Study: Traffic Tax Plan Could Fund Free Subway

With the threat of a fare hike looming, a free subway system might seem like a distant fantasy for New York City straphangers.

Some dreamers, however, are pushing to turn the concept into a reality that they say could stimulate the city's economy and provide an incentive for more motorists to switch to mass transit.

Charging motorists $16 to drive into most of Manhattan at all times — double the amount Mayor Bloomberg has proposed in his congestion pricing plan — and levying $16 tolls on all bridge and tunnel crossings could bring in $3.1 billion annually to subsidize a free mass transit system, the early results of a $100,000 study by a nonprofit group, the Institute for Rational Mobility, show. The MTA currently takes in about $1.96 billion in fares from the subway and buses, the study says, and it could save an estimated $360 million a year that it spends collecting those fares.

"It's a Platonic ideal," the chief attorney for the Straphangers Campaign, Gene Russianoff, said.

While the subway system seems to be bursting at the seams on certain routes, it has the capacity to handle the flood of riders who would likely switch to mass transit if the city's roads were tolled and transit were free, the president of the institute, George Haikalis, said.

When fewer New Yorkers owned cars and gas was rationed in the years following World War II, the subways carried about 2 billion riders a year, as compared to about 1.5 billion a year in 2006. "Then we were a city that worked more on three shifts than we do now," Mr. Russianoff said. Now riders pile onto subways during morning and evening rush hours, leaving relatively deserted trains rattling through the tunnels during midday.

Transit officials this week voiced concerns about how an overburdened system could handle an expected influx of 1 million new New Yorkers by 2030, and said money generated from congestion pricing could help the system meet an increase in demand.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority currently runs about 30 trains an hour, a number that could be increased, Mr. Haikalis said, if advanced signaling currently used on the L line were expanded throughout the system. An MTA spokesman declined to comment on the study.