Welcome to the end of the line.
The MTA came through on its grim promise to wallop riders with a crippling fare hike — coupled with severe service cuts — in a desperate bid to close its $1.2 billion budget gap without any help from Albany lawmakers.
The moves include a $103 monthly MetroCard — a staggering $22 hike.
“It’s a shameful day,” said board member Doreen Frasca.
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The hikes were approved by a vote of 12-1, with Norman Seabrook the lone dissenter.
“Let’s take the public off the hook,” he said, adding that the board should let state lawmakers “do their job.”
Without an Albany rescue, things will get worse, the agency warned.
Just minutes after their vote, MTA officials said they could return next month to demand even higher fares from straphangers in 2010 unless state lawmakers pass a true plan.
A one-year financial Band-Aid from Albany won’t stop the agency from bleeding more money in the coming years — and riders will have to make up the difference, MTA Executive Director and CEO Elliot Sander said.
“It could well be soon,” Sander said. “Potentially in April.”
Gene Russianoff, of the Straphangers Campaign, said that would make it three years in a row with fare hikes.
It’s “the worst record in the MTA’s 40-plus-year history,” he said.
The current hikes will go into effect on May 31 and inflate the cost of a single ride from $2 to $2.50.
Penny-pinching straphangers will dish out $6 more for a 7-day unlimited MetroCard, an extra $12 for a 14-day pass, and $1.50 more each way on MTA-run crossings like the Brooklyn-Battery and Queens-Midtown tunnels and the Triborough Bridge.
Also green-lighted were crippling service cuts that will eliminate the W and Z subway lines and at least 23 bus routes.
The doomsday measures will also cost 1,100 jobs.
“This is cutting well into the bone,” said board member Andrew Albert. “This is going to make New York a very, very different place.”
The board had to pass the fare hikes after stalling state senators failed to solve political infighting over a rescue plan.
“We refuse to bring the system — your MTA — to the brink of disaster,” MTA Chairman Dale Hemmerdinger said before the vote.
Gov. Paterson and a majority of the Assembly supported a revenue-raising plan to plug the deficit by placing $2 tolls on bridges over the East and Harlem rivers.
That plan, devised by former MTA Chairman Richard Ravitch, later stalled in the state Senate because of Democratic members’ opposition to the tolls.
After yesterday’s vote, Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver vowed to “do everything in my power to ensure that today’s vote by the MTA does not stand.”
Mayor Bloomberg joined the cries of other elected officials and riders who want lawmakers to act.
“So, now it’s up to the Senate to do something,” Bloomberg said in Albany yesterday, a day after he told riders to get “mad as hell” at state politicians.
Senators holding out on the rescue plan said the crisis can still be avoided.
“They’ve done what they’ve had to do,” said Senate Majority Leader Malcolm Smith (D-Queens). “There’s still some time before they actually implement the raise.”
Smith added that “everything,” including tolls, was “still on the table.”
MTA board members said they needed to take the vote yesterday or risk harming their bond rating because they must operate with a balanced budget. They can still accept rescue funds from Albany in the coming months if a bailout agreement is reached.
Lawmakers and members of public who packed the MTA’s boardroom were skeptical.
One public speaker, civil-rights lawyer Norman Siegel, asked how many people on the board “use trains and buses regularly” — and only about half raised their hand.
Many others in the audience held up signs.
Paul Wilcox held a sign that read: “Bail out the riders, not the banks.”
Amir Idris, 19, an architecture student from Harlem waiting in the line to get into the meeting, said, “I myself can’t afford $81, let alone $103.”