Subway and bus riders will have to fork over an additional $2 to get a discounted pay-per-ride MetroCard — the most popular way to pay the fare — in 2011, MTA officials said yesterday.
Instead of paying $8, straphangers — 36 percent of whom use these cards — will have to pay $10 to trigger the discount, which also will be less generous. It will decrease from a 15-percent to 7-percent bonus.
Non-cash express-bus fares also will increase from $4.78 to $5.14 and LIRR and Metro-North fares will jump between 7.6 percent and 9.4 percent in the MTA’s 2011 fare plan, first fully reported this week by The Post.
Today, the MTA board is scheduled to send the fare plan to public hearings, likely in September. They’ll take a final vote on the fare in October.
Transit officials also revealed a four-year financial plan that assures riders there won’t be any service cuts and that fares will stay with scheduled 7.5-percent increases in 2011 and 2013 — as long as the MTA’s unions agree to two years of no wage increases.
But the chief of the MTA’s largest union, TWU Local 100, yesterday said he won’t go to the negotiating table on those terms.
“No. I completely reject the notion that transit workers are going to get zero raises in the first two years of the next contract,” said union boss John Samuelson.