How important is public transportation where you live?

In most of the US at least, the answer is not very.

But in New York City. In New York transit is like air and water you

needed to survive and so we've done I think a pretty good job of making

transit affordable in New York. It's like between

10 and 15 percent the cost of owning an automobile. That is Jano Leiber. I'm the chair and

CEO of the MTA in New York City. Also known as the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

MTA is the New York State Agency that operates the subways, the buses, the power transit operation, and the commuter railroads, as well as a lot of our

toll, bridges, and tunnels in the New York area.

I read here that the MTA network has not only the nation's biggest bus fleet, but also more subway and commuter rail cars than all other U.S. transit systems combined.

Is that possibly true?

Yeah, that's definitely true.

We carry close to half of the nation's mass transit passengers.

So yes, public transit in New York is pretty important, maybe not quite as important as air and water, like

Leiber says, but still, before COVID, the subway system had five and a half million riders

every weekday and another two million on buses. The agency's annual

operating budget is around 20 billion dollars and how much of that comes from

the fares paid by riders? Not as much as you might think. About 25% of our budget is pure

fairbox from mass transit. Tolls are about two and a half billion dollars, and then the balance is a mix of

dedicated taxes and fees, some state and local government support.

There is a growing argument that public transit is good for the environment, good for

economic opportunity and social mobility, basically good for everybody. So we thought it might be worth asking, should

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