NYC The Blog posted an amusing video report about how some NYC residents are protesting fare hikes by buying unlimited Metrocards in bulk and then using them as group Metrocards or just swiping strangers through the turnstiles for free.
An unlimited Metrocard in NYC can be used every 18 minutes as many times as you’d like [for a month] and it’s completely legal to give away rides so long as the ride isn’t being sold by the person with the card. As you can imagine, this could potentially be a lot of revenue lost for the MTA. But is this just a totally backward way of protesting fare hikes — by making the MTA lost more money and forcing even higher spikes in fares?
I think the ideal ‘fairy-tale’ situation would be that if was proven that the fare hike protest directly affected a large amount of revenue for the MTA, enough to realize that reducing the fare cost w/out the ‘protest’ in action would in fact generate more revenue (pipe dreams). I could see the MTA finding legal loopholes and creating new laws that wouldn’t allow for the free rides if anything.
This doesn’t work as well as it would have before the hike. Not only is there the 30 day time limit still, but now there’s a 50 ride limit for the monthly cards. All “unlimited” cards now have a ride limit, so it’s either or
I tried to explain the recent DC metro fare increases and losses in revenues as in relation to the Laffer Curve… I believe this proves my theory. If people are charged/taxed too much, they will find ways to cheat/protest and thus the result is less revenues, and not more.