Making buses free is not the answer

On the heels of Mayor Mamdani’s successful election campaign, many New Yorkers are hopeful that some of the city’s most vexing problems will finally be resolved. One of his major campaign promises was to make New York City buses “fast and free.” Although the project raises skeptics, it remains a powerful promise against which his mayoralty will be judged.

But as a guiding vision for how sclerotic public institutions can be reinvented, “fast and free buses” falls short of what a truly transformational final vision might aim for. Public transport should be safe, reliable, affordable and enjoyable.

Imagine our city with truly integrated transit, combining subway, bus, bike and carpooling, with seamless infrastructure designed to provide the best option for any given journey. To achieve this, we need a series of coordinated and transparent steps, each of which builds consensus through its success.

In fact, it’s not fast buses we want, but fast travel. If you’ve waited for a bus in the cold or the rain, you know that faster buses don’t mean shorter door-to-door journeys. The challenge lies more in the frequency and spacing of stops than in vehicle speed.

Some cities have experimented with free public transport. But no place in North America matches the scale and complexity of New York’s system, which transports more than 5 million people daily. Is it a well-planned system? Consider that subways and surface transit systems were historically operated by separate companies, competing for ridership. Even unified, transfers between systems were poorly managed until the introduction of the MetroCard in the 1990s.

The current redundancy of system coverage is a holdover from before unified fare cards, leaving a legacy of attempts to speed up isolated modes of transportation without targeting what should be the core mission: efficient travel for individuals. “Fast and free buses” reflect the persistence of this mindset, revealing more of what it forgets than what it aims for. Today, long segments of many bus lines essentially parallel the subway lines below. Encouraging only buses risks discouraging metro use and reducing the overall efficiency of the combined system.

In a broader historical context, the subsidizing of buses at the expense of trains appears to be the latest chapter of the railway handicap in favor of rubber tires on the streets. The story of how bus companies hijacked tram ridership has left its mark on our cities by favoring buses and cars over much more efficient ways of moving people on a large scale.

On redundant lines, why would people pay $6/day for a round trip train ride when they could travel for free by bus? If the free bus plan succeeds, it will attract additional users. While some may be new users of public transport, others could come from paid metro lines. To avoid cannibalizing metro ridership with free buses, we need to rethink train/bus redundancy in a combined transport plan. Buses should extend and complement the metro system, especially for people with reduced mobility, not compete with it.

Providing a non-revenue bus system that competes with a toll train system risks more traffic on the streets in the form of buses, not less. This would favor surface transport while discouraging the rail system, which is much more efficient, congesting and further polluting our streets and degrading the public domain.

To reduce traffic on our streets for a safer, calmer and better quality of life, we should encourage all public transportation, especially the most efficient mode, the one that makes our city successful and differentiates us from other cities, and in which we have invested the most: the metro.

Cohn is an architect and urban planner based in Brooklyn.