A People’s History of MTA Fare Hikes
By 1919, the system’s private operators were complaining about the five-cent fare, and in 1928 one would sue for the right to raise fares. They lost. The year before that, a rider suggested creating a two-grade system like the those in use in Paris and London and, these days, on airplanes. “Many people are glad to pay to ride in first-class cars because they are less crowded,” he wrote. (Especially when it comes to smelly poor people!) “The objection of ‘undemocratic’ would no more apply to this system than to Pullmans on railroad trains.”