NEW YORK (BLOOMBERG) -- Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral campaign to tackle New York City’s affordability crisis has struck a chord with voters, helping him clinch the Democratic nomination Tuesday in a major upset. But one of his signature promises — free buses — is raising questions about feasibility, funding and whether a NYC mayor could actually deliver.
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority operates the city’s bus network, with more than a million weekday rides on average. Bus commuters tend to be lower-income compared to subway riders or drivers, which puts the $2.90 fare to ride into sharper focus. It’s part of why Mamdani is pledging to permanently eliminate it, as well as make buses faster and more efficient for passengers.
“All New Yorkers deserve to afford public transit — it's our way of life,” said Danny Pearlstein, the director of policy and communications for advocacy group Riders Alliance. “This campaign was so historic for many reasons, but one of them was centering the needs of transit riders and particularly bus riders who were so often invisible in a city with an iconic subway system.”
While free buses would ease the cost of getting around New York City for families on a fixed income, it would require elected officials to once again find hundreds of millions of dollars for the state-run MTA. Wiping out fares would cost the agency about $652 million annually, according to 2023 estimates from the NYC Independent Budget Office. And if just 4% of subway riders switched over to the free-bus network, that would yield a further $91 million in annual foregone revenue.
“Making buses free creates new holes in the MTA budget that have to be filled from other sources,” said Adie Tomer, a senior fellow at Brookings Metro.
The assemblyman says he has a plan for that — but it will require approval from state and local lawmakers that have a range of ideologies. Mamdani has proposed raising corporate taxes and imposing a new 2% income tax on city residents who earn more than $1 million a year. But Governor Kathy Hochul has repeatedly voiced opposition to increasing levies. And in the absence of sufficient funding, adding free buses likely means trade-offs elsewhere for transit.
The city’s bus network is already bleeding money. Fare evasion soared after the pandemic, when the MTA temporarily made its buses free of charge. About 44% of bus riders skipped paying the fare in the first three months of this year, according to MTA data. Even with the rampant fare evasion, the MTA collected $800 million of farebox revenue from its buses in 2024, according to the transit agency. That tally is expected to grow to $972 million in 2028.
Mamdani's proposal would end that revenue source as the MTA embarks on a $68 billion multiyear capital investment program to modernize a more than century-old transit network. That plan relies on $14 billion of federal funds that the Trump administration would need to allocate.
The MTA and Governor Hochul would ultimately be the ones with the power to decide whether to make the buses free. While many state lawmakers support free buses in theory, finding an alternative funding source is the challenge.
Asked about the idea, an MTA spokesperson deferred to Chief Executive Officer Janno Lieber’s comment last week: “What Mamdani’s introduced is like a lot of discussion about how to have more transit, and more affordable transit, and better transit,” Lieber said during a June 25 press conference. “And he’s been consistent on that.”
Critics of free transit systems on the left and right say its benefits in the US are often outweighed by those of investing in better and more comprehensive service — especially in bigger cities. Making only bus service free can also create the wrong incentives by rerouting people to buses who would be better served by trains. One alternative is to expand access to reduced fares for low-income riders; in New York City, that program is known as “Fair Fares.”
Curtis Sliwa, the Republican nominee for mayor, said in a statement that Mamdani is “making promises he simply can’t deliver. There’s already a range of programs like Fair Fares in place to help those in need, and Curtis will ensure these resources are fully utilized without driving away businesses or raising taxes.”
Precedents Elsewhere
Mamdani says he’s drawn inspiration from other cities where free transit has gained traction. Kansas City became the first major hub in the US to make buses free for riders in 2020, but the cost to implement it was relatively small at about $9 million. Boston Mayor Michelle Wu championed accessible transit during her first run and spearheaded a federally funded fare-free pilot program for three bus lines with the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority. But as pandemic-era aid dwindles, MBTA officials argue that eliminating fares for all routes would cost the cash-strapped system as much as $121 million a year, and would be unsustainable without a permanent and dedicated funding source.
Europe has been a leader in this, but local governments throughout the continent are notably more prone to allocating needed funds to their transit networks. In 2018, the nation of Estonia offered a no-cost bus system, with the help of extremely generous subsidies from its government; the program was halted in 2024. In 2020, Luxembourg wiped out fares across its entire transportation system. The city of Dunkirk, France, and the Czech Republic’s Frýdek-Místek followed closely behind with their own fare-free transit policies.
The city can also look inward for lessons on free transit. Efforts to continue a 2023 fare-free bus pilot lauded by Mamdani stalled in Albany after the legislature declined to renew a one-year pilot program that expired at the end of August 2024 that made five MTA bus routes free. That temporary bus program boosted weekday ridership by 30% and weekend usage by 38%, although mostly from existing customers who utilized the buses more, according to an MTA report last month that analyzed the pilot program.
A completely free bus system may actually have a negative effect on service. In the Estonian capital of Tallinn, transit use fell and car traffic increased a decade after the city's bus and tram network went fare-free. During the NYC pilot program, the ridership boost resulted in a 2.2% decrease in bus speeds on those routes during school months and a 7% jump in dwell times as more people boarded the vehicles, according to the MTA report. A separate study in April by Charles Komanoff, a transit advocate and analyst, found that free buses would have the opposite effect: Bus speeds would increase as dwell times shorten.
During the pilot period, the MTA also lost an estimated $10.8 million of farebox revenue from the five bus routes and another $1.7 million of revenue as nearby paid bus lines and subway stations posted lower ridership during the pilot, according to MTA’s analysis.
“The most likely and the easiest course of action procedurally is that the MTA would have to reduce other spending areas,” said Tomer. “There’s somewhere else in the budgets that has to get cut. And that's the debate that New Yorkers are gonna have about this in November.”