Shaun Abreu chairs the City Council’s Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure. He’s also the Council Majority Leader for Manhattan. And right now, he’s pushing what could be the most significant transit equity move this city has seen in years: free subway and bus rides for New York’s lowest-income residents.
The pitch builds on the Fair Fares program, which has offered half-price MetroCard rides since 2019. As of January 2026, enrollment stands at roughly 389,000 New Yorkers. Sounds decent. It isn’t. That figure represents only about 40% of the people who actually qualify, meaning hundreds of thousands of eligible riders are paying full fare because they either don’t know the benefit exists or can’t navigate the paperwork to claim it.
The City Council’s proposal would fix both problems.
Under the plan, New Yorkers earning up to 150% of federal poverty guidelines would ride free. For a single person, that’s roughly $23,900 a year. For a family of four, it’s $49,500. Riders earning between that threshold and 300% of the poverty level would get reduced fares. The current base fare is $3. Someone commuting five days a week spends more than $100 a month just getting to work. For a household barely above the poverty line, that’s not a minor expense. It’s a budget crisis that repeats every single month.
Crystal Hudson, who represents Brooklyn on the Council and chairs the Committee on General Welfare, co-led the effort with Abreu. Both signed a joint op-ed published by amNewYork laying out the case in direct economic terms. The argument isn’t only about fairness. It’s about costs the city already absorbs. Skip a doctor’s appointment because you can’t cover the fare, and a manageable health issue turns into an emergency room visit that runs the city thousands. Can’t get to a job interview? You don’t get the job. The city doesn’t collect the tax revenue. The math isn’t complicated.
“New Yorkers shouldn’t have to choose between getting to work and putting food on the table,” Abreu said, making the case that transit access is inseparable from economic survival in a city where the subway is the circulatory system.
The MTA’s own research has documented how fare barriers cut off low-income riders from jobs, medical care, and services they need. The data isn’t new. The political will to act on it has been.
The second piece of the Council’s proposal is automatic enrollment. Right now, New Yorkers who already receive Medicaid, food assistance, or cash aid have to file a separate Fair Fares application to get the transit discount. The city already has income data on these residents. It knows who qualifies. It just doesn’t use that information to sign them up.
That’s a bureaucratic failure with a straightforward remedy. Automatic enrollment would pull existing public benefits data and register eligible riders without requiring them to do additional paperwork. People who are stretched thin, working two jobs, managing kids, dealing with any of the thousand pressures that come with living near the poverty line, shouldn’t have to file another form to claim a benefit they’re already entitled to.
The $2.75 fare, before it went to $3, was already too much for some riders. I covered enough City Hall budget fights to know that when politicians say a program is working, you ask who it isn’t reaching. Fair Fares, at 40% enrollment among eligible residents, isn’t working well enough. The 60% it’s missing don’t represent a rounding error. They represent a policy gap that the Council is now trying to close.
What happens next depends on the mayor’s office and where the 2026 budget lands. The Council has the votes to push this hard. Whether City Hall has the appetite to fund it at scale is a different question, and not one that’ll be answered quietly.