Are there other ways to achieve Zohran Mamdani's campaign promise to make transit more affordable?
Zohran Mamdani’s historic primary victory signals that Democratic voters prefer his vision for New York to the alternatives proposed by the other candidates. The appeal of these ideas is clear, especially against the backdrop of an affordability crisis that Mamdani effectively spoke to over the course of his campaign.
New York’s transit system serves millions of riders every day. New Yorkers rely on it and understand that it enables them to access everything the city has to offer, from jobs to schools to beaches to Mets games. Yet despite transit’s central role in all of our lives, the mayor doesn’t control the buses or the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. The MTA is largely controlled by the governor. This asymmetry helps explain why previous mayors have ignored straphangers’ pressing needs year after year. Mamdani, undeterred by this imbalance, took the unusual step of featuring buses prominently in his mayoral campaign.
What free buses deliver — and don’t
“Fast, free buses” is pithy and memorable, but as policy, it is less than meets the eye. While buses are subsidized, they still generate an estimated $600 million a year in revenue. (More on this below.) This $600 million is used to help offset $4.1 billion in annual operating costs. Without a long-term plan for where an additional $600 million would come from year after year — either through fare increases in other parts of the transit system, higher taxes or more funding from the City and/or State — the MTA will be forced to reduce service. Each is a serious tradeoff; no one should pretend that “free” is really free.
Charles Komanoff, who has endorsed Mamdani’s free bus pledge, found that eliminating the fare would boost ridership by an eye-popping 23% — and generate close to $1.5 billion in benefits for that $600 million cost. This sounds great, but it is worth noting that the $600 million estimated loss is low. Mamdani has said that he plans to make every bus in New York free, but Komanoff’s numbers only include New York City Transit buses. To make every local bus free, we need to include the buses operated by both New York City Transit and MTA Bus. In 2023, MTA Bus riders paid $179 million to ride the bus. Looking at prepandemic farebox revenue (rather than 2023 farebox revenue, when ridership was only at 62% of what it was in 2019), buses generated more than $1.1 billion — or $1.38 billion in 2025 dollars. That’s a lot more than $600 million in lost revenue.
The “fast” part of Mamdani’s promise is equally important. He’s right to say that ending fare collection would likely enable much swifter boarding, as would all-door boarding, which would speed up buses along their routes. This is a real benefit of going free — but it assumes bus service would remain robust and reliable after that revenue disappears. That might not be possible with a brand new $600 million to $1.4 billion hole in the MTA budget.
There are better, more fiscally sustainable ways to make surface public transit more responsive to the needs of riders.
Alternative idea 1: Make buses faster while expanding Fair Fares
Rather than making buses free for all New Yorkers, let’s first make them fast. In my own research with colleagues at NYU’s Marron Institute on bus networks and informal transportation in New York City, I have found that passengers prefer frequent and reliable bus service to free fares. New Yorkers care more about speed and frequency, because, on average, New Yorkers spend a bit less on transportation than their fellow Americans. This is important because it suggests that transportation is not the root cause of New York’s affordability crisis.
Affordability is a worthy goal. However, instead of making buses free for all, why not build on the Fair Fares program that provides a 50% discount on buses and subways for low-income New Yorkers? The current program’s uptake has been lackluster; one study estimated that only 34% of eligible users are enrolled in it. Fixing Fair Fares by raising the income limits, providing deeper discounts and increasing participation would offer assistance to those who need it.
Fortunately, policies making buses faster and more reliable have already been implemented in New York and in cities around the world. First, dedicate space in the roadway to buses to free them from traffic; second, consolidate bus stops where they are spaced too closely together so that buses can maintain higher travel speeds over longer distances; third, provide signal priority at traffic lights to ensure buses zoom through red lights at intersections; and, fourth, allow passengers to board at all doors so that buses aren’t forced to linger at stops as each passenger pays to enter.
In 2018, Alon Levy and I proposed a Brooklyn Bus Network Redesign that combined all of these best practices and increased bus speeds by as much as 40%. Holding all else equal, which is a fudge, and using some of the same assumptions that Komanoff used for his model, we can assume that ridership would increase by 20% if these best practices were implemented citywide. (In our modelling, we assumed a more conservative trip time to ridership elasticity, but we also accounted for things like greater walking time and changes in frequency. Additionally, we redesigned the bus network in Brooklyn in a specific fashion that differs from current MTA proposals and doesn’t apply citywide.)
There are also other important benefits to faster trip times, namely an increase in service frequency without increasing operating costs. If bus operators can complete their trips in a shorter time period, they will be able to complete more trips per shift.
In New York City, the mayor decides, via the New York City Department of Transportation, how streets are used. In fact, as recently as 2019, the New York City Council passed a streets master plan compelling the DOT to add 150 miles of protected bus lanes over a five-year period. Sadly, as a recent New York City Comptroller report notes, the “NYC DOT has failed to meet any of the dedicated bus lane targets mandated by the Streets Plan.” This is clearly an area that a new mayor and an empowered DOT Commissioner can address on Day 1.
Alternative idea 2: Help the MTA work with municipal agencies
New York’s high capital construction costs have been documented by the New York Times, my team at NYU and many, many others. While Mamdani has been a genuine bus champion on the campaign trail and has taken on the capital cost issues in Albany, as mayor he would have an opportunity to work with the MTA as it builds Phase 2 of the Second Avenue Subway to address its capital construction costs and show New Yorkers that we can still do big things quickly, cheaply and well.
During Phase 1 of the Second Avenue Subway construction, the MTA and the City negotiated individual agreements that spelled out how the MTA planned to mitigate its construction impacts. Every time the MTA needs to shut down a city street to get a tunnel boring machine into place or remove underground pipes, the City needs to sign off on these actions before the MTA can proceed.
From this perspective, the City holds considerable power over the MTA. The City has used this leverage to extract improvements beyond the project’s scope, driving up schedule delays and project costs in the process. To take one example, during construction of the 86th Street Station, the New York City Department of Environmental Protection forced the MTA to renegotiate its agreement with the MTA after the MTA had hired a contractor to move gas, sewer, electric and water utilities for the new underground station. This last-minute change introduced costly redesign work, a six-month delay and contributed to a $2.24 million change order on a $34 million contract. Had the mayor explicitly prioritized collaborating with the MTA, these predictable conflicts could have been avoided.
Alternative idea 3: Change land-use rules to help transit
Finally, as the MTA moves forward with the $5.5 billion Interborough Express (IBX), a new rail line connecting the southwestern Brooklyn waterfront with Woodside and Jackson Heights in Queens, the mayor has a unique opportunity to bring more transit riders to the train by rezoning the entire 14-mile right-of-way before construction begins.
Land-use is a deeply polarizing issue that is often shaped by City Council members rather than mayors or governors. IBX, however, cuts through multiple jurisdictions, rendering councilmanic privilege — the de facto practice of letting a local councilmember determine land-use decisions in his or her district — less salient. This creates an opening for the mayor to champion comprehensive land-use changes spanning the entire route without being hostage to any individual council member. Rather than rezone each neighborhood one by one, it is better to make funding, even though half of it was recently secured, contingent on the City upzoning all of these areas. By making way for new housing, the City would also be helping to facilitate new transit riders.
The recent “City of Yes” rezoning allows for increased residential density in areas within a half-mile of existing subway stations. The area around the proposed Eliot Avenue station, a station that doesn’t currently exist, is not subject to the City of Yes zoning changes. According to our forthcoming research at NYU Marron, people living near the proposed Eliot Avenue station will gain access to 423,000 more jobs within a 45-minute commute once the station is operational. This is the biggest gain in access to jobs for any of the 14 IBX stations, but the dominant zoning around Eliot Avenue is R4, which caps building heights at just 35 feet, or two to three stories, limiting how many people will be able to travel to those jobs once IBX opens.
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New York is New York because of its high-capacity transit system that enables millions of people to access millions of jobs surrounded by countless amenities rather than city-killing surface parking lots. Our transit system is one of the few things in all of our lives that is reliably affordable relative to housing, food, childcare and healthcare. There are big, important ways to make above- and below-ground transit work better for New Yorkers that make more sense, especially in the near term, that we should pursue before making buses free.