Let me preface all of this by saying that if I still lived in New York, I would rank Zohran Mamdani on my ballot and leave off Andrew Cuomo. I implore every New Yorker reading this to do the same. I’m not sure I would rank Mamdani first — like Sam Deutsch, I would probably put him behind Zellnor Myrie and Brad Lander — but he’s an easy shoo-in for at least third.
My primary reasoning here has to do with character, which is admittedly a difficult thing to assess in a public figure who you don’t know personally. Before Trump first got elected in 2016, I used to take a more coldly transactional approach to voting: if a candidate had a good policy platform and came from the right (as in correct, not as in right-wing) political coalition, then it didn’t matter to me whether they were personally virtuous or not. But Trump’s profoundly vile personal character, his obvious lack of any moral restraint, and the damage that his character defects have wrought on the country as a whole have all changed my mind about this.
All of which is to say that Mamdani strikes me as a decent guy. Again, I’ve never met him, so it’s difficult to make that claim with any certainty. But he’s certainly behaved decently over the course of his mayoral campaign. And Cuomo, as we should all understand by now, is a bad person: corrupt, predatory, and heedless of any considerations beyond his own political advancement.
So while I disagree with certain elements of Mamdani’s platform, there is no question in my mind that he’s a better choice for New York City than Cuomo, and by a significant margin at that. Even on the areas where we disagree, I think Mamdani is the candidate with better instincts: he at least understands that New York needs more housing and that the city’s transit system is its lifeblood. Cuomo, in contrast, has been running a explicitly NIMBY campaign and has made his utter disregard for sound transit policy clear at every available opportunity.
Having said all that, this is a post about one of the areas where I think Mamdani is probably in the wrong: his much-vaunted proposal to make the New York City bus system fare-free.
This proposal has stirred up a lot of intra-left rancor and backbiting, so let me make something clear: I’m not opposed to free transit on principle. To me, it’s a question of math: how much does fare collection cost, and how much does it take in? Is making transit free for everyone more or less effective than subsidizing fares for lower-income riders? (In other words, how much would it cost to do some basic eligibility screening, and would we be able to do it in a way that minimizes administrative burdens for the riders whose fares we want to subsidize?) And lastly, how should we weigh the cost of fare elimination against other potential spending priorities, such as increasing bus frequency and reliability?
It is entirely possible for fare elimination advocates to provide good answers to all of these questions. But I suspect that the cases where the benefits of total fare elimination outweigh the costs will mostly be found in small or mid-sized cities — places where demand for transit is both manageable and predictable, where a transit network doesn’t need to cover too much territory to be comprehensive, where fare recovery doesn’t bring in a whole lot of revenue anyway, and where the administrative costs associated with setting up a more targeted fare subsidy program would eat up a pretty significant share of the city’s overall transportation budget. Free buses might make sense in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for example.
But most big cities could really use fare fees, both because they support the cost of operating large-scale transit systems and because pricing helps transit systems manage demand. And New York is the largest city in the United States, with the biggest transit network in the country.
By Mamdani’s own reckoning, his proposal would drastically increase bus ridership. As he outlined in The Nation last year, a fare-free bus pilot increased ridership on five lines by 30 percent on weekdays and 38 percent on weekends. It’s difficult to say whether eradicating fares entirely would lead to a proportionate increase across the entire system, but if it’s anywhere in the ballpark then we’re talking about hundreds of thousands of additional rides per day. I’m doubtful that the bus system is equipped to take that on — especially without additional fare revenue to help fund the addition of more buses, more drivers, and more dedicated lanes to the network.
There’s also the question of where these additional riders would come from. Car owners in New York are disproportionately affluent; the median income of a car-owning household is twice that of a non-car-owning household. I do not think the cost of bus fare is what is keeping most New York drivers from riding the bus. Which means that if Mayor Mamdani eliminated fares, the lion’s share of increased ridership would come from people who primarily get around by other means—mainly subway riders. (To be fair, Mamdani reports in his Nation piece about the fare-free bus pilot that “eleven percent of new riders used the bus instead of a car or taxi they used prior.” He does not say how many of those riders would have instead used the subway.)
So at the same time that it could overload the city’s bus system, fare elimination also threatens to drain the subway of millions of paid trips per year. In effect, the city would be draining revenue out of two major transit systems simultaneously.
Okay, you might say, but at least it would help people who can’t currently afford transit fare. Fortunately, the city already has a program for them. Some 370,000 New Yorkers are enrolled in Fair Fares, a program which knocks 50 percent off the standard fare price for eligible city residents. You might argue 370,000 clients is not sufficient uptake, and I’d agree: only about a third of eligible New Yorkers are enrolled. I also suspect that the income threshold for eligibility is too low. But to my mind, these critiques are an argument for improving the program, not going in another direction entirely.
So raise the Fair Fares income threshold, do more aggressive outreach to eligible households, streamline the application, and maybe even do automatic enrollment. I suspect these reforms would be a lot cheaper than making the buses free; but more importantly, I think they would improve low-income New Yorkers’ access to transit without compromising the overall quality of the transit system. There would certainly be tradeoffs to this approach, but the tradeoffs would probably be more manageable. My fear is that with regard to bus fares, Mamdani isn’t considering tradeoffs at all.
And yet I feel obliged to end this post by reminding everyone to rank Mamdani and leave Cuomo off their ballots. Because while I have doubts about how Mamdani would manage the city’s transit system as mayor, Cuomo already has a track record when it comes to managing the subway system—and his track record is atrocious. I’m raising my concerns about Mamdani’s plans for the bus system in what I hope is a constructive spirit, as someone who thinks he would make a vastly superior mayor when compared to the most likely alternative.
UPDATE: On Bluesky, Nicole Murray pointed out that the MTA does in fact have data on subway-to-bus mode shift among people who participated in the free city bus pilot. It looks like 27 percent of free bus riders had previously used either the subway or a different bus for trips they were now making on the free lines.
I don’t know how many of that 27 percent are former subway riders. But four of the pilot routes appear to be along lines poorly served by the subway system. (The fifth is the William-to-Canarsie B60, which covers some of the same ground as the L train.) So I think we can assume that the number of subway-to-bus conversions was relatively low in the pilot but would be higher if fares were eliminated across the entire system.