The Pros and Cons of Free Buses: Examining Zohran’s Proposal
Throughout the New York City mayoral campaign, one of Zohran Mamdani’s signature campaign slogans was “Fast and Free Buses.”
Who doesn’t love fast and free?
In 2024, New York’s buses moved at an average speed of just 7.8 mph, and there’s no doubt they should be faster. The mayor also has the tools to speed up those buses. But “free” buses is another story.
I’ve tried to absorb the key arguments both for and against this policy.
I’m drawing from the work of experts Charles Komanoff and Jarrett Walker. While this context is specific to New York City, many of the points apply to any city.
The Argument For Free Buses
In April 2025, Economist and policy analyst Charles Komanoff released a report titled, Eliminating NYC Transit Bus Fares: An Appraisal.
This report is what Zohran has referenced throughout his campaign. Here are the key benefits Komanoff argues for, along with some key numbers. To go deeper, I recommend reading the whole report.
It Will Save New Yorkers Money
This is the obvious one, right? Bus riders in New York are disproportionately working class. A $3 bus fare adds up to $30 a workweek, or $120 a month in transit fares if you’re commuting five days a week.
To New Yorkers already squeezed by a high cost of living, this matters. The median bus rider in NYC makes just $30,000 per year.
By Eliminating Fares, It Will Speed Up Buses
This is the key argument.
Komanoff argues that, without fare collection, it speeds up boarding in two ways.
- No line for fare collection
- Allowing all-door boarding, rather than just front-door boarding.
His analysis suggests this would speed up buses by 12%.
Faster Buses = Economic Benefits For Riders
Komanoff then argues that this time savings will save bus riders $670 million worth of time each year.
By Attracting Bus Riders, It Will Reduce Congestion and Traffic
The next core piece of the argument for free bus fares is that by making buses free and faster, more people will choose to take the bus instead of driving.
Komanoff writes, “elimination of bus fares leads to less driving and improved traffic speeds in the five boroughs.”
His analysis argues that there will be over 52 million more bus trips per year because the buses will be faster thanks to getting rid of the fare collection.
I can get behind this logic. If buses were faster, more frequent, and more reliable, fewer people would call a rideshare or drive a personal vehicle.
However, Komanoff admits that, “Among the people who will ride buses more if they are free, relatively few will be foregoing cars or cabs. Because of this dynamic, the advent of free bus service won’t make a big dent in overall city traffic volumes.”
But Komanoff asserts that this will have a positive impact on traffic. “Nevertheless, 16 million fewer trips a year in private cars and ride-hail vehicles isn’t peanuts,” he writes.
Less Congestion = Economic Benefits For Everyone
In addition to the time savings, Komanoff argues that there would be big economic benefits for New Yorkers and the region as a whole if buses were free.
- Environmental benefits from fewer cars. Less air pollution results in an array of obvious benefits for society, like fewer hospitalizations for things like asthma,
- New bus trips = more economic activity. Komanoff’s analysis suggests that with free buses, people will take trips to places they wouldn’t have previously, spending money at those places, generating economic activity.
- No costs for fare collection or enforcement. The MTA spends $35 million a year to equip the buses with fare collection equipment and to enforce it.
Adding all of this together is where the “$1.5 billion in economic benefits” comes from.
The Argument Against Free Buses
Now let’s get into the counterarguments.
A $600 Million- $1 Billion Gap in The MTA’s Budget Has to Get Made Up Somewhere
The other side of the coin to the obvious benefit of free buses is that, well, nothing’s really free. We as a society will still pay for the buses.
Zohran said throughout the campaign that the cost of free buses is $600 million per year. In their Report, A Better Billion, researchers at NYU argued this cost is closer to $1 billion per year
Free buses mean there will be a $600+ million gap in the MTA’s budget. That gap either must get made, or there must be cuts to the MTA.
I Would Rather Have an Extra $600 Million (or More) to Make the Buses Better
Mamdani says he’ll make up the $600 million dollars, as well as pay for other initiatives, with a 2% tax increase on New Yorkers making $1 million per year or more and with an increase to the corporate tax rate in New York State to 11.5%. (Which, Mamdani argues, isn’t that radical. It’s the same as New Jersey’s.)
Great. Not a bad idea to tax the rich. Tax ’em.
My rebuttal to that is that if we’re going to fight hard for these tax increases on the rich, which will no doubt be big fights, let’s improve the transit service instead. Let’s reimagine how good buses could be in New York City.
Use that money to have more frequency, more services, or to push for dedicated bus lanes that make buses move faster, regardless of the dwell time for fare payment.
(Or, as the Better Billion report argues, use that money to create new subway extensions.)
I fear that Mamdani is going to burn a lot of political capital on free buses when that money could be better spent on improving transportation. I think Mamdani’s response to this might be, “let’s do it all,” and that I’m presenting a false dichotomy. I suppose I am. But at the same time, public money is a finite resource.
Urban planner Jarrett Walker, whose book Human Transit is one of the clearest-thinking books out there on public transportation, echoed this kind of argument. He wrote in a Blusky thread, “The main reasons people don’t use public transit are that it isn’t useful: It isn’t frequent enough, reliable enough, or fast enough. Yes, the $2.90 fare will push some people away, but the bad service pushes away many, many more.”
Better Service = More of The Same Benefits As Free Buses
The argument for free buses hinges on reducing traffic congestion and incentivizing people to take the bus instead of a car.
Better buses would do this better than free buses.
Better buses would take even more cars off the road. Better buses would mean New Yorkers could get more places easier, leading to more economic benefits.
Buses should come more often so people can rely on them, especially for transfers. We know that transfers combined with low frequencies are a death sentence for public transportation. Nobody wants to wait 11 minutes to transfer from a train to a bus. We should invest in dedicated bus lanes. We should look at transit deserts in the boroughs and identify where poor bus service leads to people choosing cars.
Free Bus Fares Shift Subway Riders to the Bus
In an interview with Gothamist on this topic, Walker said that free buses “would create an enormous shift of ridership from the subway to the bus that’s running on top of it.”
Komanoff’s analysis confirms that free buses would lead move many subway riders to teh buses.
This isn’t good for a few reasons.
The Subways Move People More Efficiently
Subways are the backbone of NYC for a reason. They’re fast, high-capacity, and don’t compete with cars, bikes, and trucks for road space.
A subway train usually has 8-10 cars, each of which carries more people than a bus. And they move independently of street traffic, at speeds far faster than the buses.
If you incentivize people to take the bus instead of the train, you’re creating a less-efficient transportation network. It will take people longer to get places.
Free Buses Segregate The Transit System by Class
Walker argues free buses in New York “would encourage segregation of riders by class: poorest people on the bus while people with more money are on the subway, and that’s just the opposite of how transit maximizes access for everyone.”
Now I’m trending into complicated cultural territory, but here’s why this is not good.
If buses become the “free but slow” while subways are the “fast but expensive” mode for wealthier people, you’re creating a two-tiered system. The wealthy get places faster and reap the benefits of it.
(The country’s transit system in many places, based on who can and can’t afford a car, is already this way. We should not exacerbate it.)
I believe we risk making worse what’s already a cultural stigma: that buses are for poor people. In New York, class segregation is often along racial lines.
Expand The “Fair Fares” Program Instead
Again, I’ll echo Walker here. In his Blusky thread, he wrote, “I’ve come to feel that the best solution for affordability problems is one that’s targeted to the lowest-income people, rather than offering free fares for everyone.”
When you make buses free, the thousands of bus riders who have no problem paying the $2.90 fare get a tax break they don’t need.
Low-income New Yorkers already qualify for the “fair fares” program. However, many working-class people who no doubt could use the support do not qualify. Here are the qualifications right now.
Maybe with an extra $600 million, some of the money could go to helping more New Yorkers qualify for the “Fair Fares” program.
As it is today, only about half of bus riders pay the fare. The buses are already free if you want them to be, because bus drivers do not enforce the fare.
The costs of enforcing bus fares, with cops on duty specifically to roam bus lines, not only, I think penalizes being poor, it also costs taxpayers $35 million per year, according to Komanoff.
Expanded Fair Fares are a better solution for all of this. The rebuttal to this point is that Fair Fares is a bureaucratic challenge. I’ve heard firsthand from people who’ve gone through it, so it needs to be easier to get it if you qualify. (Riders Alliance has done advocacy around this point.)
Would More Bus Riders Slow The Buses Down?
I trust that Komanoff’s analysis would debunk my point here, but I’ll call it out nonetheless.
If New Yorkers shift to the bus because they’re free, does that mean the overcrowding takes away the projected 12% time increase due to getting rid of fares? I’ve seen buses load slowly regardless of fare payment because a lot of people get on and off, just as a busy subway dwells longer at stops.
If free buses don’t move faster, the argument for them collapses.
I think the logic here is that “all-door boarding” would make this easier. Again, I would ask how that’s different from a crowded subway.
What We Should Do Instead: My Opinion
Expanded Fair Fares
If $3.00 is the difference between being able to afford the commute or not, that person should qualify for help. But giving everyone free rides, including people who can afford the fare, is an inefficient way to achieve equity.
More Dedicated Bus Lanes: That’s What Makes Buses Fast
To be fair here to Zohran, he’s a huge supporter of this. His campaign has called for installing more than 30 miles of new bus lanes each year. This is where the biggest speed gains for buses come from. Dedicated lanes protect buses from getting stuck in general traffic, and they help ensure consistent, reliable service.
I write about this more, and how Zohran can do this as mayor, in this follow-up article.
More Bus Frequency
Buses in New York are often unreliable because they don’t come frequently enough. I already mentioned why this fails those who need to transfer.
If Zohran can unlock an extra $600 million for buses, I think most New Yorkers would rather that go to better service, rather than free service.
Can The NYC Mayor Even Make Buses Free? No, Not Really.
It’s also worth noting that the mayor of New York City doesn’t control the buses. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), a state agency, runs the city’s buses and subways. That means any plan to make buses free would have to go through the state, not just City Hall.
Free buses sound great, and they could bring meaningful benefits. But I think we would be better off investing in faster, more frequent, and more reliable service, and expanding programs to help the people who need the help.
But this a debate worth having.
What This Debate Means for Other Cities
While this conversation has focused on New York City, the core questions apply to many cities considering free bus proposals. The dynamics might look different depending on a city’s transit system, but the trade-offs are similar:
- How good is the bus service? In cities where buses are infrequent, unreliable, or stuck in traffic, free fares won’t fix them. As Jarrett Walker points out, people need transit that’s useful first and foremost.
- What’s the political will to fund and improve service? If free buses is a political costly battle, is it the battle to fight? What’s the risk-reward? What other campaigns now fall short?
- Is there an existing high-capacity rail or metro system? In places without a metro, buses often serve as the primary form of public transit. In these cases, free fares might boost ridership without triggering the subway-vs-bus tensions.
Ultimately, free bus debates force us to think hard about what kind of transit system we want: one that’s cheap, or one that’s truly excellent. Ideally, we should aim for both. Getting there means grappling with the real trade-offs.
More Controversial Transit Debates…
I don’t know why I keep inserting myself into these culture wars. I guess I just enjoy it.
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