This week, New Yorkers received empirical proof for something that’s been intuitively obvious for awhile now—they’re getting a raw deal on public transit fares. For the past few years, the city has had to weather a series of dramatic fare hikes. In 2006, an unlimited monthly Metrocard was $76; today it’s $104. And price increases for New York’s Metropolitan Transit Authority have vastly outstripped inflation. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ inflation calculator, a $76 Metrocard in 2006 would be $84 today. And the fact that the MTA’s base fare has only increased by 25 cents over the past eight years shouldn’t distract from their elimination of the incentive to buy rides in bulk. In 2006, riders got a 10% bonus for every dollar they spent on a Metrocard, which means that a one-way ride on the MTA cost around $1.80 five years ago. Today those bonuses have basically been eliminated, and the price of a one-way ride is a hard 2.25—19 cents more than it would be if ticket prices simply followed inflation.

But they don’t simply follow inflation. Global economic downturn (and a brief deflationary trough) notwithstanding, the price of riding New York’s subways and busses is much higher than it was even a few years ago. The reason why, according to a New York Times blog post from earlier today, is something called a “farebox operating ratio:”

In recognizable English, this metric calculates the cost of running a mass transit system and the portion of it that riders pay with their coins and MetroCard swipes. For the city’s subway and bus passengers, who have seen government purse strings draw ever tighter at every level, the burden is high. The authority’s budget makers had expected it to clock in this year at 54 percent of overall costs. Instead, it is running at 64 percent.

Basically, transit riders are being asked to shell out more because the state government is unwilling to adequately fund the MTA. Even newfangled taxes specifically aimed at funding the MTA, such as a poorly conceived and hugely unpopular payroll tax levied in the 12 counties in the MTA’s service area, have been ineffectual:

In New York, government subsidies have atrophied, and taxes dedicated to transit are not yielding as much revenue as originally hoped. And so the share of costs that fall on riders has grown.

The state government hasn’t seriously dealt with the system’s funding shortfalls, even though a healthy MTA has benefits that everyone enjoys, whether they’re transit riders or not:

A sound transportation network is essential for stores that want customers and for companies that expect employees to show up on time. It is vital as well for those who would practically give up an arm before giving up their cars. Traffic jams would be worse than ever if a transit system were so hopeless that it turned brigades of subway and bus riders into drivers.

The state government has myopically decided that the MTA isn’t important enough to justify a difficult and politically fractious solution, like congestion pricing or tolls on the city’s East River bridges. Instead, it has passed the system’s budget crisis on to its riders in the form of what’s basically a regressive tax: everyone has to spend over $1000 a year on subway fares, whether they’re commuting to a Wall Street bank or a hot dog stand. The MTA’s budgetary situation is both unfair and untenable, and the state’s failure to keep the system’s farebox operating ratio under control is deeply troubling.