In his campaign to become mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani promised free buses. Can – and should – it be done?
Zohran Mamdani’s offer to New Yorkers
A new day has dawned in New York City. So says Zohran Mamdani, the newly minted mayor-elect who will take office on New Year’s Day 2026. Keeping up the theme of all things ‘new’, he will move into City Hall with a list of radical ideas to make the world’s best city better still – some of which you may have seen… in the news.
With small-screen viral star power that made the big screens of Times Square look quaint, Mamdani’s message was extremely disciplined and resonant. His three big pledges were: universal. pre-kindergarten childcare, freezing rents for more than two million New Yorkers, and making the slowest buses in the United States fast and free. If I lived in the Big Apple, I’d have voted for the first two without hesitation. Only the third item on the wish list would have given me pause for thought.
I confess: I find free travel a hard sell. Same goes for artificially capped fares. Not because I enjoy paying over the odds for a depleted service (single fares have now crossed the £3 Rubicon here in Dundee, with no sign of pre-Covid frequencies coming back despite buses that are often crowded) – but precisely because I’d prefer buses to offer better value.
And therein lies my reservation: ‘better value’ doesn’t mean ‘free’ or even ‘cheap’. It means delivering a service or product of such quality that it’s worth paying for. And I’m sorry to say that spending hundreds of millions on temporary inducements (read: giveaways) is not the way to achieve that. Not if you want the benefit it generates to last, at least.
Look no further than patronage fizzling as the English fare cap jumped from £2 to £3. A sweet deal was diluted, and it was blown out of proportion as a 50% hike (even though most fares landed well below the new cap, and longer-distance journeys remain cheaper than ever). Many recent converts took a less rosy look at buses that are slow, delayed and crowded and decided the proposition was no longer worth it; a bubble that burst as quickly as it was inflated.
Similarly, a recent report by Young Scot found that retention among people aging out of the free travel scheme for under-22s is poor – especially in rural areas where money would probably be better spent on making sure there’s a bus to use at all. Nationally, more than six-in-ten stop choosing the bus when it’s no longer free. Anecdotally, a cousin of mine is already planning to repurpose that slot in his wallet for a driving licence once the bus pass gets tossed in the bin. Mind you, the report did point out that two-thirds of 22-year-olds at least consider hopping on the bus before jumping in the car… but what they do is more important than what they say.
In New York, the annual price tag of Mamdani’s free bus plan is $700m. In the context of a municipal budget worth well over $100bn (yes, that’s ‘bn’), it’s hardly extravagant. Put another way: for every dollar forked out by City Hall, free buses would cost about half a penny. My contention isn’t that it’s too expensive – but rather that it puts emphasis on the wrong thing, and risks tying the city’s hands in future. $700m spent abolishing fares is $700m not spent on higher frequencies, quicker journeys, fewer delays, newer vehicles, more staff, or better wages.
$700m spent abolishing fares is $700m not spent on higher frequencies, quicker journeys, fewer delays, newer vehicles, more staff, or better wages
That sum could boost NYC’s network-wide PVR by roughly 10% (400 buses!) meaning existing routes could run more often, earlier in the morning and later at night – or new routes could better serve so-called ‘transit deserts’ in the outer boroughs. Alternatively, it could fund another 35 priority corridors that emulate the success of Manhattan’s 14th Street busway – which incurred a one-time cost of $20m when it was installed, but which still yields significant benefits (namely time savings of up to 10 minutes, plus a 15% ridership boost) for one of the city’s busiest routes five years later. Extra demand generated by genuine enhancements is much more sticky – and far less fickle – than anything enticed by a literal free-for-all. One is a proper investment; the other is a populist intervention.
New Yorkers currently pay a flat fare of $2.90 (about £2.20), with a weekly cap kicking in after 12 trips, for both the bus and the subway. If you were forced to choose: would you rather pay for a bus that runs reliably every 10 minutes – or hitch a free ride on one that allegedly comes every half-hour?
Any fiscal decision inevitably raises the question of sustainability. Assuming operational inflation of 2-3%, something that costs $700m this year will cost another $15-20m next year. To cover that, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) may raise the fare by 10 cents. Ask any primary school maths teacher, however, and they’ll tell you that adding 3% to zero is… still zero. Of course, the ideal solution would be relying on higher footfall to raise enough revenue to freeze fares – or at least keep hikes to a minimum. But, again, ask that same teacher and they’ll tell you, even if you miraculously doubled patronage with the impossible-to-resist allure of free travel, zero multiplied by two is… also still zero.
The Mamdani Administration must therefore eventually contemplate raising taxes (Americans famously love that), cutting services (which would defeat the purpose of this entire enterprise), or taking away the giveaway. The outcome would likely be a combination of all three, resulting in yet another induction to New York’s infamous City Hall of Shame: Mamdani would become the latest in a 400-year list of mayors who fell short of long-shot promises.
Mind you, that headache is a distant one at best: he might not even get as far as introducing the scheme, let alone struggling to sustain it. Like most things in New York, transit is tangled up in the labyrinthine web
of bureaucracy that lies between the city and the state. It’s a tough track to navigate, even when the mayor and the governor are on the same page. Take congestion pricing: it’s paying off now, but it took almost 20 gruelling years to happen – with Governor Kathy Hochul being against it, then for it, then opposed again at the eleventh hour, in favour once more at the twelfth, and now its fiercest defender against kingly overreach from a president who wants to kill it.
A similar affliction has hampered plans for an Interborough Express light rail between Brooklyn and Queens, which was first mooted a generation ago in 1996, and the Second Avenue Subway – the first phase of which opened in 2017… despite gaining approval a year before ground was broken on the Empire State Building!
In the depths of Covid, the MTA found itself staring down the barrel of an annual deficit of $2.5bn. Five years later, the budget is finally balanced. City bureaucrats and state legislators will be loath to plunge their blue and white buses back into the red – and they definitely won’t tolerate anything that eats into a subway system that has long been starved of investment.
When pressed about Mamdani’s plan shortly after the election, Hochul demurred. She said she couldn’t imagine eliminating fares entirely – but has since opened the door to ‘conversations’ on affordability. As a humble transatlantic spectator, I suppose the lesson there is: pick your battles. If he can get Albany on board with making buses better, that’s a win. In the fractious world of New York politics, anything on transit that doesn’t morph into a decades-long deadlock would be generational wizardry.
Bringing it back to our side of the pond, it’s a debate well worth observing and reflecting on. In England, there is lots of good work to make buses better – backed by a multi-billion, multi-year settlement from the UK Government. Weaning off the fare cap and shifting focus onto punctuality, frequency, travel time and fleet quality – along with using sticks to beat car dependency – is more likely to deliver long-lasting behavioural change than a short-term discount. After all: we don’t just want people to take the bus, we need them to ditch the car.
Scotland is the cautionary tale England and New York should actively avoid. The Scottish Government will tell you it splashes hundreds of millions of pounds on buses. But the vast majority of that is committed to free passes for the two-thirds of bus users who are already least likely (or simply not allowed) to drive. And those stuck in the middle find themselves squeezed even more: our taxes pay for everyone else’s freebies whilst we’re also charged inflated fares to make up the shortfall from cut-rate reimbursements to operators. And we are stuck using buses that are only getting slower. It’s a joke that’s more gut-punch than punchline.
Nothing in life is free. As ever, it’s a question of who pays – and what they get to show for it.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Marc Winsland is principal consultant – bus operations at SYSTRA. He was previously commercial manager at bus operator Xplore Dundee.
This story appears inside the latest issue of Passenger Transport.
Should buses be free – or worth paying for?
by Passenger Transport on Dec 12, 2025 • 2:39 pm No CommentsIn his campaign to become mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani promised free buses. Can – and should – it be done?
A new day has dawned in New York City. So says Zohran Mamdani, the newly minted mayor-elect who will take office on New Year’s Day 2026. Keeping up the theme of all things ‘new’, he will move into City Hall with a list of radical ideas to make the world’s best city better still – some of which you may have seen… in the news.
With small-screen viral star power that made the big screens of Times Square look quaint, Mamdani’s message was extremely disciplined and resonant. His three big pledges were: universal. pre-kindergarten childcare, freezing rents for more than two million New Yorkers, and making the slowest buses in the United States fast and free. If I lived in the Big Apple, I’d have voted for the first two without hesitation. Only the third item on the wish list would have given me pause for thought.
I confess: I find free travel a hard sell. Same goes for artificially capped fares. Not because I enjoy paying over the odds for a depleted service (single fares have now crossed the £3 Rubicon here in Dundee, with no sign of pre-Covid frequencies coming back despite buses that are often crowded) – but precisely because I’d prefer buses to offer better value.
And therein lies my reservation: ‘better value’ doesn’t mean ‘free’ or even ‘cheap’. It means delivering a service or product of such quality that it’s worth paying for. And I’m sorry to say that spending hundreds of millions on temporary inducements (read: giveaways) is not the way to achieve that. Not if you want the benefit it generates to last, at least.
Look no further than patronage fizzling as the English fare cap jumped from £2 to £3. A sweet deal was diluted, and it was blown out of proportion as a 50% hike (even though most fares landed well below the new cap, and longer-distance journeys remain cheaper than ever). Many recent converts took a less rosy look at buses that are slow, delayed and crowded and decided the proposition was no longer worth it; a bubble that burst as quickly as it was inflated.
Similarly, a recent report by Young Scot found that retention among people aging out of the free travel scheme for under-22s is poor – especially in rural areas where money would probably be better spent on making sure there’s a bus to use at all. Nationally, more than six-in-ten stop choosing the bus when it’s no longer free. Anecdotally, a cousin of mine is already planning to repurpose that slot in his wallet for a driving licence once the bus pass gets tossed in the bin. Mind you, the report did point out that two-thirds of 22-year-olds at least consider hopping on the bus before jumping in the car… but what they do is more important than what they say.
In New York, the annual price tag of Mamdani’s free bus plan is $700m. In the context of a municipal budget worth well over $100bn (yes, that’s ‘bn’), it’s hardly extravagant. Put another way: for every dollar forked out by City Hall, free buses would cost about half a penny. My contention isn’t that it’s too expensive – but rather that it puts emphasis on the wrong thing, and risks tying the city’s hands in future. $700m spent abolishing fares is $700m not spent on higher frequencies, quicker journeys, fewer delays, newer vehicles, more staff, or better wages.
That sum could boost NYC’s network-wide PVR by roughly 10% (400 buses!) meaning existing routes could run more often, earlier in the morning and later at night – or new routes could better serve so-called ‘transit deserts’ in the outer boroughs. Alternatively, it could fund another 35 priority corridors that emulate the success of Manhattan’s 14th Street busway – which incurred a one-time cost of $20m when it was installed, but which still yields significant benefits (namely time savings of up to 10 minutes, plus a 15% ridership boost) for one of the city’s busiest routes five years later. Extra demand generated by genuine enhancements is much more sticky – and far less fickle – than anything enticed by a literal free-for-all. One is a proper investment; the other is a populist intervention.
New Yorkers currently pay a flat fare of $2.90 (about £2.20), with a weekly cap kicking in after 12 trips, for both the bus and the subway. If you were forced to choose: would you rather pay for a bus that runs reliably every 10 minutes – or hitch a free ride on one that allegedly comes every half-hour?
Any fiscal decision inevitably raises the question of sustainability. Assuming operational inflation of 2-3%, something that costs $700m this year will cost another $15-20m next year. To cover that, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) may raise the fare by 10 cents. Ask any primary school maths teacher, however, and they’ll tell you that adding 3% to zero is… still zero. Of course, the ideal solution would be relying on higher footfall to raise enough revenue to freeze fares – or at least keep hikes to a minimum. But, again, ask that same teacher and they’ll tell you, even if you miraculously doubled patronage with the impossible-to-resist allure of free travel, zero multiplied by two is… also still zero.
The Mamdani Administration must therefore eventually contemplate raising taxes (Americans famously love that), cutting services (which would defeat the purpose of this entire enterprise), or taking away the giveaway. The outcome would likely be a combination of all three, resulting in yet another induction to New York’s infamous City Hall of Shame: Mamdani would become the latest in a 400-year list of mayors who fell short of long-shot promises.
Mind you, that headache is a distant one at best: he might not even get as far as introducing the scheme, let alone struggling to sustain it. Like most things in New York, transit is tangled up in the labyrinthine web
of bureaucracy that lies between the city and the state. It’s a tough track to navigate, even when the mayor and the governor are on the same page. Take congestion pricing: it’s paying off now, but it took almost 20 gruelling years to happen – with Governor Kathy Hochul being against it, then for it, then opposed again at the eleventh hour, in favour once more at the twelfth, and now its fiercest defender against kingly overreach from a president who wants to kill it.
A similar affliction has hampered plans for an Interborough Express light rail between Brooklyn and Queens, which was first mooted a generation ago in 1996, and the Second Avenue Subway – the first phase of which opened in 2017… despite gaining approval a year before ground was broken on the Empire State Building!
In the depths of Covid, the MTA found itself staring down the barrel of an annual deficit of $2.5bn. Five years later, the budget is finally balanced. City bureaucrats and state legislators will be loath to plunge their blue and white buses back into the red – and they definitely won’t tolerate anything that eats into a subway system that has long been starved of investment.
When pressed about Mamdani’s plan shortly after the election, Hochul demurred. She said she couldn’t imagine eliminating fares entirely – but has since opened the door to ‘conversations’ on affordability. As a humble transatlantic spectator, I suppose the lesson there is: pick your battles. If he can get Albany on board with making buses better, that’s a win. In the fractious world of New York politics, anything on transit that doesn’t morph into a decades-long deadlock would be generational wizardry.
Bringing it back to our side of the pond, it’s a debate well worth observing and reflecting on. In England, there is lots of good work to make buses better – backed by a multi-billion, multi-year settlement from the UK Government. Weaning off the fare cap and shifting focus onto punctuality, frequency, travel time and fleet quality – along with using sticks to beat car dependency – is more likely to deliver long-lasting behavioural change than a short-term discount. After all: we don’t just want people to take the bus, we need them to ditch the car.
Scotland is the cautionary tale England and New York should actively avoid. The Scottish Government will tell you it splashes hundreds of millions of pounds on buses. But the vast majority of that is committed to free passes for the two-thirds of bus users who are already least likely (or simply not allowed) to drive. And those stuck in the middle find themselves squeezed even more: our taxes pay for everyone else’s freebies whilst we’re also charged inflated fares to make up the shortfall from cut-rate reimbursements to operators. And we are stuck using buses that are only getting slower. It’s a joke that’s more gut-punch than punchline.
Nothing in life is free. As ever, it’s a question of who pays – and what they get to show for it.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Marc Winsland is principal consultant – bus operations at SYSTRA. He was previously commercial manager at bus operator Xplore Dundee.
This story appears inside the latest issue of Passenger Transport.
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