I've been saying this for a while. I used to live in queens and would take a practically empty bus down a traffic packed metropolitan ave to a coworking space in bushwick. There was no way the bus was breaking even with the 5-10 people that would get on during my trips.

Instead NYC spent $250 million to crack down on fare evasion [1] and installed huge ticket machines at a bunch of bus stops that probably cost >300K each to install.

[1] https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2019/11/14/mta-will-spend-249m-o...