Here's exactly how much the price of a New York City subway ride has changed over the last 100 years
On March 22, the price of a single New York City subway or bus ride increased from $2.50 to $2.75 per ride, reports CBS News.
The New York Post points out that this is the fifth price increase in the past eight years.
ABC News published a fare breakdown by the Associated Press listing every increase in the past 111 years, since the subway opened in 1904.
Here are those 22 increases in chart form, from the original 5-cent fare to the current $2.75.
When you adjust those numbers for inflation, however, they get a little more interesting.
While the above chart shows a steady rise to today's price, the inflation-adjusted chart below shows the fare growing in fits and starts, even dipping in the late '70s. When you're looking at a difference of $2.70 over a century with an average historical 3% rate of inflation every year, it turns out that the fare hasn't risen as much as the unadjusted graph would indicate. The cost of a subway ride has risen from about $1.20 in 2015 dollars in the early 20th century to $2.75 today.
Note that the adjustments for inflation are imperfect because the first government inflation data available from the Bureau of Labor Statistics via the St. Louis Fed's FRED database is from 1913, and because March data isn't yet available (we used January 2015 dollars).
