MTA’s Lieber Defends Bus Fare Teams Despite Stand-Down Order

A day after pulling bus fare enforcement squads off the street, MTA Chair and CEO Janno Lieber said Friday that the teams remain an “important component” of the agency’s effort to recoup money lost to fare evasion. Speaking at an unrelated press event in Queens, Lieber framed the suspension as a pause, not a retreat.

The stand-down, announced Thursday, follows a week-old decision by MTA leadership to remove four members of the agency’s EAGLE teams from active service. Surveillance video appeared to show the agents in a violent struggle with a rider. The rider, Kyle Taylor, a Brooklyn public school aide, says he was riding the B14 bus to work on the morning of Oct. 6 when fare agents assaulted him even though he had paid with a paper transfer. In the video, the agents can be seen pinning Taylor against a bus shelter. His attorney, Benjamin Pinczewsk, says they punched Taylor in the face and knocked him to the ground, leaving him with injuries to his head, neck, back and left shoulder.

At Thursday’s news conference, Lieber also disclosed what he called “another episode” in which fare enforcers got into a physical confrontation with a rider. He offered few details beyond saying the incident was “several months old.” Together, he said, the cases raised concerns about how the teams interact with the public and how altercations are reported.

“I’m concerned about this pattern,” Lieber said Thursday. “I’m not willing to keep our teams active in the field until I know that all protocols are being followed with respect to both customer interactions and how they’re being followed. But also with respect to the reporting and investigation of incidents.” He said he has asked MTA Security Chief Michael Kemper to review how the teams operate. Until now, they have been overseen by NYC Transit Safety and Security. “We’re gonna take a break, we’ll take another look, and we’ll be back when we’ve completed that,” Lieber said.

The squads are central to Lieber’s long-held plan for what he calls “European style” fare enforcement on buses. Under that model, civilian agents use handheld devices to verify payments made through the MTA’s OMNY tap-and-ride system and issue fines to riders who skipped the fare. The MTA has piloted the approach this year, after the full switch to OMNY at the start of 2026 and as the agency prepares to phase out coin payments on buses.

The money at stake is considerable. The MTA reported losing $300 million in annual revenue to bus fare evasion in 2024. A 2025 report from the Citizens Budget Commission put the 2024 loss even higher, at $568 million.

Not everyone is convinced the squads have a future. Danny Pearlstein, director of policy and communications for the Riders Alliance, said the stand-down suggests the European model may not be workable in the five boroughs. He pointed to several complications in collecting bus fares in New York in 2026: the MTA made buses free during part of the COVID-19 pandemic, it ran a free-bus pilot on five routes between 2023 and 2024, and most bus riders are low-income.

“These are all things that make it impractical and, in many respects, unfair to press people for the fare, and certainly to spend a bunch of money on it and risk the type of blowback that comes from aggressive tactics,” Pearlstein said. “This was a naive effort.” He added that it is hard to see a clear-eyed version of the program, other than finding new revenue sources to replace money the agency can’t count on and “maybe shouldn’t have counted on.”

For now, the teams stay off the street while the review proceeds. Lieber has set no return date, saying only that the EAGLE teams will come back once he is confident their training, reporting and investigation protocols meet what he called the agency’s “high standards.”