Centro fare recovery: what CNY’s transit numbers actually show in 2026

Senior Reporter

The Central New York Regional Transportation Authority files an annual report with the Federal Transit Administration’s National Transit Database. The numbers in those filings tell a clean story.

Centro’s fare-recovery ratio, the share of operating costs covered by passenger fares, was 14.18 percent in the most recent filing. That is the FY2024 report year, which for this agency runs April 2023 through March 2024. It is the newest year the National Transit Database has published.

The common read on that number is that Centro halved its fare in 2022 and blew a hole in its own revenue. CNY Signal pulled the underlying NTD tables for Centro and for its two closest upstate peers and the data does not support that read. Fare revenue went up after the cut, not down, and the recovery ratio today is within two points of Rochester and Albany. The real gap is on the cost side, and it shows up per rider.

The numbers

Centro’s full legal name is the Central New York Regional Transportation Authority, abbreviated CNYRTA. The authority was formed on August 1, 1970 alongside three peer authorities chartered the same year: the Rochester Genesee Regional Transportation Authority, the Capital District Transportation Authority in Albany, and the Niagara Frontier Transportation Authority in Buffalo. Centro’s service area covers five upstate counties: Onondaga, Cayuga, Oswego, Oneida, and Cortland.

The agency reported 319 revenue vehicles to the NTD for FY2024: 231 buses, 42 cutaways and 39 automobiles, on a mix of diesel, compressed natural gas and diesel-electric hybrid power. Of those, 192 are operated in maximum service, 155 directly and 37 under purchased transportation contracts. Another 42 are service vehicles.

Total operating expenses for the year were $79,706,778, not the $93 million figure that circulates locally. The NTD breaks that into vehicle operations $41,905,193, vehicle maintenance $17,787,330, general administration $13,685,587 and facility maintenance $6,328,668. Passenger fare revenue was $11,303,820. Divide the second by the first and you get the 14.18 percent.

Ridership is 7,296,742 unlinked passenger trips for FY2024. Against the roughly 10.3 million trips Centro carried in 2018 that is 29.2 percent down, which matches the 25 to 30 percent shortfall the agency has described. What gets left out is the direction of travel. FY2022 was 5,050,975 trips. FY2023 was 6,685,285. FY2024 was 7,296,742. That is a 44.5 percent increase in two years.

Riders traveled 23,284,831 passenger miles, an average trip of 3.19 miles. Across a five-county service area of 641,357 people, that works out to 11.4 boardings per resident per year.

The fare structure

The current single-ride adult fare on city service is $1, set in March 2022. Before that, it was $2. The MAX day pass is $4 and the MAX weekly pass is $12. Commuter routes carry a higher fare structure of $3 per ride and $30 weekly. Seniors and persons with disabilities ride at a 50 percent discount.

The decision to cut the city fare from $2 to $1 in 2022 was framed at the time as a ridership-recovery move. The intuitive conclusion is that halving the fare halved the fare revenue. The filings say otherwise.

Centro collected $10,206,456 in passenger fares in FY2022, the last report year that was mostly priced at $2. In FY2023, the first full year at $1, it collected $10,421,845. In FY2024 it collected $11,303,820. Fare revenue is 10.8 percent higher than it was before the cut.

The reason is volume. Average fare collected per boarding fell from $2.02 in FY2022 to $1.56 in FY2023 and $1.55 in FY2024, which is roughly what you would predict from a $2 to $1 change once commuter zones, day passes, MAX passes and paratransit fares are folded in. But boardings rose 44.5 percent over the same stretch. A 23 percent drop in yield per rider against a 44 percent rise in riders is a net gain.

Meanwhile the recovery ratio itself barely moved and then improved: 13.95 percent in FY2022, 13.28 percent in FY2023, 14.18 percent in FY2024. If the fare cut were the structural hole in Centro’s budget, that line would be falling. It is not.

How Centro compares to its three sister authorities

The Capital District Transportation Authority in Albany runs a base cash fare of $1.50 with BusPlus rapid service at $2. CDTA has been the standout among the four 1970-era New York transit authorities: ridership in calendar year 2024 reached close to 14 million boardings system-wide, and CDTA crossed pre-pandemic levels.

The Rochester Genesee Regional Transportation Authority, which operates RTS, has trended in a different direction. RTS has been replacing fixed-route service with on-demand microtransit on lower-performing routes, including a recent 132-vehicle on-demand partnership with The Routing Company. Lower-performing fixed routes are being absorbed by a smaller, app-dispatched fleet, which restructures the fare-recovery math rather than fighting it head-on.

The Niagara Frontier Transportation Authority in Buffalo combines bus, light rail, and Buffalo-Niagara Falls airport operations under one umbrella, which makes its fare-recovery ratio harder to compare directly to a pure-bus operator like Centro.

Among the four, Centro is the system that responded to the post-COVID environment by cutting the headline fare and absorbing a structural revenue gap.

The federal pandemic-aid cliff

Three rounds of federal transit relief during the pandemic put roughly $69.5 billion into U.S. transit operating budgets: $25 billion under the CARES Act in March 2020, $14 billion under CRRSAA in December 2020, and $30.5 billion under the American Rescue Plan in March 2021. That money is gone or close to it. The Eno Center for Transportation, the Regional Plan Association, and the New York State Comptroller have all published the same warning over the last 18 months: the pandemic-relief cushion ends in fiscal 2025 to fiscal 2027 for most agencies, and most agencies have not closed their structural deficits.

For Centro, the implication is direct. The fare cut was politically defensible while federal aid filled the gap. Once federal aid runs out, the question becomes which line covers the difference: state aid, county subsidy, fare hike, or service cut.

State and local subsidy

The biggest single source of operating support for Centro outside of the federal pipeline is the New York State Mass Transit Operating Assistance program, known as STOA, administered by the New York State Department of Transportation. STOA is funded by a dedicated package of state taxes and is allocated by formula. Onondaga County is the largest local subsidy contributor among Centro’s five counties.

Both lines are the relief valve when fare revenue cannot cover operating cost. Both lines are politically harder to expand in a year when state and county budgets are themselves tightening.

Leadership and the search

Centro’s CEO chair was vacant for most of 2024 and into 2025. Brian Schultz, who had led the authority since 2020, went on medical leave in October 2023 and formally separated in January 2024. Christopher Tuff, previously deputy CEO and a former bus driver, served as interim CEO and was named permanent CEO in May 2025 after a nationwide search led by TransPro Consulting.

That 18-month leadership gap covered the period during which the fare-recovery question moved from a policy debate to a structural fact. The new permanent CEO is now the person who has to either close the gap or surface it to the board and to the five-county legislature delegations that fund the local subsidy.

The number that actually matters is cost per rider

Fare recovery is a ratio, and a ratio hides which side is moving. Break it into dollars per boarding and the picture changes.

Centro spends $10.92 to carry one passenger one trip. The rider covers $1.55 of that. The other $9.37 comes from Albany, from Washington, and from the five county governments. RTS in Rochester spends $10.60 per trip and covers $1.66 from the farebox, leaving $8.94 in subsidy. CDTA in Albany spends $8.10 and collects $1.30, leaving $6.80.

So the fare-recovery spread between Centro at 14.18 percent and CDTA at 16.04 percent is under two points, but the subsidy spread is $2.57 per boarding. On 7.3 million trips that is $18.8 million a year of difference in what the public pays to run the same kind of service.

The productivity numbers say where it comes from. Centro runs 457,282 vehicle revenue hours and 5,842,574 vehicle revenue miles a year, at $174.31 per revenue hour and $13.64 per revenue mile. CDTA runs $137.61 per hour and $9.84 per mile. Boardings per revenue hour are close, 16.0 at Centro against 17.0 at CDTA, so Centro is not carrying dramatically fewer people per bus-hour. It is paying more for the bus-hour.

One caveat a careful reader should hold onto. Centro’s NTD filing consolidates its Cayuga, Oswego and Oneida county subsidiaries into a single report. RGRTA’s Rochester filing does not; its seven county subsidiaries report under separate NTD numbers. Centro’s figures therefore carry rural, low-density service that Rochester’s headline number does not. The Albany comparison is the cleaner of the two.

What the board has to decide

The structural choice is now narrow. Either Centro absorbs further service cuts to bring operating cost down to the new revenue base, or it reverses the 2022 fare cut, or it goes back to Onondaga County and Albany for a larger annual subsidy. Some combination is the most likely outcome. None of the options are politically free.

The first thing to watch is the FY26 budget package the new CEO presents to the board. The second is whether the five-county legislature delegations sign on to a subsidy increase, and whether any of them push back against funding a service whose ridership is still well below 2018 levels.