Kansas City’s $50 million experiment with free bus fare is hitting the brakes — because the city can no longer afford it.
Mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani’s socialist proposals — including free buses in the five boroughs and Soviet-style, city-owned grocery stores — are now 0-2 when tried elsewhere, after Kansas City’s own venture with a government-run grocery abruptly closed earlier this month.
The Midwest city used federal COVID-19 relief money in 2020 to become the first in the country to institute free buses.
But local funding dried up, and riders and conductors slammed the buses as unreliable, filthy, rolling homeless shelters, something critics say could easily happen in Gotham…