Rural Republican legislators in Annapolis are pressuring the Maryland Transit Administration to hike the base fare of Baltimore public transit significantly, from $1.60 to $2.15 – or even higher.

Though the O’Malley administration promises nothing will change right away, at least not in 2010, just the prospect of increasing bus and MARC train costs — during a time when wages are going anywhere but up — has Baltimore bus and rail riders worried.

“I have four kids who catch the bus and I think its ridiculous,” said Laura Jackson, a Hampden hairstylist who says she takes the 27 bus downtown because gas prices are high and she doesn’t want to pay for parking. When Jackson was a teenager, the bus cost fifteen cents. Now, she says, “Everyone’s raising everything, but no one’s getting raises.”

If instated, the increase would be the first since 2003. MTA Administrator Ralign T. Wells told the Sun that this time around, the MTA will “look inside our own house before we look outside” in its attempt to save money. If the transit agency does decide to implement a higher fare, however, it would have a large impact on many public transit riders, several told the Brew today..

Waiting for the #27 bus across the street from the Royal Farms on “The Avenue,” longtime Hampden resident Steven Deems said that every day for the past five years he has taken two buses to get to and from physical therapy on Gay Street, an hour-and-a-half round-trip commute.

“Oh my God. Wait ’til I tell the people around here – They’re going to love this,” said Deems of his neighbors’ reactions to a fare hike, many of whom live in a nearby retirement home. Deems said that if the MTA does raise the fare, he will no longer take the bus. “I’d find physical therapy that was closer,” he said.

Derryl Wilks, who has taken the bus, usually the #3, for the last three to four years, is one rider who said he would continue to ride the bus, even if fares went up.

“Considering I have no other vehicle, I’m afraid I’d have to,” said Wilks, who usually rides the bus downtown for doctors appointments three to four times a week, but spoke to the Brew outside the Baltimore Housing Community Action Center on York Road. “I wouldn’t like it but would have to live with it.”

Many riders protest a higher fare in and of itself, while others find fault with the MTA’s reasoning behind using a fare hike to recover costs. Riders have long complained about broken fare boxes, arguing that increased fares would be unjust because if they could pay, they would.

“We don’t have a wide-scale issue with our fare boxes,” countered MTA spokesperson Jawauna Greene. Greene says that even if no fare boxes were broken and all riders paid for each trip, it wouldn’t generate enough revenue to compensate for the costs that need to be recovered. Furthermore, says Greene, the MTA has “done a number of upgrades” and simply doesn’t get “100 percent of the expenses [they] put out.”

“We do need our fare boxes to be working,” she said. To that end, Greene says the MTA is taking measures to remedy fare box malfunctions, which she says were problem in the beginning but have improved over the years. There are a number of reasons the boxes break, explained Greene—everything from jams to the boxes being overly stuffed with money. As a result, Greene says the MTA has made a large effort to improve employee education and protocol, ranging from employees vaulting every night (emptying the box), to requiring drivers to immediately report malfunctions so that the MTA can immediately dispatch onsite repairs on the street.