New Yorkers want better public transportation and a more affordable city. Politicians argue that fare-free buses will deliver both. But eliminating fares could cost the city $1 billion, depriving it of revenue that could be used to make transit faster.
What do riders really want? I spoke to dozens of New York bus passengers as well as Eric Goldwyn, an economist and program director at NYU’s Marron Institute who has floated a vision for going “Beyond Free Buses.” What I found is that many New Yorkers aren’t asking for free buses; they want a transportation system that works. For that to happen, Gotham needs to think bigger than abolishing fares.
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Kassandra Juarez rides the bus daily from her home in the East Bronx to work in Manhattan. The fare isn’t her main concern with the buses. Her biggest problem, she says, is that they “take forever to come;” and when they do come, they’re “often crowded and sometimes a little dirty.” Because she needs to transfer buses, her commute takes over an hour each day.
“If the buses were to run more frequently, I could probably save 40 minutes each day that I spend waiting,” she said, adding that she’d be willing to pay “a dollar or two more” for more frequent buses.
Luisa Cinco, a rider of the Q32, echoed those concerns. “You always have to wait a long, long time for it to come,” she told City Journal in Spanish. As for Hoyin Tong, a rider of the M55, her concern was “not so much the price” but the fact that the buses were “super slow, even in bus lanes.”
When asked whether she’d support fare-free buses, she suggested that it would be better to focus on bus speeds. “There are programs for those who can’t afford the fares,” she said.
Bus riders across the city voiced similar themes: the need for speed, frequency, and reliability.
“I wouldn’t say no if it were cheaper,” said Edward Xu, a rider of the M1 bus, “but really it’s fine and I’d prefer if it went to more places.”
Advocates of fare-free transit say that their plan would make buses faster, since riders wouldn’t need to take time to pay the fares. That theory doesn’t hold up in practice. Average route speeds fell slightly during New York’s fare-free bus pilot, which ran from 2023 to 2024, owing to a 30 percent increase in weekday ridership.
Writing in The Nation, mayoral hopeful Zohran Mamdani and New York State Senate deputy majority leader Michael Gianaris note that 23 percent of riders reported riding the bus during the pilot “because it was free.” They see this as success, but eliminating fares induces more people to choose busing as their mode of transport, resulting in overcrowding and delays that penalize people who have no choice but to ride the bus. For example, during the pilot, 45 percent of free-bus riders said that they would have walked or not made the trip if it weren’t free.
Without fare revenue, local policymakers will also struggle to expand or improve Gotham’s transportation system. Fares account for 25 percent of the nearly $20 billion it takes to operate the MTA. Without fares, the city will likely need to rely on tax hikes—a state prerogative—to finance future investment in the bus system, limiting the MTA’s ability to invest in new services and make necessary adjustments quickly. As Zakhary Mallett writes in Vital City, “The most direct way to correct our conundrum of never having enough money to maintain transportation is to economize how we provide and finance it.”
Proponents’ claims notwithstanding, “fast” and “free” are trade-offs: cheaper (or free) buses mean less long-run investment in things that could dramatically speed up transportation in the city.
The alternative that NYU’s Goldwyn has proposed would allow the city to expand ridership among poorer New Yorkers while retaining fares. He argues that the MTA should increase uptake of Fair Fares—a program that provides half-price fares for low-income New Yorkers but is used by only 34 percent of eligible residents—while investing existing revenue in more frequent buses, consolidated bus stops, and all-door boarding.
In an interview, Goldwyn called on the city to expand its subway system to divert demand from bus routes. “There are busy bus corridors that could justify subway expansion,” he said. “New York should be looking at expanding the Second Avenue Subway to the west side of 125th Street,” he argued, echoing a proposal floated by Governor Kathy Hochul last year. He also proposed expanding the subway to Fordham Road to divert demand from the Bx12, which has one of the city’s slowest routes but some of its highest ridership figures.
“We tend to think of buses and subways as compartmentalized modes of transit,” he said. “We should be looking at these things together.”
Proponents of universal fare-free buses also ignore how, for many New Yorkers, the buses are effectively already free. Today, roughly half of riders beat the fare.
As a regular rider of New York City’s buses, I’ve seen that fare-beating rates vary dramatically based on location. On the M7 route, which runs through the Upper West Side, for example, almost all riders pay the fare. On the Bx9, in the Bronx, by contrast, roughly ten riders skipped the fare for every rider that I observed paying.
Before the pandemic, the city collected close to $1 billion in fare revenue; it could arguably reach a similar total today with proper enforcement. Those foregone funds could help fund projects that cut commute times for outer borough residents. It would take just five years of fare revenue, for example, to cover the cost of the first phase of the Second Avenue Subway extension. If New York learned to build more subways affordably, those funds would go even further.
Making buses fare-free will hinder the city’s ability to invest more systematically in transportation. New Yorkers aren’t demanding free buses. Instead, they want the city to be far more ambitious in building a system that works reliably and efficiently.
Adam Lehodey is an investigative reporter at City Journal, covering governance, economics, and cultural affairs in New York City.
Photo by Erik McGregor/LightRocket via Getty Images