The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, an agency facing deficits of up to $1.5 billion by 2009, is spending more than $2,000 for each homeless person it escorts to a shelter from the subway, a breakdown of statistics shows.

The MTA this year renewed its $1.5 million contract with the Bowery Residents’ Committee, a nonprofit social service provider, to fund the program for outreach workers to visit subway stations and try to convince homeless people to accept escorts to city-run shelters or detox centers.

But station agents, vagrants, and straphangers interviewed over the past three weeks at stops popular among the homeless said they knew little or nothing about the program, and had rarely or never observed these outreach workers in action. Even after almost 20 years in existence, the MTA-funded outreach program is little known.

The outreach program carried out 875 escorts last year, according to statistics provided by the MTA. Outreach workers estimated that they were re-escorting the same homeless people back to the shelters from subway stations about 25% of the time. “It’s a tough sell,” the program director, Robert Rumore, said. “The largest portion of people we escort is back out again.”

Homeless people living in the subways are often wary of giving up the freedom of an open system for the rules and regulations of shelter life; most of them suffer from untreated or undiagnosed alcoholic conditions, according to a senior policy analyst for the Coalition for the Homeless, Patrick Markee. “Outreach has limited tools at its disposal,” Mr. Markee said. “Putting a price tag on a single placement may not be the best way to understand it.”

An MTA spokeswoman, Mercedes Padilla, said the MTA made 4,000 independent contacts with homeless people on its property last year. She said the MTA would not comment on whether the program has been successful in creating a more pleasant transportation environment for customers, or in improving lives.

According to Mr. Rumore, 22 homeless outreach workers patrol the entire subway system every day, targeting stations popular among the homeless, like the Second Avenue stop on the F and V lines, as well as hub stations like Pennsylvania Station and Grand Central Terminal. At least nine outreach workers are monitoring the subway system at all times, except for weekend nights. According to the MTA’s Web site, some of the primary stations targeted by outreach workers were West Fourth Street, and all of the stations along the no. 1 line between 96th and 191st Streets. Station agents at these stations said they were unfamiliar with the program.

Police and transit officials underground say they do little to discourage homeless people from camping out in stations. “Unless they’re being a real nuisance, it’s never my priority to report them,” a station agent at the Canal Street stop on the A line said. Appeals from social workers to leave the system, therefore, are more easily brushed off when homeless people know they won’t be forced out of the station and into the street by other authorities underground. “It’s not illegal to be homeless,” Ms. Padilla said. “It’s not illegal to ride back and forth on the subways.”

The MTA agreed to allow a reporter to shadow its outreach workers on the condition that questions would be answered only by the program director, not the outreach workers. On a trip to Pennsylvania Station, two outreach workers interacted with three homeless men, who exerted peer pressure on one another to rebuff offers for escorts to shelters.

On the Long Island Rail Road concourse of Pennsylvania Station, two young women in bright blue vests approached a homeless man with a glassy, fogged out look in his eyes. Leaning limply against the wall with a lumpy bag of belongings by his side, the man nodded at them, seemingly eager for their attention, but unwilling to give up his spot to go with them to a shelter. Another homeless man in a blue puffy coat and dirt-caked jeans approached the threesome, proclaiming that he suffered from insomnia, and asked his homeless acquaintance to join him on an all-night aimless train ride on the E line.

“He’ll talk to you tomorrow, just leave us alone and come back tomorrow,” the homeless man, Philip Somaru, told the outreach workers. In the end, both men remained in the station.

“The program costs are driven by the challenges the MTA faces from the clients,” the chief attorney for the Straphangers Campaign, Gene Russianoff, said.

According to Mr. Russianoff, the MTA only reluctantly began confronting homelessness on its property in the 1980s, when the problem of people living permanently underground was rampant and made stations dirtier and more dangerous for customers.

“The MTA didn’t want to get into the business of addressing homelessness, but there were people living on the tracks,” Mr. Russianoff said. The MTA began funding the homeless outreach program in 1989.

But homeless who can get by panhandling are often unwilling to accept escorts to shelters, according to the MTA official who oversees the program, Cynthia Wilson, even if it means risking their own safety by sleeping in public. Even on the coldest winter nights, many homeless people say they prefer to ride the trains, or simply call 911 for an ambulance and sleep in a hospital for the night, than to enter the city’s shelter system.

The city’s street count last summer found 13% fewer individuals living on the streets and subways than in 2005.

“This time of year, there are more people seeking shelter in the subway,” Chief Michael Collins, an NYPD spokesman, said. “Our enforcement on the subways is up.”