Still, It Has A Nice Jingle: “Ten-Trip, Pay-Per-Ride, Still A Steal At Seventeen Thirty-Nine”

The MTA buttresses the penny lobby with its latest fare hike:

The MTA is rolling out a 10-trip, pay-per-ride MetroCard — with a peculiar price: $17.39

And the agency will soon start selling a 30-trip pay-per-ride with a $52.17 price tag.

The move is intended to provide an easy-math option for riders wanting to buy cash-based bonus MetroCards with a specific amount of trips — and no spare change in value.

Another reason: MetroCard vending machines can provide only limited types of change.

But one transit worker dubbed the options “wacko.They just look odd.”

Another worker quipped, “This is going to put the Board of Education to the ultimate test.”

Under the scheme, the $2 fare remains the same but the easy-math 20% bonus — buy five trips and get a sixth free — is being reduced to 15%.

That means a rider who gives a token booth clerk $8 will get a card with four trips — and $1.20 remaining toward the future purchase of another ride. MetroCards can be refilled at vending machines and booths.

The 10-trip oddball card — providing 10 subway or local bus rides, and free transfers — equates to $20 in value for $17.39.

The 30-trip oddball amounts to $60 in value — for $52.17.

That Thugs Masquerading As Goo-Goos Can Pull This Off Says Something About The Regulatory Atmosphere In This City

You mean you don’t know who the Committee on Contract Compliance is? Pay up:

[T]wo thoroughly modern shakedown artists have been successfully looting hundreds of construction sites around the city — using little more than a pair of hardhats, a couple of official-looking clipboards and a cellphone, prosecutors said yesterday.

“These guys were pretty sophisticated,” Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau said as he announced the indictment of alleged enlightened extortionists Anthony Lewis and Kyle Correll.

The alleged scheme started back in 2005 for Lewis, 38, of Brownsville, Brooklyn – an ex-con swindler weighing some 400 pounds — and his accused sidekick Correll, 36, of Far Rockaway, Queens.

That’s when the two decided to incorporate themselves as “The Committee on Contract Compliance.”

They had hardhats lettered — in blue — with the bogus but important-sounding name. They carried clipboards and video cameras.

Thus outfitted, prosecutors said, the hard-hatted hoods would show up at small construction sites around town, targeting mostly Asian and Middle Eastern operations, tooling around in Lewis’ Lincoln Navigator and hitting as many as a dozen a day.

“We’re the Committee on Contract Compliance,” they’d allegedly announce to the site foreman. “You have serious safety violations. Hand us some cash, and we won’t shut you down.”

Some forked over a couple of hundred dollars immediately, to make the nuisance go away. Go jump in a lake, many of their other targets would respond, easily realizing the pair had no governmental affiliation.

That’s when Lewis would allegedly get on his cellphone and start dialing city and federal agencies.

Lewis and Correll had learned the right vocabulary, how to report just the kind of false violation that would get a firetruck, a cop car or a regulator to descend on the site immediately, said DA investigations chief Daniel Castleman.

The resulting inspection would shut down the job at a ruinous cost. That’s when Lewis and Correll would show up again, prosecutors said — asking the frantic victims if they had thought things over. More likely than not, the victims had.

Victims forked over anywhere from $300 to $10,000, prosecutors said.

The Fake Prada Window Shopping Theory Of Policing

Do the police need something to do? Because doing the fashion industry’s dirty work seems like it has little to do with public safety*:

Cops launched a massive predawn raid on counterfeiters in Chinatown yesterday, seizing about $1 million in phony brand-name apparel.

Sunglasses, watches and handbags with fake Coach, Prada and Rolex labels were taken from 32 stores in what Mayor Bloomberg called “one of the biggest takedowns ever of trademark counterfeiters.”

“It has been one of the most notorious knock-off shopping malls in the five boroughs,” Bloomberg said of the three-building strip along Canal Street.

*And this link to public safety seems like a stretch for the NYPD to make.

For The Assignment Desk . . .

The question remains how you get trains off an island:

They were a vision in disco-era orange and yellow when they debuted in the 1970s, subway cars to put a smile on the face of the most jaded New York straphanger.

A bunch were delivered in 1973 to Staten Island, where they became the workhorses of the railway.

They’re still reliable and mechanically sound. But all this time later, the cars are as dowdy as leisure suits and as passe as The Hustle.

To buy more time before new cars are purchased some five to eight years from now, the 64-car Staten Island Railway fleet is scheduled for an upgrade.

An $11 million mini-overhaul is planned to spruce up the floors and seats, repair leaky ceiling panels to prevent soaked bottoms, and beef up the climate-control system.

Later this year, the cars will taken two at a time to New York City Transit’s Coney Island maintenance shop in Brooklyn. Each pair will stay in the shop for about a week, and the entire fleet should be rehabbed over 12 months.

Ad It Up, And It’s A Great Deal For The City

If it’s such a good idea then of course you’ll need a $500,000 ad campaign to get the word out:

Supporters of the plan to charge drivers entering Manhattan below 60th Street launched a $500,000 ad blitz yesterday.

Congestion-pricing backers are posting 15,000 advertisements in subways and launching print and television campaigns, all promoting a pledge that the revenues raised will be used for mass transit.