A People’s History of MTA Fare Hikes
Talk about fare hikes became particularly heated in 1933. That year, Brooklynite O.L. Mulot wrote a letter to the Times to argue that “the question of subway fares demands adjustment.” His beef? The one-fare system that allows riders to pay only five cents “from Coney Island to Flushing or from New Lots, Brooklyn, to 242nd Street, Manhattan…” But his solution wasn’t to introduce different fare zones but to charge different prices at different times—five cents at rush hour, ten cents at off-peak times— which would be smarter than a smaller all-around rise. “An increase to 6 or 7 cents involves tokens,” he wrote, “which are a nuisance.”