Mayor Mamdani Bargains Albany for Cheaper Free Buses and a G Train Rethink

Mayor Mamdani’s push for free buses and transit expansions reflects both New York City’s urgent budget arithmetic and the city’s perennial transit ambitions—and offers lessons, and warnings, for other global metropolises grappling with similar woes.

New York City’s annual “Tin Cup” ritual, in which its mayor schleps north to Albany to pester state legislators for money, rarely sparkles with suspense or drama. Yet this year’s performance—Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s first since leaving the Assembly for City Hall—featured an unusually bold proposition: buses, he argued, should be as free as the city’s tap water, and nearly as ubiquitous. That is, if only someone else would help pay for it.

What Mayor Mamdani pitched on February 11th would have been dismissed a decade ago as a utopian wheeze. Instead, he offered a more frugal version of his campaign promise, declaring that citywide fareless bus service could now be had for a “mere” $600m-$700m annually, down from the $800m estimate he previously cited. Crucially, the mayor linked this sum not to new bus lines or faster journeys, but to the stone-cold arithmetic of replacing lost farebox revenue for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA).

Mamdani’s tin-cup tour comes as the city stares down a projected $7bn budget gap—trimmed from the $12bn hole forecast just a few months prior—making Albany’s largesse as crucial as ever. Neither Governor Kathy Hochul nor legislative leaders have thus far shown enthusiasm for his menu of revenue-raising proposals, ranging from increases in wealth taxes to tweaks in real-estate levies. In the meantime, the mayor’s stopgap is to float a pilot: free rides during the upcoming FIFA World Cup games hosted nearby, a modest test sandwiched between fiscal brinkmanship and soccer-fuelled spectacle.

If implemented, making New York’s buses gratis might benefit the city’s 2.1 million daily bus riders, many of whom are disproportionately working-class, elderly, or disabled. Advocates reckon that eliminating fares could speed up boarding, cut conflicts between passengers and drivers, and boost ridership that remains anaemic since the pandemic, hovering below pre-2020 levels. Add in the economic relief for low-income riders—many of whom reside in the city’s outer boroughs, astride the “transit deserts” long neglected by planners—and Mamdani’s plan has a distinct populist tang.

But free buses, as several large cities abroad have discovered, are no silver bullet. Where similar schemes have been attempted—from Tallinn to Dunkirk—the results are uneven. Usage climbs, but transit agency coffers are depleted, and the impact on car traffic or social mobility is often underwhelming. In New York’s context, the challenge is compounded by the MTA’s byzantine funding, which braids city, state, and federal contributions with the farebox. Unpicking this knot would require not just infusions of cash but political compromise—a commodity in scarce supply.

The economics of fareless buses also have second-order effects. For the city, $700m is not puny, but in a $112bn municipal budget it represents just a sliver—albeit a fiercely contested one, subject to the crosscurrents of public safety, housing, and migrant services. Crucially, that price tag does not account for longer-term capital, maintenance, or service upgrades; nor does it predict the knock-on effects of changed travel patterns. Could free rides lure more office workers back to Midtown? Might they nudge employers, and eventually property values, in boroughs that have struggled to regain their pre-pandemic footing?

For the state, the calculus is thornier still. Revenue-raising ideas that might fund fareless buses—a bump in the “millionaire’s tax”, or tweaks to congestion pricing—remain toxic to suburban politicos but alluring to progressive city lawmakers. The result is deadlock, chronic underfunding, and the attendant risk that the city’s ambitions simply outstrip its ability to pay for them.

Making transit ambitions real

Yet transit dreams die hard. Alongside the free bus gambit, the mayor floated an idea with a touch more nostalgia: reviving weekend service on the G subway line as far as Forest Hills, restoring a link between Brooklyn and Queens that vanished in 2010’s round of financial triage. Assembly members Claire Valdez and Emily Gallagher, among others, champion expansion as a means to cut down on circuitous Manhattan transfers and ease pressure on overcrowded lines. The mayor, for his part, called it “very interesting”—City Hallese for “don’t hold your breath, but let us study it.”

Such proposals recall, if faintly, the city’s historic role as a transit pioneer. New York, for all its chronic infrastructure malaise, still boasts the country’s largest bus and subway networks. But compared with global peers, its recent investments lag; Paris, London, and Seoul have ploughed billions into new lines and technologies, while New York’s projects bog down in red tape and cost overruns. The mayor’s pitches—however earnest—risk being filed alongside generations of unfunded mandates and wishful transit talk.

Elsewhere, fareless transit experiments have produced results as mixed as a Long Island Rail Road timetable. Kansas City, which scrapped its $1.50 bus fare in 2020, saw ridership rebound but a drop in service quality and ongoing funding headaches. Estonia’s capital made a global splash by erasing fares in 2013, but discovered only marginal declines in car usage and budget holes to match. The lesson: free rides alone do not assure transformative change, nor will they satisfy every New Yorker’s need for speed, reliability, or frequency.

As New York’s mayor takes his budgetary “tin cup” to Albany, the deeper question is not who will foot the bill, but whether the city and state can synchronize their priorities and spending in an era of shrinking federal aid and voter scepticism. Progressive aspirations for fareless travel and subway expansion are laudable, but absent sustained political courage, they may remain just that—aspirations.

We reckon such experiments are worth trying, if framed honestly and supported by data. Even if city leaders manage to scrape together enough funds for temporary fare relief or a restored subway spur, the real test will be whether they can forge a workable model for long-term funding and governance. Until then, New Yorkers may ride onward, their fares and ambitions both at the mercy of politics as usual. ■