Something Surprising Happens When Bus Rides Are Free

Pay walled

Free buses? Really? Of all the promises that Zohran Mamdani made during his New York City mayoral campaign, that one struck some skeptics as the most frivolous leftist fantasy. Unlike housing, groceries and child care, which weigh heavily on New Yorkers’ finances, a bus ride is just a few bucks. Is it really worth the huge effort to spare people that tiny outlay?

It is. Far beyond just saving riders money, free buses deliver a cascade of benefits, from easing traffic to promoting public safety. Just look at Boston; Chapel Hill, N.C.; Richmond, Va.; Kansas City, Mo.; and even New York itself, all of which have tried it to excellent effect. And it doesn’t have to be costly — in fact, it can come out just about even.

As a lawyer, I feel most strongly about the least-discussed benefit: Eliminating bus fares can clear junk cases out of our court system, lowering the crushing caseloads that prevent our judges, prosecutors and public defenders from focusing their attention where it’s most needed.

I was a public defender, and in one of my first cases I was asked to represent a woman who was not a robber or a drug dealer — she was someone who had failed to pay the fare on public transit. Precious resources had been spent arresting, processing, prosecuting and trying her, all for the loss of a few dollars. This is a daily feature of how we criminalize poverty in America.

Unless a person has spent real time in the bowels of a courthouse, it’s hard to imagine how many of the matters clogging criminal courts across the country originate from a lack of transit. Some of those cases result in fines; many result in defendants being ordered to attend community service or further court dates. But if people can’t afford the fare to get to those appointments and can’t get a ride, their only options — jump a turnstile or flout a judge’s order — expose them to re-arrest. Then they may face jail time, which adds significant pressure to our already overcrowded facilities. Is this really what we want the courts spending time on?

Free buses can unclog our streets, too. In Boston, eliminating the need for riders to pay fares or punch tickets cut boarding time by as much as 23 percent, which made everyone’s trip faster. Better, cheaper, faster bus rides give automobile owners an incentive to leave their cars at home, which makes the journey faster still — for those onboard as well as those who still prefer to drive.

How much should a government be willing to pay to achieve those outcomes? How about nothing? When Washington State’s public transit systems stopped charging riders, in many municipalities the state came out more or less even — because the money lost on fares was balanced out by the enormous savings that ensued.

Fare evasion was one of the factors that prompted Mayor Eric Adams to flood New York City public transit with police officers. New Yorkers went from shelling out $4 million for overtime in 2022 to $155 million in 2024. What did it get them? In September 2024, officers drew their guns to shoot a fare beater who was wielding a knife and two innocent bystanders ended up with bullet wounds, the kind of accident that’s all but inevitable in such a crowded setting.

New York City tried a free bus pilot program in 2023 and 2024 and, as predicted, ridership increased — by 30 percent on weekdays and 38 percent on weekends, striking figures that could make a meaningful dent in New York’s chronic traffic problem (and, by extension, air and noise pollution). Something else happened that was surprising: Assaults on bus operators dropped 39 percent. Call it the opposite of the Adams strategy: Lowering barriers to access made for fewer tense law enforcement encounters, fewer acts of desperation and a safer city overall.

If free buses strike you as wasteful, you’re not alone. Plenty of the beneficiaries would be people who can afford to pay. Does it make sense to give them a freebie? Yes, if it improves the life of the city, just as free parks, libraries and public schools do. Don’t think of it as a giveaway to the undeserving. Think of it as a gift to all New Yorkers in every community. We deserve it.

I wouldn't have thought of the judicial/policing ramifications.

All of fare enforcement goes away. All the ticket kiosks. IT to support them. Credit card processing. Customer support that isn't helping arrange/plan rides or deal with safety/service issues. Drivers spending time accepting fares instead of driving. Cages to separate buses into paid and unpaid sections when there's a second fare collector. And with it goes all of the cost to riders of dealing with those things.

Fares dictate the physical layout of transit systems to accommodate collecting the fares. Stairs up from one platform down to another so that a fare can be collected between an arterial service like a subway and a peripheral service like an underground tram. Or leaving and re-entering a station for commuter rail instead of having a cross-platform transfer.

The whole system is better if the people who benefit from it (everybody, businesses, industries, vehicle users benefiting from decreased traffic) pay for it in the simplest way possible without a bunch of extra steps.

literally cheaper to give power to the people

@bluemoon @hissingmeerkat

Koch Network has waged a multi-decade war on public transportation
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/19/climate/koch-brothers-public-transit.html

Hate anything where the races & classes mix.

Even kept money-losing ripoff artists like Uber & Lyfft afloat to kneecap public transit
https://jacobin.com/2019/08/uber-koch-brothers-david-charles-rideshare-public-transit

The fossil fuel industry is desperately seeking every possible avenue to keep their captive consumers & stop a necessary phase-out of their toxic products.

That includes funding fascists.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/20/us/politics/koch-network-2024-election-trump.html

@Npars01 @bluemoon @hissingmeerkat
In 2015, the Boston Globe published an excellent expose about the Kochs' work to derail public transit in #Nashville, including public fearmongering and a smear campaign against the mayor. Unfortunately it appears to be paywalled.

It reads like a Simpsons episode, all for the worship of oil and tires, and would be funny if it didn't really happen.

@rbellinger @Npars01 @bluemoon @hissingmeerkat Non-paywalled link to the 2015 Boston Globe story: https://web.archive.org/web/20250206191305/https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/nation/2015/10/10/nashville-mayor-wanted-bring-two-parts-his-city-together-then-was-crushed-state-legislators/QT91unb8xk4xPBqkTumgMP/story.html

@VisualStuart @rbellinger @bluemoon @hissingmeerkat

1. Corrupt car dealerships getting together to end automakers unions too.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/05/rich-republicans-party-car-dealers-2024-desantis.html

https://jacobin.com/2024/01/nikki-haley-south-carolina-scandal-mismanagement

https://www.goiam.org/news/sc-gov-haley-hates-unions-more-than-she-likes-jobs/

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/09/20/scott-and-haley-attack-unions-as-uaw-strike-threatens-to-escalate.html

https://dissentmagazine.org/blog/a-firestorm-of-interference-understanding-the-volkswagen-vote-in-tennessee/

2. Traffic fine revenue
In many cities there's a growing racial divide between urban & suburban.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/31/us/police-ticket-quotas-money-funding.html

Demographic changes have shifted back to the rich living in the urban core blessed with nice short commutes &...

1/

2/

... everyone else forced into suburban commuter hell.
https://www.traffictechnologytoday.com/features/feature-is-automated-traffic-enforcement-for-safety-or-profit.html

https://sycamoretn.org/how-criminal-fees-fines-fund-state-county-govt/

https://fortune.com/2025/03/04/georgia-speed-cameras-school-zones-dale-washburn-redspeed-blue-line-solutions/

https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/usappblog/2021/07/16/taxation-by-citation-in-many-us-cities-does-little-to-protect-the-public-and-can-compromise-individual-rights/

Traffic enforcement became a major source of city income off of POC running a daily gauntlet of cops pulling them over for minor offenses like busted tail lights and issuing tickets. Risks of being shot by cops.

Forcing people to lose a day at work for car repairs at dealerships, the only ones with a supply of parts.

3/

Chokepoint Capitalism at its best.

If the fines were challenged, more losses at an overburdened court system.

If the fines were paid late, more losses from late fees. Traffic enforcement started working with ICE and detentions increased, leaving a vehicle to be confiscated.

Eventually people give up their cars & take transit, only to have austerity measures placed on public transit subsidies.

City transit becomes a political, economic, & social justice issue.

Free buses? Really? Of all the promises that Zohran Mamdani made during his New York City mayoral campaign, that one struck some skeptics as the most frivolous leftist fantasy. Unlike housing, groceries and child care, which weigh heavily on New Yorkers’ finances, a bus ride is just a few bucks. Is it really worth the huge effort to spare people that tiny outlay?

It is. Far beyond just saving riders money, free buses deliver a cascade of benefits, from easing traffic to promoting public safety. Just look at Boston; Chapel Hill, N.C.; Richmond, Va.; Kansas City, Mo.; and even New York itself, all of which have tried it to excellent effect. And it doesn’t have to be costly — in fact, it can come out just about even.

As a lawyer, I feel most strongly about the least-discussed benefit: Eliminating bus fares can clear junk cases out of our court system, lowering the crushing caseloads that prevent our judges, prosecutors and public defenders from focusing their attention where it’s most needed.

I was a public defender, and in one of my first cases I was asked to represent a woman who was not a robber or a drug dealer — she was someone who had failed to pay the fare on public transit. Precious resources had been spent arresting, processing, prosecuting and trying her, all for the loss of a few dollars. This is a daily feature of how we criminalize poverty in America.

Unless a person has spent real time in the bowels of a courthouse, it’s hard to imagine how many of the matters clogging criminal courts across the country originate from a lack of transit. Some of those cases result in fines; many result in defendants being ordered to attend community service or further court dates. But if people can’t afford the fare to get to those appointments and can’t get a ride, their only options — jump a turnstile or flout a judge’s order — expose them to re-arrest. Then they may face jail time, which adds significant pressure to our already overcrowded facilities. Is this really what we want the courts spending time on?

Free buses can unclog our streets, too. In Boston, eliminating the need for riders to pay fares or punch tickets cut boarding time by as much as 23 percent, which made everyone’s trip faster. Better, cheaper, faster bus rides give automobile owners an incentive to leave their cars at home, which makes the journey faster still — for those onboard as well as those who still prefer to drive.

How much should a government be willing to pay to achieve those outcomes? How about nothing? When Washington State’s public transit systems stopped charging riders, in many municipalities the state came out more or less even — because the money lost on fares was balanced out by the enormous savings that ensued.

Fare evasion was one of the factors that prompted Mayor Eric Adams to flood New York City public transit with police officers. New Yorkers went from shelling out $4 million for overtime in 2022 to $155 million in 2024. What did it get them? In September 2024, officers drew their guns to shoot a fare beater who was wielding a knife and two innocent bystanders ended up with bullet wounds, the kind of accident that’s all but inevitable in such a crowded setting.

New York City tried a free bus pilot program in 2023 and 2024 and, as predicted, ridership increased — by 30 percent on weekdays and 38 percent on weekends, striking figures that could make a meaningful dent in New York’s chronic traffic problem (and, by extension, air and noise pollution). Something else happened that was surprising: Assaults on bus operators dropped 39 percent. Call it the opposite of the Adams strategy: Lowering barriers to access made for fewer tense law enforcement encounters, fewer acts of desperation and a safer city overall.

If free buses strike you as wasteful, you’re not alone. Plenty of the beneficiaries would be people who can afford to pay. Does it make sense to give them a freebie? Yes, if it improves the life of the city, just as free parks, libraries and public schools do. Don’t think of it as a giveaway to the undeserving. Think of it as a gift to all New Yorkers in every community. We deserve it.

4/

Now traffic enforcement is conjoined with both ICE officers' quotas & private prisons seeking detainees.

People at bus stops facing the same risk of detention as a commuter driving to work. Both risked detention.

https://tennesseelookout.com/2025/11/06/private-prison-operator-corecivic-saw-55-increase-in-immigration-detainee-contracts/