Shaun Abreu remembers what it cost to get around before he had a steady paycheck. The City Council Majority Leader, who represents Manhattan’s 7th Council District, now chairs the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure. He’s pushing something that could reshape daily life for more than a million New Yorkers: free subway and bus rides for the city’s lowest-income residents.
The proposal is a major expansion of the existing Fair Fares program, which has offered half-price MetroCard rides since 2019. As of January 2026, roughly 389,000 New Yorkers are enrolled. That sounds like a lot. It isn’t. The program currently reaches only about 40% of eligible riders, meaning hundreds of thousands of people who qualify aren’t getting the benefit.
The City Council wants to fix that.
Under the Council’s proposal, New Yorkers earning up to 150% of the federal poverty level would ride entirely free. That threshold works out to about $23,900 a year for a single person, or $49,500 for a family of four. Beyond that, the plan calls for reduced fares to extend to residents earning up to 300% of the federal poverty level. Do the math: at $3 a ride, someone commuting five days a week spends over $100 a month just to get to work. For a family scraping by near the poverty line, that’s not a routine cost. That’s a serious bite.
Crystal Hudson, who represents Brooklyn’s 35th Council District and chairs the Committee on General Welfare, has co-led the effort alongside Abreu. Both signed a joint op-ed making the case in plain economic terms. Skip a doctor’s visit because you can’t afford the fare, they argue, and a minor health problem becomes an emergency room admission that costs the city far more. Can’t get to a job interview? The cycle of poverty doesn’t break itself.
The argument isn’t just moral. It’s fiscal.
Still, the Council’s pitch doesn’t stop at making rides free. The second, equally critical piece is automatic enrollment. Right now, New Yorkers who already receive public benefits, food assistance, Medicaid, cash aid, must still fill out a separate Fair Fares application to get the transit discount. The city already has the income data. It already knows who qualifies. But it doesn’t use that information to sign people up.
That gap is a bureaucratic failure with real consequences. People who don’t know about the program, who can’t navigate the paperwork, who are too stretched thin to deal with another form, don’t get help they’re legally entitled to. Automatic enrollment would close that gap. It’s a straightforward fix.
Brighton Beach, where I grew up, isn’t exactly transit-starved. The B and Q trains run up through the neighborhood, and most people I knew took the subway without thinking twice about the fare. But I also remember neighbors who counted change before leaving the house, who skipped trips they needed to make because $2.75 (the fare before the current $3 rate) felt impossible some weeks. That’s not ancient history.
The federal poverty guidelines set the baseline here, and it’s worth understanding who actually lives below or near that line in New York City. The city’s own data has shown for years that transit costs fall hardest on outer-borough residents, seniors on fixed incomes, and immigrant families in neighborhoods like Sunset Park, Jackson Heights, and East Flatbush. These are the riders the Fair Fares expansion is designed to reach.
The Council’s proposal lands during this year’s city budget process, when every spending line is contested. Opponents will raise cost concerns. That’s a fair debate to have. But the counterargument from Abreu and Hudson is that the city is already absorbing those costs downstream: in emergency rooms, in deeper poverty, in lost economic productivity from workers who can’t get to jobs.
As the MTA’s own research has documented, transit access is foundational to economic mobility. You can’t separate a functioning transit system from a functioning city economy. The infrastructure argument and the equity argument end up being the same argument.
A version of this op-ed case was made in amNewYork, where Abreu and Hudson laid out the proposal in their own words.
The Council has a real chance here to move a program that works into one that actually reaches the people it was designed for. Free fares for a million New Yorkers. Automatic enrollment for those already in the system. Not complicated. Not cheap, but not optional either, if the city is serious about affordability.
The spring budget window is open. The question is whether the votes are there.