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NEW YORK, NY December 13, 2004 —Commuters and subway riders are expected to get bad news this week. On Thursday, the MTA board will vote on plans to raise fares on the Long Island Railroad and Metro North, as well as bridges, tunnels and the city’s bus and subway system. If approved, it will be the second increase in 2 years. WNYC’s Beth Fertig spoke with New Yorkers about how it will hit their wallets.

Every morning, sixty-two year old Ching Han Lee stops for breakfast at a pastry shop before heading to work at a garment factory in Chinatown.

LEE: Bolobau.

Lee usually buys a sweet, fluffy bun called a bolobau. It’s Chinese for pineapple bun.

LEE: That one, that one is fifty cents.

Her morning pastry is the only meal Lee doesn’t cook for herself. Work in the garment industry is seasonal and she makes just about 15 thousand dollars a year. With her husband’s construction job, that’s barely enough to cover rent and other necessities including transportation. Lee lives near Sheepshead Bay and she stretches her money by purchasing the 70 dollar, unlimited monthly Metro card. If that goes up to 76 dollars, she says, she’ll have to tighten her belt even more.

LEE: If the Metro card is higher I will skip breakfast, fifty. Maybe uh - OK -

Lee has an easier time in Cantonese, so a translator from the garment workers union Unite steps in to help.

TRANSLATOR: I’d rather eat the leftover food from yesterday than buying breakfast to save. In order to save.

Behind the counter, Linda Eng is nervous about that prospect. She’s been working at the Cheung Hong Pastry Shop on Mott Street for 20 years and says Chinatown is already suffering because of a downturn in the garment industry. She says Ching Han Lee isn’t her only customer worried about paying more for transportation.

ENG: (Speaks Chinese) "Same thing."

About 40 blocks uptown, another group of New Yorkers ponders the fare hike. The comfortable, fabric-covered seats of the Liberty Lines Express Bus are a world away from the spartan, fluorescent lit bakery in Chinatown.

Here, middle class New Yorkers pay 4 dollars a ride to go straight from midtown Manhattan, back home to Riverdale in the Bronx. Nobody on this bus says they’ll change their behavior if the price goes up to five dollars.

BROE: I don’t like it but the necessity of it is I need to take this.

Twenty-five year old Nora Broe works in a lab at Weill Cornell medical center.

BROE: I mean in order for me to get a train to the east side it would probably add like half an hour, 45 minutes onto my commute and that’s worth the dollar in my opinion.

But she’s skeptical about the need to raise fares. So is Jim Sheehan, who works in security at the United Nations. He’s especially dubious about reports that the MTA has a 300 million dollar surplus.

SHEEHAN: Show me the proof. Where is all this money going, where’s the surplus going?

The MTA has said it needs to plug the hole in next year’s deficit. The ongoing financial crisis is a big concern for express bus riders. They constantly worry about service cuts. The MTA is already planning to close 164 station booths in the subways.

The transit authority says overall ridership on the buses and subways is up, after last year’s fare hike. But with another round of increases two years later, there’s no way to predict how much change New Yorkers can really afford.

For WNYC I’m Beth Fertig.