Voters and Experts on Zohran Mamdani’s Free Bus Promise

Photo: Laura Brett/ZUMA/Reuters

The price of a subway ride in New York City might go up to $3 by the end of this year. But a bus ride? If Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for mayor, is able to accomplish one of the cornerstones of his campaign, that could drop to zero. It’s something New York has already tried at a small scale, in part thanks to Mamdani himself, who spearheaded an effort to include a fare-free bus pilot in the state budget in 2023.

The pilot, which cost $15 million, ran on one route in each borough: the Bx18 in the Bronx, the B60 in Brooklyn, the M116 in Manhattan, the Q4 in Queens, and the S46/96 on Staten Island. Then everything came to an unceremonious stop last September, after just one year, even as Mamdani sought to expand it to three lines per borough. The pilot reportedly ended because he planned to vote against the last state budget to squash a housing-policy item he felt favored landlords, according to previous reporting in this magazine, and Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie pulled free buses in retaliation. But reps for Mamdani and Heastie both denied this.

A few days after the primary, I asked voters in Brooklyn and Queens neighborhoods, where many residents depend on buses, what they thought of Mamdani’s big campaign promise. There were a fair number of skeptics. “People don’t pay for the bus half the time,” said James, a Midwood resident waiting for a bus in Williamsburg who declined to give his last name. He said he voted for Mamdani anyway because he’s an immigrant with an “out-of-the-box” style. Others wondered where an agency already paying nearly $20 billion annually to run transit service would get the money. “It would be nice, but it’s not gonna happen,” said Cora Robertson, a resident of South Jamaica, Queens. She had voted for Adrienne Adams. “Transit’s already losing too much money,” she said, “and they’re not gonna put up with that.”

Last July, the MTA gave the pilot middling marks in its assessment of the fare-free pilot, noting that it didn’t actually lead to an increase in bus speeds. Plus the agency lost revenue when it could hardly afford to. MTA leaders also worried the pilot sent “the wrong message” to riders at a time when the MTA is dealing with a massive fare-evasion problem: Nearly half of all bus riders are already dodging the $2.90 charge, and the agency is losing some $800 million per year to fare beating.

But look at the data another way, and you could call it a success. According to the same MTA data, ridership grew on the five bus lines by up to 38 percent (which partly explains why bus speeds didn’t increase; they were accommodating more riders), and many riders were switching from personal automobiles or taxis to public transit. Assaults on bus drivers decreased by nearly 20 percent. What’s more, the largest increase in ridership came from New Yorkers making less than $28,000 per year. “The data we have is their data, so I don’t know how they can call it a dud,” said state Senator Michael Gianaris, the prime sponsor of the pilot in Albany’s upper chamber and a fellow representative of Mamdani’s Astoria.

So what would it take to eliminate fares on all 6,000 of New York City’s buses? A spokesperson for Mamdani said the program would cost about $700 million annually — not an insignificant amount, though not a “budget buster,” as Gianaris put it, especially compared to the $115 billion city budget Mamdani might preside over as mayor.

It’s also not an action he can take by himself. Bus fares are set by the MTA, a state agency functionally controlled by the governor. Should he win in November, Mamdani would have to go hat in hand to Albany and beg state lawmakers to raise taxes on the state’s wealthiest residents — something Governor Kathy Hochul has resisted during prior budget negotiations even though the legislative houses embrace it. “The governor doesn’t support it at all, so the question becomes how far do we get in negotiations,” said Gianaris, the Senate’s deputy majority leader. “But there’s typically a deference to the mandate a new mayor has,” he continued, pointing to the universal pre-K program championed by Bill de Blasio and that Andrew Cuomo, who was then governor (and who was roundly defeated by Mamdani in the primary), eventually found the funds for from existing revenue. Gianaris said $700 million in annual funding could likely be found for free bus service, though Mamdani’s $7 billion universal child-care proposal would certainly necessitate a tax increase.

At least New York — which already runs some permanently free transit, like the Staten Island Ferry and the LaGuardia Link bus — would not be the first. Other cities have tested free buses, from Kansas City to Albuquerque, but none were close to New York’s scale, says Jarrett Walker, a transportation consultant and author who has helped design bus networks around the world. New York sees about 1.3 million bus rides every day, more than Kansas City sees in an entire month, per statistics from both cities’ transit agencies. A few larger cities have piecemeal free transit — like Boston’s ongoing fare-free pilot on three routes serving low-income neighborhoods, which Mamdani has said inspired his own push, or Miami’s network of free trolleys — as part of larger paid transit networks.

Still, Walker thinks a fare-free system would be a mistake. By not collecting fares — hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth in New York’s case — the city would essentially be deteriorating the quality of its bus service, he said. “Money we spend on not charging fares is money we’re not gonna spend on service,” said Walker. “Free transit tends to correlate with transit that’s not very good and not very useful for that reason.”

Washington, D.C., was a case study in this exact scenario. The city voted to make all its buses free in 2023. Lawmakers in the nation’s capitol proposed pumping more than $100 million to do that — but the funding would come from diverting money that was earmarked for a “transitway” along busy K Street to improve service there. The city opted to delay the fare-free project anyway at WMATA’s urging; the money instead went partially into new overnight bus service. It was “exactly the kind of tradeoff between free fares and service quality that free fare advocates insist won’t happen,” said David Zipper, a senior fellow at MIT’s Mobility Initiative, adding it was “inescapable.”

Otherwise, we have to look outside the U.S. to see what fare-free systems actually end up achieving. Tallinn, Estonia’s capitol, which made transit free in 2013, has not seen automobile traffic go down, which suggests that waiving fares might not draw people out of their cars. However, Luxembourg, which became the first country on Earth with fully free transit in 2020, has seen dips in both car trips and carbon emissions. A mixed record, in other words.

What Mamdani as mayor could have more direct input on is speeding up buses — that is improving service. He could go on a blitz of constructing new bus lanes via the DOT, which had built 164 total miles as of last summer that sped up commutes by an average of 10 percent, according to the MTA. When measuring the effect of busways, which almost completely restrict auto traffic from bus lanes, that number increases to 20 percent. While the city is under a legal mandate, through the 2019 Streets Master Plan, to build 30 miles of new bus lanes each year, Mayor Adams hasn’t come close to that benchmark. Last year he built just 13.5 miles, and the year before just 5.2. Mamdani said in a March AMA on the MicroMobilityNYC subreddit that he intends to “meet the current Streets Master Plan’s mandates and go beyond them.”

It’s a small piece of an ambitious vision to make the city more affordable that certainly has some bus riders excited. Clare Suraleigh, a nanny from East New York, said Mamdani’s free bus proposal was one of the ideas that convinced her to vote for him. She recalled the months during the pandemic when the MTA stopped collecting bus fares to protect drivers from the virus — and how it made for a faster, hassle-free commute.

“I mean, nothing is really free,” Suraleigh told me as she waited for a bus in Williamsburg, her clients’ three kids in tow. “But if it can get me to work faster, less harassment, I’m willing to give him a chance.”