By Sarah Chen, 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, sits in the low double digits. The U.S. national peer average for similarly sized bus systems sits roughly twice as high. The structural choice that produced that gap is not an accident. It is the result of a deliberate fare cut in 2022 paired with an operating cost base that has not contracted with ridership.
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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 runs an active fleet of about 238 buses on a mix of diesel, compressed natural gas, and diesel-electric hybrid power. Most recent published operating expenses run in the $93 million range, with a much smaller revenue line on the fare side.
In 2018, Centro carried 10.3 million annual trips. As of mid-2024, ridership remained 25 to 30 percent below pre-pandemic levels even after a multi-year recovery. Centro reported in 2024 that May ridership had fallen by roughly 10,000 trips compared to May 2023, ending a streak of 35 consecutive months of year-over-year growth.
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 during the pandemic recovery. It is also the single largest structural reason Centro’s fare-recovery ratio is now well below the U.S. peer average. Cutting the headline fare in half while operating cost stays flat mechanically halves the contribution of fare revenue to operating expense.
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 CPI-adjusted real fare
One number worth running. Before the March 2022 cut, the Centro adult cash fare was $2. In 2014 dollars, that fare was worth approximately $2 in 2014 purchasing power. By 2026, $2 in 2014 dollars is worth roughly $2.65 in 2026 purchasing power, using cumulative CPI inflation of approximately 32 percent. The current $1 fare in 2026 represents about 38 cents in 2014 purchasing power.
Put differently: the headline fare collected today is worth, in real terms, less than a quarter of what Centro was charging 12 years ago. That is the fare gap, and it is the line item the federal aid was effectively backfilling.
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.
Sources: Federal Transit Administration National Transit Database (transit.dot.gov/ntd); 2024 NTD Annual Data Summary; Centro/CNYRTA website (centro.org); Wikipedia entry for Central New York Regional Transportation Authority; Eno Center for Transportation analysis of the transit fiscal cliff; New York State Comptroller Office press release on local government fiscal pressure (February 2025); Capital District Transportation Authority Route Performance Reports (FY24 and FY25); CNY Central reporting on Centro fare changes; TransitTalent reporting on the Centro CEO transition. Hero photo: Andre Carrotflower, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
