New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s proposed test-drive of free buses during this summer’s World Cup soccer games must negotiate an inconvenient pothole: an analysis from New York University’s Marron Institute of Urban Management that blew out the tires of fare-free transit. The implications reverberate beyond New York’s five boroughs, including in Boston, where I and many other car-free residents depend on the MBTA. And where the pilot of three no-fare bus routes (routes 23, 28 and 29) have been extended through June.
The NYU report argued that the $1 billion in foregone fares under Mamdani’s plan for permanent free buses in the Big Apple could buy 41 miles of new subway lines. Per the New York Times, “The added stations would be in overlooked parts of the city where new transit options could spur the construction of thousands of new units of affordable housing, the researchers said.” In other words, Mamdani is missing the forest of affordability for the trees of free buses.
In the last five years, the European tradition of fare-free public transportation has crept across the nation from Boston and Richmond, Virginia, to Kansas City, Missouri. But for just as long, many transportation experts here have thrown shade on such schemes. Today, Boston Mayor Michelle Wu’s enduring hope of free bus service remains stalled, with only the “free-three” available throughout the MBTA. This well-meaning but misguided idea should be put out of its misery…