The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which is investing thousands of hours in designing, planning, and tallying the results of what will be more than 1 million “rider report cards” it is distributing to customers, so far has gleaned from straphangers that trains often arrive overcrowded during rush hour, that onboard announcements are garbled, and that stations could be cleaner.

As the MTA fights the uphill battle of selling a fare hike to the riding public, elected officials and subway riders are criticizing the report cards as a costly public relations gimmick.

“This is the epitome of New York City Transit being disingenuous with a hogwash propaganda machine,” Council Member Simcha Felder, a Democrat of Brooklyn, said. “Asking people to grade you when you know already that things stink — that’s really propaganda at its worst.”

Less than 7% of the 700,000 “report cards” distributed so far on 15 of the system’s 22 lines have been returned to the MTA, according to statistics provided by New York City Transit.

The C train so far has received the lowest grade, earning a D+ for overall service, and most of the subway lines have received middling C and C- grades for timeliness, cleanliness, and comfort. Riders said they do not expect glowing marks for the R and V lines, which are expected to be announced by the end of the week.

On a multiple-choice questionnaire, the top “priorities for improvement” identified by riders on almost every line are: creating adequate room on board during rush hour, having minimal delays during trips, and having reasonable wait times for trains.

“The results of the report card shouldn’t surprise anyone, least of all the MTA,” Council Member John Liu, who heads the transportation committee, said. “It has the potential to be useful, or to devolve into just a wasteful gimmick.”

Many subway riders interviewed over the past week said they were skeptical that their opinion mattered to the MTA, which under the leadership of CEO Elliot Sander has been trying to shed its reputation as an opaque agency.

“I don’t think they’ll listen — they haven’t listened before,” a chef who commutes to work on the C train, Nick Samious, said. “It’s a waste of time to fill it out.”

The rider report card is the pet project of the president of New York City Transit Authority, Howard Roberts, who was appointed in March. Mr. Roberts, a former vice president of Citibank, borrowed the report cards idea from a similar grading system the bank used to rate its retail branches, a spokesman, Paul Fleuranges, said.

The MTA has no way of totaling the cost of the report card initiative, Mr. Fleuranges said. “It’s not breaking the bank by any means,” he wrote in an e-mail message.

Transportation experts, however, estimated the price tag for the rider report cards as being in the high six figures, and they could be costing the agency up to $1 million. The MTA has also signed a $60,000 contract with a vendor to provide the report cards online in 13 languages.

“The only reason I can think of for doing it, is a ‘Yes, we’re listening’ p.r. kind of thing, or a perceptional calibration, to see if the internal measurements map to rider perception,” a former New York City Transit official who is the deputy director of the Center for Rethinking Development at the Manhattan Institute, Hope Cohen, said.

In other cities such as Washington, D.C., transit officials said they use a monthly phone survey that costs less than $150,000 a year to gauge rider experience.

“It wouldn’t be cost-efficient to be out there handing out surveys,” a spokeswoman for the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, Cathy Asato, said. The MTA, which also uses telephone surveys, chose a rating system that people could fill out on their own time, Mr. Fleuranges said.

“It’s an indicator of the feelings of certain ridership,” an MTA board member, Andrew Albert, said. “It can’t be a bad thing.”

Since the MTA rolled out the report card five months ago, it has announced plans to add rush hour service on the no. 7 line based on rider input.

“I would consider it doubtful that they would go to this survey instrument as a way of making decisions rather than the modeling tools they already use for that purpose,” Ms. Cohen said.