Some of the subway’s littlest riders are its biggest fare-beaters, a new study says.
Kids taller than 44 inches – the height limit for a free ride – made up 43% of fare-beaters observed by NYC Transit surveyors last year, an agency staff report says.
The “predominant mode of evasion is children over 44 inches ducking under turnstiles,” the report says.
The surveyors noted that a subway surveillance camera even spotted a young boy enter without paying – and then open an emergency exit gate from the inside so his stroller-pushing mother could also ride free.
The lost revenue from the pint-size scofflaws is not small change. It costs the agency millions of dollars a year, the report says.
Some parents told the Daily News Tuesday they had no qualms about beating the system.
“The MTA’s dumb. … As long as they don’t enforce it, we’ll keep doing it,” west Harlem mom Janet Carrion, 42, said.
Carrion, who works as a baby-sitter, doesn’t pay for her own boys, ages 8 and 9, to ride the subway.
“We pay for every little thing, and the fare is too expensive to begin with,” she said. “I don’t feel guilty.”
Store clerk Aricellis Maldonado, 28, of Crown Heights, Brooklyn, never pays for her 9-year-old son, who is about 2 inches over the limit.
“No one’s ever stopped me, and until they do, we’ll keep doing this,” Maldonado said.
Louise Montelleone, 43, a Bronx computer technician, applied for a city-issued student MetroCard for her 9-year-old daughter. Montelleone felt guilty about evading the fare, she said.
“They never enforce it,” she said. “I felt bad, though.”
Transit staffers presented their report at a think tank’s annual conference, but it is not considered an official Metropolitan Transportation Authority document, an agency spokesman said.
Some cheats don’t know they are fare-beating, the authors speculated.
“Passengers may be unaware of height guidelines determining when children must begin to pay, which were posted at booths that many customers no longer use,” they wrote.
The authority is considering placing signs near turnstiles to alert riders of the height rule.
The evasion rate peaks at 3 p.m. shortly after students are dismissed from school.
Among other fare-beaters, some 24% spotted by surveyors last year involved riders slipping through open or unlocked exit gates.
About 32% used other illegal techniques, including turnstile-jumping and two riders doubling up and entering at the same time.
