Furious straphanger Daryn Mayer's next stop will be in front of a judge -- to challenge her "outrageous" $100 ticket for not knowing how to pay the fare on the MTA's newest super-express bus route.
At East 79th Street and Second Avenue Tuesday afternoon, Mayer, a marketing executive rushing to a meeting, saw the front door close on the M15 Select Bus.
So she jumped in the still-open back door instead, and rushed to the front to pay.
But the driver said her MetroCard wasn't welcome.
"He said, 'You have to pay outside,' " Mayer said.
Unlike nearly all other MTA buses, the M15 Select Bus requires passengers to buy tickets from outdoor machines.
Mayer asked the driver if she could get off and drop her MetroCard in a machine. But the bus's doors were closed, and the driver did not open them.
"He said, 'OK, don't pay. Ride for free,' " Mayer said. "So I sat down."
At the next stop, Second Avenue and East 68th Street, several uniformed officers boarded and headed directly for Mayer.
One of the officers "comes up to me and says, 'Where is your slip?' " Mayer recalled.
"The doors were closed, and I had no other option -- how could I get off?" Mayer said. "It's not like I was trying to not pay."
In a statement, MTA spokesman Kevin Ortiz said Mayer "became combative, responding with an expletive. She claimed the bus operator let her on the bus without paying her fare.
"When asked by the inspector, the bus operator denied he had let her on the bus, and said he explicitly told her she needed to pay her fare. At that point, she was removed from the bus and received a summons," Ortiz said.
Mayer denies cursing at the officers, but admits she was angry.
She said the way she was hit with the $100 fine was essentially a trap -- "another way of trying to get money out of people."
An MTA source said that if Mayer didn't have a ticket, she should have gotten off the bus, bought a ticket from a machine, then waited for the next bus, "which shouldn't have been far behind, considering it was rush hour."
its simply clear she didnt know about how to pay and jumped on the rear as the doors were open, thinking she can pay up front. Now, i agree the bus driver could of just let the doors open and let her off, next time she know, and hopefully they throw that ticket off, its clear the mta and police have a connection, its ticket season for the cops.
ReplyDeleteI see both sides. Something similar happened to me. I entered the bus with my husband, he paid for both of us but the metrocard only had one fair, so my husband put in another metrocard with fair in it to pay for me and as we"re walking back the driver tells us we only paid one fare. This inferior piece of dung was wrong. Anyway, yeah they set this woman up and had she been black or hispanic, she would've never been targeted. MTA targets whites because most of their employees are disgruntled minorities and they like to stick it to whitey.
ReplyDeleteoutrageous! This city and the MTA are a hot mess. With all the fare and toll hikes, where the hell is all this money going to?
ReplyDeleteMayor Doomberg and the rest of the Doomberg Administration,ARE YOU KIDDIN' ME OR WHAT?
ReplyDelete