Fast and free buses and better subways

Zohran Mamdani’s campaign promise for fast, free buses has turned heads. New York bus riders felt seen by a political leader. At the dawn of power, Mamdani recognized the struggle of horsemen to be able to live in the city and the pressing demands of our times.

Skeptics oppose free buses, saying passengers can afford the fare, free service would be worse and, more recently, offered an attractive expansion of the metro as an alternative.

Yet fast, free buses are more of an opportunity than critics think. Like Andrew Epstein, Mamdani’s campaign communications aide, reflected after the elections, fast and free buses are a force non-reformist reform.

By freeing up passengers’ hard-earned money and time to devote to creativity and collective action, fast and free buses are not an end in themselves. They provide a scaffolding for user empowerment that could prove essential for the expansion of the metro network.

Fast and free buses are an interesting prospect for users. One in five is pricing managerwho have difficulty paying the direct cost of public transportation. Beyond that, bus users come from low-income households as metro users and drivers. Every dollar saved counts.

Bus users are also short of time. Of 1,800 riders on Flatbush Ave., Pratt Center and Riders Alliance interviewed91% were affected by delays and half took a splurging drive when the bus didn’t arrive. One in three people have been fired, lost pay or reprimanded at work for being late. When runners can’t move, we can’t move forward.

Without money or time, bus riders are difficult to organize. Fragmented users mean entire city neighborhoods without traffic power. A core group of people fed up with unreliable subways and inaccessible stations got congestion pricing. In areas without a metro system, many people are simply waiting until they can afford a car.

Increase ridership near and far from the existing subway and win the expansions that many New Yorkers crave, and which rely on policy change. unrealistic today, bus riders need money and time to spend campaigning for a better connected city.

Like André Gorz, the late French thinker who initiated non-reformist reforms, considereda policy like fast and free buses is not the end of the road but the beginning of something great.

After victory, non-reformist reforms disrupt the status quo and those who benefit from it. Fast, free buses offer commuters far from the metro a much more affordable and efficient alternative to driving.

Soon it won’t just be about buses, but also about safe, affordable transportation options, from buses to expanded subways to streets where kids have the freedom to walk to school and parents have the peace of mind to allow it.

Writing about cycling during the 1973 oil embargo, Gorz’s friend, the Austrian priest Ivan Illich, argued the apparent freedom to drive is in reality “the obligatory consumption of large doses of energy conditioned and unevenly distributed by the transport industry”.

New Yorkers were forced to pay and delayed on slow buses, wishing they could afford to pay several times more for a car is a bleak picture, the opposite of Mamdani’s vision for the city and transit experts’ dream of 41 new miles of subway, the biggest expansion in a century.

With a federal administration working for the fossil fuel industryin trying to sell as much gasoline as possible, we must devote our own energy to building power and freeing ourselves from their restrictions.

Fast, free buses illustrate the power we need. They are the key to a fairer, freer and more united city in which we all deserve to live.

Pearlstein is the director of policy and communications for Riders Alliance.