As you might guess, all of this went through my mind as I pondered New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s promise to make all bus travel in the city free of charge. “As mayor,” he vowed in his campaign, “I’ll make every bus fast and free.” Free for the poor and free for the rich.
You can easily grasp the appeal of an idea like this. In most places in America, including New York City, transportation is the second largest household cost, after housing. It frequently accounts for as much as 30 percent of a family’s after-tax income. Transportation is something everybody needs. You might argue that it should simply be treated as a public good, like parks and police and fire protection. Of course, ripping the fare boxes out of buses wouldn’t exactly make them free; it would simply transfer the cost to the other taxes that contribute to the city’s general fund.
It’s not a small amount of money. Each bus ride that a New Yorker takes is estimated to cost the city an average of $5.47. The cost of making them totally free would probably deprive the city of at least $600 million a year, and some sources place the loss significantly higher than that.
Critics of what Mamdani wants to do insist that the transit system needs several things more than it needs free fares. It could use more frequent service, more reliable arrivals and physical rehabilitation of the vehicles themselves. Most surveys that have been done have concluded that passengers value better service more than they worry about its cost. The nonprofit TransitCenter argues that “forgoing all fare revenue would substantially impede the ability to provide service, let alone improve or expand it.”
THE BEST KNOWN FREE-TRANSIT EXPERIMENT in this country is probably the one in Boston, where Michelle Wu won election as mayor in 2021 using “Free the T” as a slogan. She kept her promise — sort of. Taking liberal advantage of federal transit subsidies, she abolished fares on three busy bus lines, and the results were positive. Once the fares disappeared, Wu’s office reports, ridership on the three lines grew by 35 percent and they now carry 16 percent more riders than they did before the COVID-19 pandemic.
Earlier this year, with federal money drying up, Wu arranged for the three-line experiment to continue through June, proclaiming that “fare-free bus service helps families, workers and businesses.” This was a widely praised move. But there are no plans to take the test citywide, and no definitive estimate on just what that would cost. Free transit Mamdani-style doesn’t seem to be on the drawing board in Boston just now.
A more extensive free-ride program is the one in Kansas City, which began attracting more passengers once the fare box was gone. But there are serious downsides. Free transit fares don’t seem to be lifting people out of their cars. Most new transit riders are residents who previously walked or rode bicycles to their destinations. A city councilmember admitted that “we just never found a sustainable funding source to replace the $10 million a year out of the fare box.” There have also been consistent complaints about long wait times and buses that didn’t show up at all. As of June, Kansas City will start charging for bus rides again.
Then there is Portland, Ore. It attracted national attention four decades ago when it created a free-fare zone for rail service in neighborhoods in the vicinity of downtown, and a number of other cities chose to emulate it. But Portland ended the experiment in 2012, citing both fiscal and safety concerns.
OTHER FREE-FARE PROGRAMS have struggled with different problems. Albuquerque has one of the most extensive programs, and it has had to deal with low participation. It has also been dealing with serious service and related labor problems: The job vacancy rate among drivers stood at 44 percent last year. That was the lowest shortfall in three years, but the vacancy rate among mechanics was even higher.
Seattle, whose free-transit program is limited to youths under 18 and low-income residents, has reported a significant increase in non-work travel, but it has not made much of a dent in the number of residents commuting to work; the ridership increase has been concentrated among those using the system for leisure activities or shopping.
The most successful free-transit experiments have come in smaller cities with a university campus or a large government presence: Chapel Hill, N.C., has had a successful central-zone free-fare program for more than 20 years, subsidized in part by the University of North Carolina; Olympia, Wash., has been able to report similarly positive numbers, based in part on ridership related to the concentration of state government workers. Another program that has worked is the one in Alexandria, Va.; it benefits from substantial usage by tourists. The lesson in all this is that demographics matter a lot. It seems easier to make free transit succeed with a population under 500,000 and a dominant local institution willing to help out. The larger American cities have had difficulty making the effort work.
THERE’S NO QUESTION that the free-fare experiments have accomplished some good things, regardless of how stable they have been financially. Buses in free-fare cities have become safer; studies have shown that aggressive behavior toward operators tripled over a recent 15-year span, and most of these incidents involved fare disputes; when the fare box disappears, the number of such incidents drops dramatically.
But there are larger issues involved, and most of them do not reflect especially well on free-fare transit. Even when ridership increases significantly as fares are eliminated, the number of commuters who ride public vehicles is still very small: The number of Americans who use them to commute to work has hovered at less than 4 percent in most recent years. As of 2019, before the pandemic, it was 14.3 percent in the Northeast and more than 55 percent in New York City. The national numbers have gone up since the pandemic ended, but they are still small compared with car travel. The upshot, discouraging as it might be, is that millions of Americans are contributing tax money to systems that very few of them use.
Beyond that, there is the complex issue of means testing. Americans have traditionally been leery of taking low-income subsidies too far. President Franklin Roosevelt worried about this. He and his advisers made Social Security a broad-based program in part because they feared that targeted benefits would not attract a sufficient political constituency. Whether Mayor Mamdani’s fare-free program would prove acceptable to the majority of non-bus-riding New Yorkers remains an open question.
I guess I’m sort of an outlier. I ride transit, I ride it for half price and I would be more than willing to pay full fare if the managers of the system asked me to. I don’t want to ride for nothing; it seems to me a substantial waste of public money. How many riders in New York would feel the same way? Mamdani’s free-bus experiment may be about to provide us with some answers.
Governing's opinion columns reflect the views of their authors and not necessarily those of Governing's editors or management.
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