This just ain’t fare.
The MTA’s communications team selectively edited a video to make it look like a “latte-sipping” middle-aged woman was scamming a ride by sneaking under a subway turnstile in a bid to claim that well-heeled New Yorkers and not just violent vagrants are fare evaders.
But according to a full clip of the incident obtained by The Post, the customer made at least one attempt to swipe her MetroCard before being forced to crawl under the turnstile when it apparently failed to register.
“We have countless images of people in designer clothes, carrying $7 lattes, waltzing through emergency gates at Wall Street or on the Upper East Side,” MTA CEO Janno Lieber claimed during an April 26 speech to the Association for a Better New York.
Lieber, an appointee of Gov. Kathy Hochul, echoed the claim again the next day when he told the MTA board what “honest and hardworking New Yorkers” were telling him.
“They are outraged and demoralized when they see people who are better off, as I say, carrying $7 lattes — and we have this on video — waltzing through the emergency exit gates,” Lieber said.
The MTA has been using an edited video of a woman ducking under the turnstile holding a coffee drink as an example of fare evaders.
In response to The Post questioning whether such a video exists, MTA communications director Tim Minton tweeted a 7-second cut of footage dated November 2018 of what he described as a “latte-carrying [rider] ducking their fare share like this one.”
The edit showed the unnamed woman, who is holding a coffee cup, crawling under the turnstile and into the station.
But a longer, 14-second cut of the video — which the MTA shared on Tuesday in response to a further inquiry from The Post — clearly showed the alleged fare beater attempting to swipe her MetroCard before awkwardly ducking under the turnstile.
An MTA spokesman declined to share additional footage from the woman’s turnstile experience — making it impossible to determine how many times she had attempted to swipe before giving up.
Faulty “swipes” are a mainstay of the NYC subway experience dating back to the introduction of the MetroCard in the late 1990s.
The Post discovered a longer video showing the woman attempting to swipe her card prior to ducking the fare.
Straphangers often find themselves unable to swipe in because the turnstile read their payment but did not let them enter. Time-based MetroCards require riders to wait 18 minutes after a swipe before they can attempt to enter the system again.
“Riders aren’t to blame for the flaws of the transit system, least of all at the turnstile,” said Riders Alliance spokesman Danny Pearlstein.
“From broken vending machines, to bent swipes and faulty readers, the MTA has always had issues with the MetroCard. The focus should be improving service to win back riders, not playing the blame game.”
Some commuters have reported issues with the turnstiles when attempting to swipe their card.
The MTA claims to have lost $119 million in revenue to fare evasion so far this year.
An agency rep declined to comment on why it selectively edited the four-year-old clip.
