A rider wait for a bus Oct. 8, 2020, in Cambridge’s Central Square. (Photo: Marc Levy)

A half-fare program for lower-income riders on the MBTA could roll out this spring and summer if approved in a vote set for the end of this month. An agency advisory board and Boston city officials recommended the program’s adoption March 7.

The program would cut costs for riders at or under 200 percent of the federal poverty level – around $29,000 per person in a household. Applying is expected to take around five minutes.

At current rates, subway ride will go down to $1.10 from $2.40 for the eligible; a local bus ride will be 85 cents instead of $1.70. A daily rider could see savings of $720 in a year, or $1,908 for commuter rail users, the T said.

“We view low-income fares as a responsible approach to support riders who really need it, increase ridership and still maintain strong fare revenue to support operations,” said Steven Povich, the MBTA’s senior director of fare policy and analytics, in a January presentation to the agency board’s Audit and Finance Subcommittee.

The subcommittee is tasked with understanding how the program will affect finances at the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, which has been managing an ongoing financing disaster referred to in recent meetings as a “fiscal cliff’ it will soon run off.

More than 60,000 riders are expected to benefit from the program, making for an additional 8.1 million annual rides on fixed-route lines – as opposed to the door-to-door paratransit system known as The Ride – by 2029.

With the cost break, eligible riders are expected to increase use of the MBTA from 25 percent to 30 percent, even though the figures are extrapolated from an ongoing test of fare-free bus routes in Boston that has “seen about a 20 percent increase in ridership,” Povich said.

It’s the revenue from increased ridership, even if it’s coming in at smaller amounts, that makes the program function in the long term.

Beginning to budget

Only $45 million is pledged by the governor out of a projected $23 million to $62 million needed to fund the project, said Brian Kane, executive director of the MBTA advisory board. That pledge supports only the first year of the program, which is expected to grow to $50 million or $60 million by the end of the same five-year projections.

“The benefits to these folks are real and obvious, and certainly suggest that benefits are worth paying for,” Kane said at the meeting. “It is also worth considering how these benefits are paid for, especially in light of the fiscal-cliff discussion.”

The program includes proposals to expand a $10 weekend commuter rail pass to federal holidays and to replace paper change tickets with CharlieCards for overpaid balances.

Meanwhile, an operating budget is in development for the 2025 fiscal year that includes an MBTA hiring surge and more additions to a track repair plan to get subways back running at their top 40 mph speeds. Riders can also expect to see fare increases, according to a subcommittee presentation.

‘Forward funding’ problem

The same Audit and Finance Subcommittee meeting in January revealed staggering budget gaps projected through 2029. A funding history analysis presented by agency chief finance officer Mary Ann O’Hara showed an operating deficit and major financial fallout in the coming years.

In 2000, instead of continuing to fund the MBTA through annual legislative appropriations, the state decided to implement a “forward funding” model that forced the T to balance its own budget. That relied mainly on sales tax revenue, which has always been lower than expected. There has been chronic “underfunding of the T” and “a structural budget gap” ever since, O’Hara said.

Decreased T ridership since the pandemic and decades worth of piled-up repair needs worsened the problems, and the “pandemic generated a wave of retirements and a temporary hiring freeze before federal Covid relief funding became available,” she said.

The fiscal cliff

In the early 1990s, the MBTA had 650,000 passengers a day and 7,000 employees. “Now you have 1.3 million passengers a day, and until recently, you had 6,000 employees,” said Thomas Glynn, chair of the agency’s board of directors.

Board member Thomas McGee agreed: “The problems the system has faced over the last several years directly relates to the lack of employees to get the job done.” Doubling the number of passengers, but reducing the number of employees has posed huge issues for T management and operations, contributing to the disrepair of trains and tracks. Recently, red line closings have caused delays through Cambridge and Somerville, repairs as part of a track improvement program that also come at a steep cost.

“The inventory’s operating budget is spending more than it is taking in,” O’Hara said. “We now stare at the fiscal cliff.”

The MBTA is projecting budget gaps of between $567 million to $652 million beginning in the 2025 fiscal year, growing to $799 million to $902 million by the 2029 fiscal year, O’Hara said.

To tackle this, O’Hara recommends a return to more legislative support for the T, like peer institutions such as New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority and San Francisco’s Bay Area Rapid Transit. The MBTA has also invested in its hiring capacity by adding 1,700 positions.