Zohran Mamdani Wants to Take a Free Bus … Straight to Gracie Mansion

There's a running debate in this country about the effectiveness of free buses and whether the budget money spent on subsidizing fare-less rides should be spent bolstering service instead. On the one hand: Free buses are an economic lifeline for bus riders who are poorer than other transit users. On the other hand: Who wants a bus that only comes once or twice an hour, even if it's free?

Meet two-handed Assembly Member Zohran Mamdani.

The Queens pol, who's partly staked his mayoral run on instituting free bus service across the city, wants to solve the "free or frequent?" argument by not only making buses fare-free while also focusing on making buses faster by clearing the streets for them.

That's how to break out of the false notion of competing priorities, he says.

"I understand where people are coming from when they worry about the choices that they think we have to make between service or fares," the mayoral contender said. "There is a portion of that 'fast' that comes from the fact that if you make it free [you get] a faster ride."

Mamdani's case for fare-free buses got a boost recently from congestion pricing architect Charles Komanoff, whose modeling indeed found that fare-free buses would move faster and attract millions of new rides. Komanoff's research suggests free buses would be 12 percent faster because buses would spend much less time loading and unloading riders. The faster buses would also, per Komanoff's research, boost ridership by about 7 percent.

Beyond that, Mamdani "fast" vision relies on address issues that have plagued city buses for years now — with strategies the city has long had at its disposal.

For one, Mamdani pledged to fully staff up the Department of Transportation's bus unit, where short staffing among planners is an issue that both the Independent Budget Office and the DOT itself each identified as a reason that bus priority efforts have lagged throughout Mayor Adams's tenure.

Mamdani also said he would meet the minimum of painting 30 miles of bus lanes per year as required by the Streets Master Plan, a target that the current mayor has spectacularly failed to hit. He also vowed to expand transit signal priority, a technology that holds green light for buses as they approach an intersection or turns the light green earlier when a bus is waiting there.

The DOT has fallen short of installing transit signal priority at 1,000 intersections in 2023 and 2024, though in March DOT's First Deputy Commissioner Margaret Forgione told the City Council the agency was on pace to install it at 1,000 intersections in Fiscal Year 2025, which comprises the last half of 2024 and the first half of 2025.

If Mamdani is counting on transit signal priority, he may need his DOT to reexamine the effectiveness of how the city uses it though. The city says transit signal priority speeds up buses by an average of 14 percent, but a recent report by People for Cities said that transit signal priority was not a magic bullet. At best, the report suggested that riders can save 20 seconds per trip with the most effective version of transit signal priority, but at worst the benefits are shaved off when caterwauling from drivers cuts down on the amount of time that green lights are extended or started early for buses.

Mamdani also said that he wants to learn from what other international leaders in rapid bus service have done, and bring those lessons to the five boroughs.

"I think we have to dream beyond the bar that Eric Adams has set, because that's too low of a bar in almost every issue across New York City government. One idea that also excites me beyond just the fulfillment of the Streets Master Plan is bus rapid transit, and understanding the ways in which Bogota moves 40,000 people in an hour, while our most-frequented bus moves less than that in an entire day," he told Streetsblog.

Those strategies are crucial to actually improving bus service — and unlike free buses, which require Albany's approval, can be done by the mayor and city government. State politics may complicate some of Mamdani's priorities, such as raising $9 billion in taxes to cover potential gaps in federal funding and to pay for policies like free buses.

"On its own, the city can only raise property taxes, which are capped and extremely unpopular," explained Reinvent Albany Executive Director John Kaheny. "For all other taxes, the mayor has to persuade the governor, Senate and Assembly to pass a new law allowing the city to raise taxes, and persuade the City Council to approve the tax hike."

Actual, no-BS grad-separated bus rapid transit has never been seen in New York and installing it here is an ambitious enough goal for most candidates. But the push for free buses is by far Mamdani's most ambitious transportation policy proposal, and with a $700-million price tag and over two million paid and unpaid riders daily weekday riders on MTA buses, it would also be the largest free transit policy ever done in the world.

Skeptics of free buses have argued that fares are a major piece of the picture keeping transit going. Public transit expert Jarrett Walker recently noted that small bus systems are the ones in America that have given up fares, and warned that getting rid of them entirely would mean inevitable service cuts.

The policy has had mixed results in the United States. In Massachusetts, the MBTA's fare-free bus pilot in Boston has been successful enough that officials at the transit agency suggested expanding free buses to the entire bus system, though even the high-end estimate of $121 million per year it would still cost significantly less than doing the policy in New York. (Though one can make the case that it's basically double the per capita cost of what free buses would cost in New York City.)

That said, Kansas City's much-cheaper and smaller free bus policy collapsed in spectacular fashion this year. The policy, which was approved by the city in late 2019 and cost just $9 million, was initially praised as a win for riders and for the Kansas City bus system. But by 2025, the Kansas City Area Transportation Authority chose to reinstitute fares for buses to close a budget gap after the KCATA initially proposed a budget that would cut almost half of the city's bus lines.

If free bus service is implemented in New York, Mamdani said that the program, which is already favored by 72 percent of voters (and majorities across party lines), would be popular enough to be protected from retrenchment like in Kansas City.

Mamdani said he's not just interested in mandating that the MTA provide free buses, but would look to lockbox any dedicated funding that's supposed to pay for the free service. Mamdani also pointed to his successful efforts on an MTA rescue package in 2023 and in getting funding for more bus service in 2024 to show that his push for free transit doesn't need come at the expense of effective and well-funded transit, a hallmark of his five years in state politics.

"I am the same legislator who won a significant increase in both subway service and bus service, alongside the authorization of the MTA to ticket cars that sit and impede a bus's ability to travel. This is part of a larger vision for public transit that encompasses transforming our streetscape, and fighting in Albany as the mayor of New York City for all of the tools we need to make these buses the envy of the nation, as opposed to the laughingstock," he said.

That 2023 MTA rescue package also included a free bus pilot, which was championed by Mamdani and state Sen. Michael Gianaris. The two Queens legislators initially pushed for enough money to fund free local and bus service across the city, and settled for a pilot that established one free bus route in each borough for about a year.

The MTA said the pilot, which ran from late September 2023 until the end of August 2024, had mixed results. Ridership went up on the free lines, but the MTA credited that to existing bus riders choosing the free routes instead of entirely new riders choosing the bus system. Mamdani and Gianaris pointed to the drop in assaults on free lines compared to the rest of the bus lines across the system and the fact that 11 percent of new bus riders were people who would have otherwise taken a trip in a private car or taxi.

The dispute over the findings in the pilot wasn't shocking, since Mamdani and the MTA have been at odds on the idea about free buses for years. MTA Chairman and CEO Janno Lieber has always been cool on the idea, preferring to encourage the city to do more to enroll people in the half-price Fair Fares program. But Lieber has also made buses a major focus of his time at the MTA, and Mamdani said that free buses was a natural extension of Lieber's own rhetoric about buses as "engines of equity."

"An MTA official [once] told me, 'If you were really concerned with equity, then you would focus on the buses,'" Mamdani said. "They spoke to me about the average level of income for a bus rider being $30,000 a year, about the average speed being about eight miles an hour and about the way in which we had seen a city government flout not only its responsibilities but its opportunities to transform that experience because of the virtue that it owns the streets."

Mamdani of course is hardly the only candidate pushing to speed up buses in the city. Among his competitors, Comptroller Brad Lander and state Sen. Zellnor Myrie got high marks from a livable streets panel for their own plans to speed up city buses. In Lander's case, he's vowed to bring back Select Bus Service routes that were never finished and create interborough SBS routes, while Myrie said that he'd focus on building out physically separated bus lanes, expanding camera enforcement and even making bus stops themselves more pleasant.