Another Mamdani Promise, Free Buses, Goes Bust

Yesterday Mayor Mamdani admitted that another one of his campaign promises won’t be happening, at least not anytime soon. Remember his promise to make buses in NYC free? It was obvious to everyone that this was not something he could do on his own and in an interview with Politico he finally admitted as much.

In Albany, no one has included the free bus plan in their budget proposals, and it seems like that’s not something that your administration is pushing hard for this year. Have you already accepted that might be something you’ll be pushing in 2027 instead of 2026?

Both legislative houses included language within their one-house budget proposals in support of bringing back a free-bus pilot program. That is something that we are encouraged by, and it continues to be part of budget negotiations. I’m absolutely committed to making buses fast and free, and we’re encouraged by the conversations we’re having with the governor and legislative leaders to take action on that in 2026 as a first step.

Mamdani is more slippery than a hagfish with a head cold. He didn’t promise people a pilot program, he promised he would make the buses fast and free. Here’s one of his campaign videos on the topic.

That’s a long way from a pilot project which may or may not make it into this year’s budget. The pilot program, back in 2023, only covered 5 bus routes which made up a tiny fraction of the city’s bus riders.

 In New York City the free rides program will benefit about 44,000 daily riders, representing a fraction of the bus network’s roughly 1.3 million weekday riders.

That works out to 3.3% of the total ridership. So I guess you can give him credit for 3% of his campaign promise. But the difference between what he’s (maybe) delivering and what he actually promised is billions of dollars per year. He never had any way to deliver on this without the help of the state assembly and the governor to raise taxes. And so far it seems the governor does not want to raise taxes to give more freebies to the city.

The other part of this worth considering is that nearly half the people who ride the bus in NYC already don’t pay the fare.

New York’s long-running fare evasion problem, among the worst of any major city in the world, has intensified recently; before the pandemic, only about one in five bus riders skipped the fare.

Yet public officials have done relatively little to collect the lost revenue from bus riders. Instead, they have focused almost exclusively on the subway system, where waves of police officers and private security guards have been deployed to enforce payment, even as fare evasion rates on trains are dwarfed by those on buses.

During the first three months of this year, 48 percent of bus riders did not pay, according to the latest available statistics from the transit authority, while 14 percent of subway riders evaded fares. Roughly twice the number of people ride the city’s subways as ride its buses.

This is by far the worst fare evasion in the world, nearly ten times the rate of evasion in Canada for instance. But as the article suggests, it didn’t used to be quite this bad. Evasion was under 20% prior to the pandemic and then in 2020 the city made buses free because of the pandemic. That’s when another 30% of people decided to stop paying. 

So Mamdani’s pilot program is just another instance of setting the bar low again so that people get the idea paying is optional all along. Given Mamdani’s socialist leanings I doubt this is accidental. He wants the buses to be free and there are two ways to make that happen. The right way is to pass a law to cover the costs and the other is to just convince enough people there’s no need to pay until it becomes a crisis. My guess is the city’s DSA mayor doesn’t care which one actually happens.

Finally, as I described here, this is not the first empty campaign promise that Mamdani has made. He also promised a rent freeze, something else he can’t deliver because the decision is up to the Rent Guidelines Board which is supposed to consider factual information when making its decision. So now Mamdani has just stopped mentioning the rent freeze.

People who voted for this guy wanted affordability but what they’re getting so far is socialist vaporware.

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