Make sure MTA hears your anger about toll and fare increases

Here we go again.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority is looking to raise fares and tolls, affecting those who take buses and subways, and those who ride over the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge and use other bridges and spans.

That means us.

There will be a series of hearings on the proposed hikes, but that’s not going to change anything. You can pretty much take it to the bank that we’re going to be paying more. MTA chief Thomas Prendergast in August said that whether fares would increase would depend on what the agency’s November financial revision showed. Now we have our answer. It’s not a surprise.

I guess we should be getting used to it by now. Fares and tolls went up in 2011, 2013 and 2015 as well. Oh, and another hike is already looming out there in 2019.

All years, you’ll notice, when state lawmakers are not up for re-election.

Who wants to be out there campaigning when a fare hike is percolating through the electorate? Not that we should blame our lawmakers. There isn’t anybody who seems able to put a stop to all this. It’s becoming a rite of autumn. It’s becoming news when tolls and fares don’t go up.

But no matter how often it happens, we’re not getting used to it. Because no matter how much effort and money it takes to keep a mammoth transit system like New York’s in something approximating acceptable running order, you still have to ask yourself: How much bang are we getting for our buck?

On Staten Island, not much. It wasn’t all that long ago that Prendergast told us that the Island will likely never be hooked into the city’s subway system. So that’s one pipe dream dead.

Meanwhile, express bus riders, particularly those from the South Shore, are giving the better part of their days over to commuting. It’s one of the longest commutes in the country already and shows no sign of improving.

Local bus lines don’t get you around much faster, and good luck to you if you need a bus line to get you across the Island. You’ll find slim pickings. We’re getting new Staten Island Railway trains (after four decades), but that one train line up the borough’s east coast is the only train line we’ve got. It’s hardly a rail system.

All this for a borough of close to 500,000 people.

When the system needs improving, fare and toll hikes seem the only way for the MTA to go. Competition for federal transit funding is cutthroat, so you can’t count on money coming from Washington. It seems there are no out-of-the-box ways for the MTA to raise revenue. It doesn’t seem like there are any places to cut costs either. No efficiencies that can be implemented. No positions that can be eliminated. No salaries to cut. There’s one ATM for the system: Us.

So MTA members will sit through some public hearings. And they will hear some upset members of the public. Then fares and tolls will go up no matter the hue and cry. Too many of us are too dependent on the system. It’s not like we can boycott.

At the very least, we should get out there and let them hear our voice. Make them stay a little bit later at the hearing than maybe they want to. They should at least hear our dissent.

Because if they don’t hear that resistance, who knows what they’ll try and pull on us next time?