Our Fifteen Cents' Worth

Today, the price of the T rises to a dollar and ends an era in Boston transportation history.

Raising Boston subway fares has always been an emotional affair. In 1948, a fare hike from ten to fifteen cents inspired one of the great folk songs of the 20th century, J. Steiner and Bess Lomax Hawes' "The MTA Song." The ballad tells the story of a man named Charlie who rides "forever 'neath the streets of Boston," without a nickel to pay the subway's new exit fare. Walter O'Brien, a Boston politician, used the tale of the famous "man who never returned" in his 1948 mayoral campaign, promising to repeal the fare hike and "get Charlie off the MTA."

Today, the MTA's successor, the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA), raises subway fares from 85 cents to one dollar. Even at a dollar the fare will remain one of the lowest in the nation, and the T's announcement of its first fare hike in almost a decade met only half-hearted protest from environmental and transportation advocacy groups.

Still, the passing of the 85-cent fare will have its place in the emotional history of the city. The price of a subway token, after all, is like the price of baseball cards or a gallon of milk: it's one of the measures by which each generation of Americans complains about the next. For every one of us, the day will come when we will catch ourselves reminiscing to our children--or maybe just to first-years --about the days when a T ride only cost 85 cents (and when the bleacher seats at old Fenway Park were only $16).

The fare hike, which also affects bus, commuter rail and ferry passengers, will mean an extra $46 million in operating revenue annually, according to MBTA estimates. The Authority says the money will be spent on natural gas-powered buses, new bus routes and various other T projects.

And so, in the name of inevitable progress, fades one of the quotidian figures of life in Boston. Thousands of stickers on token booths will be scraped away; hundreds of thousands of commuters will slowly forget the multiples of 85 cents. The city's quirky transportation system, its fares no longer quaintly nestled under the barrier of a dollar, rumbles into the 21st century.