of Communications Haley Richardson. That signaled to some longtime advocates that the MTA might never actually do it - and that could result in even more people demanding free buses, which Lieber has dismissed as difficult and experimental.

#Mta mobility update#

When asked if the agency could share anything about whether it was actually going to follow through with the long-delayed pilot, a spokesperson said that the lack of any update spoke for itself. At the time, Lieber said he was trying to find “the right time” to start the pilot, which was announced in 2021 and then sat on the shelf for months. This is one cancellation that’s actually stuck.Ī year after MTA CEO and Chairman Janno Lieber said that he was mothballing the agency’s modest 10-bus-route pilot for time-saving all-door boarding, there is still no plan to introduce or even test the practice.Īn MTA spokesperson merely said there was “no update” on the agency’s plans for the back-door boarding pilot, which was unceremoniously axed in 2022.