While Woodside was not included in the announcement, the fare would be reduced enough to cause a hold down fare at Woodside, and maybe Forest Hills and Kew Gardens (the zone 1-zone 1 monthly cost is expected to shoot up to to $197 next month, which would be more than the discounted monthly rate from stations further out in Queens).
The reductions, which also include additional funding for increased express bus service and improved first/last mile connections, will be paid out of the $50 million Outer Borough Transit Fund established in the FY 2019 state budget as a result of the new congestion surcharge on taxi and TNC vehicle trips operating in Manhattan below 96th Street.
Specific details on the implementation of the discount, such as the effective date, applicability to other portions of the system, or any other strings the MTA or LIRR might attach are not yet known. The MTA declined amNY's request for comment.
While fare discounts are great (ConnDOT's fare reductions in the 1990's led to marked increases in both ridership and revenue), the MTA continues to go about this in all of the wrong ways. Instead of coming up with a comprehensive plan to address inefficiency and waste on the railroads to cut costs and reduce fares for everyone across the board, we keep seeing these hodgepodge of sloppy, limited discount programs for select groups of people with confusing and restrictive conditions. CityTicket is still limited to weekend trains only at NYC stations with a host of strings attached, the Atlantic Ticket pilot program only applies for stations seven stations in eastern Queens to/from Brooklyn stations, and only covers one-way and weekly tickets...and now this scheme now only applies to monthly tickets at a select handful of stations (which will now become an awkward subset of zone 3, since a Bayside-New York one-way ticket would be valid to any station in Queens, but a monthly presumably won't).
Without trying to minimize the dearth of transit options in eastern and northeast Queens, I struggle to see how places like Bayside, Hollis, or Rosedale are any more "transit deserts" than places like Westbury, Amityville, or Bay Shore which continue to have to pay skyrocketing LIRR fares... This entire region is short on transportation services, and the MTA has failed to keep up with growing demand. Spending the next decade conjuring up a hundred different one-off discount programs for each individual subregion or legislative district is not going to address the real problems at the core of the LIRR's burgeoning value crisis. Fares across Long Island (and the Hudson Valley) need to be brought much more in line with what peer systems elsewhere charge, and what people can afford. Runaway fare increases (unless your enclave of the region can bargain a one-off discount) will only continue to weaken ridership and the region's economy overall.
