Things don't always have valid reasons for why they are.

Let's talk a little bit about one of my first lessons regarding the wacky ways in which government sometimes works. This lesson came from ninth grade while attending Brooklyn Technical High School.

It was my first experience in having to stand up for myself where I found rules to be unreasonable and didn't make any justifiable sense.

I was 14, awkward, dorky, and incredibly uncomfortable in my skin and unable to stand up for myself. A lot of it had to do with being told to accept authority and to not question those in power.

I'll set the stage.

Brooklyn Tech - 1987

Brooklyn Technical High School, Brooklyn Tech, takes up almost a large city block. It's eight stories tall, though the eighth floor was only a couple of classrooms and a rooftop gym. It had a swimming pool in the basement. At the time I attended it had close to 5000 students. It was overwhelming.

The basement had dark hallways, while the other floors were long hallways usually crowded with students. It was a maze of a school. The floors were designated with East, West, North and South and Central. It was easy to get lost with the size of the school, the number of student activities, clubs and cliques.

There were kids from all ethnicities, backgrounds and social classes. It was rare to have the same person in more than one of your classes. I took seven classes a day from 7:40 am to 3 pm. Each class was 50 minutes long (or thereabouts). This wasn’t including lunch, so it was 8 periods total. We had 5 minutes to get from one class to the next.

The size of the school made it so that getting from certain classes to others was a dash through students, stairs, teachers and sometimes unexpectedly locked access doors. As an example, I had technical drawing on the second floor right before lunch. The cafeteria was on the seventh floor. I could try to take the elevator from the basement level. I’d have to walk down two flights, take the elevator, and go up seven flights, squeezed in an elevator with everyone else trying to make the same lunch period. The wait was usually about 15 to 20 minutes to take the elevator since there was always a line.

The other option was to hike up five flights of stairs to get to the cafeteria in time, so that wouldn't have to wait in line for food for the more popular foods. Usually there were long lines for the favorite foods like hamburgers and hotdogs. The other lines for warm lunch and salad bar were relatively empty. I decided to run to lunch up the 5 flights and wait in line winded after the run to get my meal.

Lunchtime or before or after class was also the only time I could go to the library or take care of administrative school stuff. Before school was shot. I had my science and technology class pre first period. It was an extra period added in the morning that most kids didn't have to take. I don't think that the admin offices were open prior to that period, I might be mistaken. It was a long time ago. That left me with lunchtime or after school. The admin offices were in the basement. I didn’t want to have to have to cross Fort Greene park to my bus stop in the late afternoon, so that left me with lunch time.

Stage is set.

The Saga of the Half-Fare 

I don't remember much about our prefect periods, that’s what we called homeroom which we had once a week. The teacher would hand out report cards, odds and ends regarding paperwork we needed to complete, free or reduced-price lunch coupon books and our transportation passes. This was 34 years ago, memories get fuzzy, but I clearly remember two of them: the one where one kid was complaining that his science teacher gave him a 99% on his report card, when he clearly deserved 100% - while here I was scraping by with mostly 80s and a 75 in Spanish (don’t ask), and the one where I was given a half fare bus pass.

It must have been a few months into the school year. I had already received a few monthly buses that year. I got my bus pass for the upcoming month and I see that it's a half fair pass. What – wut?!?!?

Back in the days before MetroCards, we’d get a paper monthly pass that you’d show to the bus driver or train station attendant if you had a subway pass. They were color coded for each month and had a foil stripe to prevent copying. The half fare pass had the words “1/2 Fare” stamped in bold red letters on the front.

I had a choice, accept the bus pass, and ask my mom for more money for school, we were poor and always broke, or find time to go to the Transportation Office in the bowels of the school basement during lunch time and question it.

I went to question it since my homeroom teacher said she had no idea why it changed. I went down that day during lunch. I thought it would be quick, just some error and we'll swap it out for a full fare pass.

The Transportation Office was in a small room in the corner of the basement. Brooklyn Tech was built in the 1930s as an all-boys technical school. The basement housed machine shops and other mechanical engineering classrooms. It was dark and the hallways were lined with lockers used by freshmen and sophomores. It didn’t feel very welcoming or comfortable.

There were a few students waiting that day. They may have had the same issue. By the time I was called in lunch was half over. I asked the transportation officer why I was given a half fare pass. The woman had an impatient look and pulled my information from one of the filing cabinets, and then went to the map. She pointed. “See here? That's where you live. You're inside the half fair zone” Less than half a block away was a dark line, Spencer Street, marking where the full fare line began.

If I walked one block east and took the bus at the other stop, I'd be in the full fare zone which meant free bus pass. But since I lived half a block to the west of the line, I had to pay the half fare. Back then that would have been 50 cents – a dollar a day. When you're poor, that dollar means a lot. I remember my heart racing and getting angry and irritated. “Are you sure?” I asked. The lady said there was nothing she could do.

I missed lunch that day. I told my mom when I got home. She was surprised as I was. “Why did you get a full fare pass all these months?” I don't know. “They need to do something. This isn't right.” I don't know what to do. “We'll make it work. I can give you the money.” I felt like the principle behind it was the issue. This made no sense.

I went back. I’m not certain if it was the next day, but it was close in time. I talked with the transportation officer again. I’m adlibbing since I don’t remember the exact conversation. “You're telling me that because I am half a block away from the line, I now go from getting a full free ride, to needing to pay 50 cents or walking. So, let's think about this for a second. Regardless of how far I live from school, I still need to ride the bus, right?”

I didn’t know how to express it. Whether you live five miles away, or whether you live one or two miles away, you're still riding the bus. You still need that service. What's the logic behind charging a kid for a service that they need, especially since our tax dollars as New York City residents were paying for it?

My 14-year-old self knew that this was completely illogical. Either you need to ride the bus, or you don't. The walk to school was thirty minutes each way through not so safe streets. I lived 1.4 miles from Brooklyn Tech. I’d have to cross through Bedford-Stuyvesant, “do-or-die Beds-Stuy”, and Fort Greene before gentrification. I couldn’t avoid walking through Fort Greene Park even with the bus. If they would have given me a train pass, I could have avoided crossing that solitary park in the mornings. But at 1.4 miles, all I qualified was the half-fare pass. At 1.5 miles I would have gotten the full-fare pass but still no train pass.

That was the first moment in life when I started thinking about the ineffectiveness of government. How there are certain policies in place sometimes just to appease certain demographics. The transportation officer brought up the question, where was she supposed to draw the line? It must be drawn somewhere.

But then, why charge at all? Why does living between the half mile and 1.4 miles suddenly mean that you need to pay, regardless of your financial situation? It’s not like at 1.4 miles I magically have the option of walking and that at 1.5 miles I couldn’t.

She kept saying that there was nothing she could do. Rules are rules. I kept on about how we were talking about half a block. Half. A. Block.

I must have worn her out. She said that she’d make an exception, but that I couldn’t tell anyone and how much trouble she could get into for doing this.

Now as an adult I've paid for that bus fare probably a bazillion times over in taxes paid while living and working in New York City right after college. We as a community need to think about our priorities as a society. Why are you making your life difficult for these kids to go to school? Why are we putting up these kinds of dumb boundaries in place? These silly lines blocking somebody from getting their education.

At some point later that year, the pass changed back to half-fare. Things were a little better for us financially and it wasn’t as much of a struggle for mom to give me the few dollars that I needed to get to school. There was also a lot going on at that point at home. The battle wasn’t worth continuing.

Where do things stand?

I did some research to see if the half-fare policy is still in place. 

At one point in 2010 the MTA (Transit authority in NYC) was contemplating taking away all bus and train passes because of budget shortfalls. Students would be required to pay to get to school, making a free, public education not free any longer. 

The NY State Senate found the funding after student, teacher and MTA employee protests. Even with that, it was still contained the ridiculous half fare program. That changed in 2019 after students protested the ridiculousness of the policy. Reading commentary online, it’s amazing how many people call kids “lazy” for needing transportation. These people probably never had to walk over a mile to school in the cold or through dangerous neighborhoods. (Not necessarily uphill both ways)

It’s promising to see that these kinds of changes are happening. There will always be pushback, but over time a certain sense of awareness prevails. This is one reason why I don’t yearn for “the good ole days”, because from my experience, and for many others, those days weren’t all that great. We shouldn’t have pride in the cruelty of the past.