Episode 156: Should the Bus Be Free? with Yonah Freemark

Doug Gordon: Hey everyone, it’s Doug. So let’s say you’re in the market for an e-bike but aren’t sure where to start. For a lot of people, just the sticker price alone can be a big barrier. That’s why I’m a fan of Upway. Upway is a really cool online marketplace with a huge selection of certified, pre-owned e-bikes, all at discounted prices. Think of it like buying an affordable, certified, pre-owned car, but for e-bikes. In fact, that’s exactly what Maxime Renson, the head of Upway US told me.

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Doug: This is The War on Cars. I’m Doug Gordon, and I am here in the studio with my co-host, Sarah Goodyear.

Sarah Goodyear: Hey there, Doug.

Doug: How are you?

Sarah: Good. I’m really good. I’ve been moving around the city already this morning. I had a lot of appointments before this, so it was hard to get here.

Doug: Because there’s no bus that comes from your place directly to the studio.

Sarah: That’s right. The bus service—there should be, like, a quick bus to do the trip that I did. I ended up doing it on a Citi Bike e-bike because it was too far to walk. I didn’t have enough time. But why isn’t there a bus? Why isn’t there better bus service in New York?

Doug: And if there were a bus that you could take from your house to the studio, should it be free? That is the question we’re gonna be asking today.

Sarah: I mean, we have our opinions. My opinion is uninformed at this point. Loosely informed. And of course I would like it to be free. I don’t want to pay.

Doug: I will say that before I researched this episode and prepared the outline, I probably leaned more to the side of no, it should not be free.

Sarah: Okay.

Doug: I’m a little more agnostic right now. A little more like, maybe it should be free, maybe in certain cases, maybe we should see what happens.

Sarah: Okay. Are there any facts that we can use to support our opinions?

Doug: Facts on this podcast? Sarah!

Sarah: [laughs]

Doug: We have a really great guest who is going to help us with that. Let’s sort of set this up first. So as folks know, Zohran Mamdani, he’s the New York State Assembly member who won the New York City Democratic primary for mayor in June. He thinks the bus should be free. During the primary, he made free buses one of the core planks in his platform, and it was all part of his pitch to voters that he understands their very legitimate concerns about the cost of living. And he wants to do something about it, something concrete.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Zohran Mamdani: It’s not just about economic access, it’s also about public safety. It’s also even about environmentalism because we’re seeing that 11 percent of the new riders, they were previously driving a car, taking a taxi. Now they’re off the road, they’re on public transit. And the cost of doing all of this is about $700 million a year. Now that sounds significant, which it is, but just want to put it into context. We’re talking about that in the context of a city budget that’s about $113 billion a year. State budget, about $252 billion a year. There is money. The question is what we spend it on.]

Doug: Now as we head towards the general election in November, free buses are a big part of Mamdani’s campaign still. It is an idea that has stirred up a lot of debate, especially in the urbanist community—you know how much we love to argue.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Doug: Some people saying, “Yeah, you know, all transit should be free.” Other people saying that this plan is gonna cost an estimated $600 million, and that would be better invested in improving service. And it’s an argument that is not just relevant to New York City, but to cities around the world.

Sarah: I mean, I do want to point out that Zohran’s platform calls for buses to be fast and free. And, you know, he said that’s the tagline: Fast and free. Fast and free. And so there’s not just the “free” part, there’s the “fast” part. And those things, you know, work in tandem. And so he is saying that there would be better service as well. But we’ll get into all those details. But I just wanted to put that “fast” part out, because that’s really important.

Doug: Well, this was the part that I think was sort of interesting to me, because there is that adage in television production and business: fast, cheap and good; you have to pick two. So we’ll get into this. But before we do that, quick business.

Sarah: First of all, you can find us on Patreon at Patreon.com/thewaroncarspod, and you can pre-order our new book, Life After Cars: Freeing Ourselves From the Tyranny of the Automobile wherever books are sold. It will be published in October, on October 21 by Thesis, an imprint of Penguin Random House. Go to LifeAfterCars.com for all the latest news, including updates on our book tour.

Doug: Yes. We have a number of shows on sale now, including San Francisco on October 25, Brooklyn at the Bell House on October 28, Seattle on November 5 with Ray Delahanty, CityNerd. And we just announced Vancouver on November 8 with an organization called Vision Zero Vancouver. By the time this releases, there might be more, I don’t know. But go to LifeAfterCars.com, and you can get tickets for what we have announced.

Sarah: Yeah, we’re adding dates all the time.

Doug: So with everybody talking about free buses—is it a good idea? Is it not a good idea? We decided to bring in someone who has thought about this a lot to help us answer the question, or at least have a more informed opinion about it. Our guest is Yonah Freemark.

Sarah: Yonah is a researcher in the Housing and Communities Division at the Urban Institute, where he focuses on the intersection of land use, affordable housing, transportation and governance. He’s published peer-reviewed scholarship in numerous journals including Urban Affairs Review, Politics and Society, Housing Policy Debate and the Journal of the American Planning Association. He’s also written for publications like Streetsblog, Next City, and the New York Times. Yonah previously worked for Chicago’s Metropolitan Planning Council, and he holds master’s degrees in city planning and in transportation, as well as a PhD in urban studies from MIT. In other words, this man is smarter than both of us put together. Yonah Freemark, welcome to The War on Cars.

Yonah Freemark: Thanks for having me. Unfortunately, intelligence can’t be defined by the number of degrees that you have.

Sarah: [laughs] Anyway, you’re more credentialed. We can say that.

Doug: Your bona fides are real. Yes, yes. Yonah, let’s give, like, a little bit of background, because this is not a new idea that has sprung whole cloth from the mind of Zohran Mamdani. This is an idea that’s been around for a long time. And in fact, New York has piloted free buses. As a state assembly member, Zohran Mamdani led an effort to pilot free bus service on five lines in New York City, one in each borough. And then you have other cities like Boston, which also has experimented with free fares. Mayor Wu expanded a pilot that began under her predecessor, and now there are three routes through sort of underserved transit-dependent communities, low-income communities where people generally don’t have or can’t afford cars. We’ve got a few examples around the country. Yonah, you’ve done a lot of research on this. Before we really break down the arguments for and against free bus service, like, if you were as uninformed as we are, where would your gut instinct tell you to go with this?

Yonah Freemark: I think that there’s a variety of different ways of thinking about free buses. I think one is, you know, it’s obvious, you know, as Sarah, you said if you could have a public service that’s free, why not, you know? We rely on our public libraries being free. We generally aren’t charged when we, you know, ask the police to come to solve a problem in our community, et cetera. So why isn’t transit treated like other types of public service? On the other hand, you know, if you’re thinking about the cost of providing a service, you might say, “Well, of course we should charge for transit because it costs money to drive the bus. It costs money to electrify or provide fuel for those buses.” So, you know, I can see it going both ways.

Doug: Okay, so the arguments for free bus service and free transit in general, they usually consist of five main points. And in this episode, we’re gonna just go through them one by one. Those points are number one, it increases ridership; number two, it gets people out of cars; number three, it benefits low-income people; number four, it can lead to increases in employment in a region; and number five, it improves operational efficiency, or in other words, speeds up bus service. Let’s break these down one by one. So question number one: Does free transit add riders?

Yonah Freemark: Yeah. I mean, here the evidence is relatively clear. If you make transit free, you’re going to have more people actually using the system. Now the degree to which this is true is obviously variable, but there’s a lot of evidence out there that the cost of transportation informs how much people use the transportation system.

Yonah Freemark: And that is not just related to transit, it’s related to any mode of transportation. When fuel gets cheaper, people drive more. When people can buy an e-bike for less money, they are more likely to buy an e-bike. And so there’s nothing surprising about the fact that if you reduce the fare or eliminate the fare, you’re going to have more people using the system. But if you want to think about this empirically, there are some studies out there that look at what’s called “fare elasticity,” which is to say if you’re going to reduce the fare by X amount, how much more do you expect people to ride? And, you know, it’s very much dependent on the community. But in general, the data that’s out there suggests that the fare elasticity is something around between two and eight percent, which basically means if you reduce the fare by ten percent, your ridership will go up by two to eight percent.

Yonah Freemark: So that’s actually a pretty big effect, depending on the community, but that doesn’t really tell us much about making a transit system or part of the transit system free, because that’s just reducing or increasing the fare. And this is where I think we’re starting to see some increasing evidence from a number of different transit agencies that are playing around with this. As a lot of folks who are listening probably know, transit agencies throughout the United States have really struggled since the pandemic—and even before the pandemic—to bring back riders, right? They, you know, have had a lot of people working from home, they’ve had people who are reluctant to get back on the train and bus. And the result is that transit agencies don’t have as much ridership as they used to, for the most part.

Yonah Freemark: But that is not true for every transit agency throughout the United States. And interestingly, when you look at the largest transit agencies in the country and compare their ridership from 2024 versus 2019, so pre-pandemic versus post-pandemic, among those in the biggest metropolitan areas, there are two that stand out as having substantially more riders in 2024 than in 2019. And those two agencies are the Richmond, Virginia Transit Agency and the Tucson, Arizona Transit Agency. And I think you’re going to guess what I’m going to say about what’s interesting about those two agencies. Richmond and Tucson have gone out of their way to decide on going fare free, and they have benefited from that. They’ve been able to actually have—in 2024, both of them had 24 percent more riders than each of them had in 2019. And that’s a large increase compared to almost every other transit agency, which is much lower.

Sarah: Right.

Yonah Freemark: And this is something we’re seeing in cities all around the world, frankly. You know, I do a lot of research in France and, you know, there’s a city, a relatively large city called Montpellier in the south. That city went entirely fare free a few years ago, and it has had the greatest increase in ridership of all the French metropolitan areas since that time. And so, you know, there’s a lot of evidence out there that ridership is going to increase when you give people a lower price or even free service, but I do want to emphasize that there are some—there’s some asterisks to add here.

Sarah: I’m wondering if the next point of what we were saying is a potential benefit, which is, does free transit get people out of cars? Is that one of the things that you’re talking about being kind of a squishy effect?

Yonah Freemark: Absolutely. Fundamentally, we need to ask a sort of preliminary question, which is: Does the number of people literally getting onto the bus or getting onto the train really matter? Is that the key issue? Or is the key issue we want fewer people to be driving and more people to be taking the train? These are related, but not the same issue. And to get into that, we need to look at what’s called “mode shift,” which is essentially when you put in a new transportation service, you change the fare or whatever, does that change the percentage of people who are choosing to drive, to take a bike, to walk, et cetera, over time? And here the evidence is less clear. There isn’t a great amount of evidence that making transit systems fare free actually gets people to stop driving.

Doug: Hmm.

Yonah Freemark: In fact, what it seems to be doing is giving people who are probably already taking transit or who are walking or biking an encouragement to take transit more. And so you end up—so when you say, you know, there are more transit riders, what you mean is, for example, Sarah, instead of you taking that e-bike, if there had been a free bus going to the right destination, maybe you would have jumped on the bus.

Sarah: Right.

Yonah Freemark: Right? So that is a choice to get out of a bike and onto a bus. It’s not a choice for you to get out of your car and onto a bus. Which, you know, if you’re trying to pursue transit from, like, an environmentally sustainable goal, you’re not getting there if you’re not taking people out of their cars. On the other hand, you know, maybe it’s good for the transit system to be popular, to be filled with people who are using it, whether or not they would have been driving otherwise. I think that that is an open question that we need to think more about. And it’s also worth emphasizing that it used to be, you know, a lot of people, a lot more people had monthly passes, for example, on the New York City subway or on transit systems throughout the country. It’s less common now for a number of reasons, but people who had monthly passes essentially might use the bus as, like, what we might think of as a pedestrian accelerator.

Doug: Mm-hmm.

Yonah Freemark: In other words, they’re walking down the street, a bus pulls up, and they’re like, “Hey, this can save me a few minutes on my way down the street. Let me just jump on the bus instead of walking.” That is not to be dismissed. If you think of transportation as a mechanism to improve your ability to get from here to there, then giving people an option that is free essentially makes their lives a little easier, and allows them to speed up their route. On the other hand, it may not actually get people out of the cars, again. But I think the big reason for that is that people who drive often are not actually worried about the cost of transit today, so if you reduce it to zero, they don’t necessarily see an incentive there.

Sarah: I just want to go back for a second to getting more people on the bus. What you said about just the inherent benefits of increasing ridership regardless of what mode those people are coming from, it seems to me that one of the things that often goes unspoken about buses but that we all know is how stigmatized bus use is in this country. So to me, like, getting more people onto the bus and creating an environment that’s like, there are just more people there, and there are more different types of people that might be shifting onto the bus, regardless of whether they’re coming from cars, that that inherently sort of lifts the profile of the bus, and that that is not an insignificant benefit.

Yonah Freemark: There’s this theorist from the mid century named William Whyte who was a big proponent of public space. He was sort of like the originator, in a lot of ways, of thinking about creating more livable, open public spaces for everybody. And one of the things he demonstrated very clearly was that if you get more people into a public space, everyone will get more comfortable. And one of the things he emphasized was that if you have a small public space with just one or two people who might, for other people, feel uncomfortable to be around, that makes that public space challenging to maintain and challenging as a community environment. But when that public space becomes popular and filled up, even if the exact same people are there, suddenly the public space becomes a place people want to be. And I see the value that you’re trying to describe. I think in New York City, things are a bit different, and I think that applies to a lot of the things we’re discussing today.

Sarah: Yeah.

Yonah Freemark: Compared to a lot of the rest of the United States, you know, I’m not sure that the free transit is this—has the same value, and we can get into that in more detail later. But also, the buses are simply more full. It’s not like New York City’s buses are empty. Even if they’re having ridership challenges compared to the past, we’re not facing a challenge with, like, nobody on the bus. In a lot of smaller cities, that may be an issue. So when you create a situation where, you know, you fill up the buses a little bit more, you make people feel like there are people around them. Yeah, I think that that could absolutely create a sort of eyes on the street type feeling of comfort.

Doug: Along the lines of what Sarah was saying, this idea of bus service and bus riders being stigmatized, there is this question: Who does making the bus free benefit? Now somewhat absurdly, Andrew Cuomo, he said that Mamdani’s plan would benefit the rich.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Andrew Cuomo: Assemblyman Mamdani proposed 100 percent free buses, fast free buses for all. My question on that proposal is, first of all, what happened to subways? More people ride subways. You just leave that out. But number two, why would you subsidize the rich? I get the theory of socialism, and government provides government controls. I get that. But besides playing socialist, why should New Yorkers subsidize the bus fare for rich people?]

Doug: I mean, it’s sort of like saying libraries benefit the rich. What does the research show?

Yonah Freemark: The biggest beneficiaries, from evidence in other countries where this has been implemented, is that it benefits people sort of at the economic margin of society, which is to say people who are struggling a little bit to pay for basic needs. And so that includes low-income people specifically, but also young people and the elderly. There’s a lot of evidence out there from places like South Korea, but also in Czechia, that when these services have been implemented as free, you end up getting people who, you know, are struggling in that way economically to actually use the services more.

Yonah Freemark: The argument that Andrew Cuomo was making is not demonstrated in the research. This is unlikely to be taken advantage of more by wealthy people. And the fundamental explanation for that is that the wealthy people who are avoiding the bus today are unlikely to jump on the bus tomorrow because it becomes free. And the reason for that is because again, it’s not like they have a problem affording the bus.

Doug: Right. $2.90 is not a barrier for a millionaire.

Yonah Freemark: Right. The price is a barrier for lower-income people. And so those, you know, intuitively are going to be the people who benefit. But, you know, I think this is where the question of how it’s implemented might get more interesting, and where we can maybe talk about the New York City example in more detail versus how it’s been done elsewhere.

Yonah Freemark: So in places like Richmond and Tucson and Montpellier that we talked about before, all of the transit system became free, right? So, like, you could use the bus in Montpellier, you could use the tram. They’re all free. And so people are able to use the whole system as they want, the network. What Mamdani is proposing is that the buses become free and the trains, the subways remain having a fare, right? So that’s his proposal. I think that this could potentially raise concerns about access and equity in terms of the different people who are benefiting from this system.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Yonah Freemark: And the reason for that in the New York City context is that in general, almost always the subways are faster than the bus system. And so if you make the fare cheaper just on one part of the system, the bus system, you essentially are giving people who have low incomes an incentive to take the bus because it saves them a few dollars, even if it takes them more time. And so what you could end up doing is essentially exacerbating inequities from a transportation perspective, at least overall.

Yonah Freemark: This doesn’t necessarily mean that the typical low-income person in New York City would have a worse outcome. In fact, it seems like they would have a better outcome in most cases because they’re choosing to have the cheaper service. But from an equity perspective, in other words, like, what’s the average experience, you’re gonna have more low income people taking the bus and less taking the subway as a result.

Yonah Freemark: So I don’t know, it’s a trade off that’s a little difficult to parse out because, you know, again, if somebody chooses to take a free bus because they think that saving themselves a few dollars is more important than saving a few minutes on the train, then maybe that’s a good choice for them. So I don’t know. I have a difficult time on that.

Sarah: I also would like to add that in New York, buses often service parts of the city where there is no train service, and where people are members of those marginalized communities and low-income communities. So I think that part of the rationale probably behind Mamdani’s proposal is that there is a huge sector of bus ridership in this city that is in places with no subway access, far out, and constantly struggling to get their transportation needs met in a financially sustainable way. So I mean, that’s my guess as to what might be the rationale behind it. But that’s a really interesting—that’s a really interesting wrinkle.

Doug: Yeah, and maybe this is something we can talk about in more detail later, but in terms of it benefiting low-income people, elderly people, kids who might not have deep pockets, I think we’re measuring affordability in such a narrow way when we’re sometimes talking about bus service because okay, look, $3 or so—the fare’s about to go up—round trip, every day, five days a week, not to mention other trips like running errands. That adds up when you are a minimum wage earner or less, let’s be honest. But I also know that, for example, my daycare for my kids would charge us $25 for every 15 minutes we were late to pick up the kids, right? $100 an hour. So I might save $3 at the end of the day, $6 total, but if the bus still shows up 25 minutes late or is stuck in traffic, I could be out $50. And if you’re a wage earner and you’re late to work and you miss the first hour of work and you lose your job, then of course there’s that aspect as well.

Doug: So you know, it does put money back in people’s pockets. It might mean that, you know, unbanked people don’t have to worry about fishing for coins and that kind of stuff, but I do think we’re sort of—there’s a narrow focus. Now to Mamdani’s credit, he’s talking about other things: freezing the rent, municipal grocery stores. But I think sometimes we talk about, well, this is just a universal good because it’s free, is a very narrow way of looking at it. So I’m glad we’re breaking this down.

Sarah: Yeah. And I will add once again in Mamdani’s defense, that “fast and free” has been the watchword. And we’re gonna get to that.

Doug: We’ll get to whether or not it actually makes the bus fast.

Sarah: Yeah.

Doug: So let’s get to the next question, speaking of jobs. Does making the bus free help with the region’s employment?

Yonah Freemark: There is not a huge amount of evidence that free bus service is going to actually increase the number of people having jobs in a city. It’s not gonna, like, reduce unemployment. But there is a lot of evidence that fair systems that are less costly or that are free for people who need it can encourage people to, for example, go to the doctor more often. There’s an interesting study done by one of the people who was in the PhD program with me at MIT, named Jeff Rosenblum, who looked at basically what happened in Boston with individuals who received reduced fare cards or free fare cards. And what he found very clearly was that people who got those cards were less likely to miss their medical appointments, and had better physical and mental health as a result. And that is not to be dismissed. You know, even if employment doesn’t go up, even if people aren’t more likely to have a job, if their quality of life goes up, I think that that is a benefit that we should be thinking about.

Sarah: Absolutely. I mean, it seems like that public health benefit, we’re so bad in this society at factoring in those public health benefits. And, you know, we’re looking for different kinds of economic benefits a lot of the time. But obviously, public health is expensive. If people aren’t healthy, it’s expensive for the society in myriad ways. And so I think that’s something really interesting that doesn’t get explicitly mentioned sometimes.

Doug: Yeah, my brain goes to just something as simple as if you had an expensive grocery store in your neighborhood and there was a cheaper one more than a walking distance away, if you’re low income, you might think to yourself, “No way am I spending six bucks to save seven,” right? But if it were free, that six bucks or that seven bucks makes a big difference in your life.

Sarah: Right. Or if you have a job to go to that maybe isn’t paying that much, that can be half an hour’s wage or whatever. It can add up.

Doug: All right, so our final question before we sort of dig in more philosophically, let’s say, is: Do free fares improve operational effectiveness? In other words, does it make the bus faster?

Sarah: But before we get to that core question, we’re gonna take a little break.

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Doug: And we’re back. So here’s the big and I guess, final question: Does this make the bus faster? What do you think?

Yonah Freemark: It depends on how the system is implemented. You know, the theory here is that if the buses are free, people can board from all doors and there’s no transaction time. Right now when you get on a bus, for those of you who are hopefully using the bus on a relatively frequent basis, you have to either tap your card, or in a lot of places, people are putting in their dollar bills or putting in their coins. And it takes a bit of time. So if you’re on a busy bus system, the buses end up sitting at the stop for quite a while. It’s called “dwell time.” And that dwell can be a challenge from the perspective of getting buses moving.

Yonah Freemark: And so the idea behind free fares is that if you are allowing people not to pay at all, people can just jump on the bus from all the doors on the bus, and then the bus can get going more quickly, right? And so, you know, there is some evidence here that this is true. So in the Boston study, they did find that there was a six to twenty-three percent decline in dwell times, which meant, you know, less time waiting at the stops per passenger.

Yonah Freemark: Unfortunately, this decrease in dwell times was sort of counteracted by the increase in ridership. So in other words, you had more people taking the bus, so it’s true that per person, there was less time waiting at the stop, but because there were more people boarding, it took more time.

Doug: That was my question, because I did wonder if it’s a little bit of a be-careful-what-you-wish-for sort of situation where yeah, it’s great to get more people on the bus, but I took the bus yesterday to run some errands, and I had a couple stops where nobody except for one or two people got on and boom, boom, we were on our way. Then I got to a stop where 15 people got on, and I was sitting there thinking, “I should just get off at this point because I could probably walk faster than it’s gonna take for all these people to get on now.” That’s with everyone swiping their cards or tapping their cards and paying. But yeah, 20 people get on your bus and you gotta wait for all the doors to close and, you know, “Back door, please!” It could offset those benefits.

Yonah Freemark: You know, I think this is where the interplay between increased ridership and reduced dwell time really comes into play, and I don’t think we really know the answer until it’s actually implemented, frankly. What does seem clear is that we could theoretically achieve those dwell time reductions without eliminating the fare. And I think this is one thing that’s worth, you know, dwelling over is can agencies open up their back door for people to board while also tapping their cards? A lot of agencies have been reluctant to do that because they want to have people go past the driver to encourage them to pay. But that slows bus boarding procedures.

Yonah Freemark: And so if you just open up the back door and let people tap there, you could also have a dwell time reduction. The other thing you can do is, you know, encourage people to use what in theory is in effect with the SBS service in New York City, which is paying off board, paying at the platform. That requires some sort of enforcement on the bus, but in theory that should speed the buses as well. So, you know, I think there’s some potential here, but I’m a little skeptical of it as a means to increase the speed of buses. I think if you want to achieve that goal, we need to—we need to be thinking about other approaches. Reducing the service costs or eliminating fares, I don’t think is going to be your best mechanism to actually make the buses more efficient.

Doug: We’ve answered those five questions, or at least discussed them, and hopefully people are a little more informed. I know I was researching this, and our conversation so far has been excellent. But let’s talk about those other ways to make the bus faster. There’s research from TransitCenter that shows that if given the choice, people prefer better bus service to free fares. Like, the thing that’s stopping people from taking the bus right now, except for in certainly those more edge cases of people truly with very limited funds, is that it just doesn’t come enough, and it doesn’t go to the places they need it to go.

Sarah: And it gets stuck in traffic while it’s going.

Doug: Which leads exactly to—exactly what I was gonna set up. Thank you, Sarah. Just get rid of the cars that are in the way of the bus. Implement things like congestion pricing to speed up traffic, dedicated right of way, signal priority. What are we leaving out here that we should be talking about?

Yonah Freemark: Well, you know, I think there are actually two ways to be thinking about this. I’ll begin by saying that I think this issue of replacing free fares with better service assumes that fares are bringing in enough revenue that you could use to provide better service, right? There’s a fundamental assumption in that poll that, like, these are things that need to be compromised against one another, that, you know, you can have free fares, you can have better service, it’s one option or another.

Yonah Freemark: But the reality is that in most small- and medium-sized cities in the United States, fares don’t bring in very much revenue. And the result is that even if I were to institute fares or not institute fares, the effect on my service provision would be quite minimal. So just to give you an example of this, I looked at the data for Spokane’s transit agency. So Spokane is in what? In eastern Washington. And it’s like a prototypical medium-sized city, which actually has some pretty good bus service. They implemented a bus rapid transit line. They in 2023 only collected six percent of their total operating cost from fares, okay? Six percent. That’s about $6.5 million a year.

Yonah Freemark: If you eliminated all that fare revenue, you know, you’re gonna tell me, “Oh, well they’d have to cut service.” Well, it’s true. Maybe they would have to cut service by, let’s say, five percent. If I went ahead and cut service by five percent, yes, the evidence suggests that there would be a drop in ridership. But if I eliminated fares, I also think there would be an increase in ridership for the same reason. And actually, the impact might be sort of even if—or maybe even an increase in ridership, if you instituted free fares, even if you had a decrease in the amount of service you were providing for these—for these small- and medium-sized cities, which is an interesting situation.

Yonah Freemark: However, in larger cities like New York, fares provide a very substantial share of the overall cost of transit. So if you were to take out the fare supports from the bus system or the rail system, you suddenly have a huge gap you have to fill in some way. And this is where it gets even more complicated, because how are you going to fill that? Well, maybe you could take the money out of the operating expenses of the transit agency. That would be a gigantic cut to transit service in a place like New York City, if you had to do that. And that would be devastating for ridership. It would absolutely be worse than any sort of gain you would get from making the fares free.

Yonah Freemark: However, if the money that is making up that cost is coming from somewhere else, then we’re talking about a whole other equation. And this is where Mamdani’s proposal is actually more complicated than it seems. Because you are not taking money away from the MTA’s operations under Mamdani’s proposal. You are taking money from the city’s budget and giving it to the MTA, which is a state agency. These are different concepts.

Yonah Freemark: Now in theory, you could take the same money and give it to the MTA to increase service. And perhaps that’s worth discussing now because you asked: How do we increase the quality of transit service in a way that will increase the use of the transit service in a way that’s maybe better than the fare free? And maybe that’s worth asking. For example, Mamdani is saying we might have to spend upwards of $700 million a year of city budget to make up the lost revenues from the buses. What could you buy with $700 million? Well, you know, you could invest, for example, in a lot of bus corridors throughout the city. You could literally dedicate lanes or even whole—whole streets to providing better bus service that would absolutely speed buses. That is expensive, but it’s less expensive than $700 million a year if you want to implement it over time.

Yonah Freemark: My perspective is that that is a huge opportunity, but as you said, it’s also politically difficult. So it’s easier to say, “Oh, we could spend the money on improving the infrastructure to improve buses,” than it is to do it in reality, because you are dealing with a lot of people at the local level who are saying, “No, don’t take away my bus stop. No, don’t take away my car lane. No, don’t take away my parking.” And so you can say, “Oh, you can spend the money to improve the bus service,” but then it becomes complicated to actually get it in action.

Doug: There’s a flip of that argument, which I think is kind of similar in a way, which is that I think free fares are a good idea, but it requires the political leadership to continue to see it through. So we have a great mayor, Mayor Mamdani. He comes in, let’s say we have a supportive governor and state legislature that says, “Yes, let’s do it.” And then two, four, twelve years from now, someone comes along and says, “Screw bus riders. The fare is back to being $3.” Locals feel very upset about that, but what are you gonna do? That’s politics. If you invest the political capital and the financial capital in improving bus service physically with dedicated lanes and new equipment, it’s not that those things can’t be undone—we’ve seen bus lanes get ripped out. But it’s a little harder than just flipping a switch on a farebox and saying, “No, now we’re collecting fares.” So, you know, look, I can hear the emails and the comments going in of, like, “Why not both?” Right? You know, free service and better improvement. And you’re right, Yonah. I think we need to think creatively about where the money can come from. And part of Mamdani’s pitch is that there’s plenty of money out there, we’re just spending it on the wrong things. But I do think the political side of this kind of cuts both ways.

Sarah: Yeah. I mean, I, yesterday, was at a rally celebrating the 34th Street busway, which is something that should have happened many years ago. And it’s looking like it’s gonna be a reality. We’ve done it on 14th Street here in New York, and this is the kind of infrastructure improvement that you’re talking about, where there are dedicated bus corridors that are gonna speed up buses. And everybody was really excited about that. And I am in the camp of why not both, right? Because look, we’ve done it already in a couple of places here in New York. We’re supposedly gonna do it more.

Doug: And if New York has however many billions they’re gonna give to the Buffalo Bills to build a new stadium, they probably can find the money for free service and better bus service.

Sarah: Exactly. And, you know, the idea of taxing the billionaires, I think, is something that is becoming more attractive to more people as the billionaires become more prominent and visible. And we all know that if you can buy yourself rockets to blow up, you could probably pay enough taxes to help make these lanes a reality if you’re in that income bracket. So I think that there is sort of a false choice that we could have free fares and better service, that we could just have better buses. But yeah, that’s just me. I want everything.

Doug: Let’s return to that point as we head towards wrapping up the conversation. But there’s an important thing I think we need to consider here, and that’s bus operators.

Sarah: Yes.

Doug: Yonah, you said, you know, when people get on the bus, they have to pay and pass by the driver. That driver acts as not just the bus operator, but an enforcement mechanism. And that’s a big burden to put on someone who didn’t get into this because they want to confront passengers over whether or not they’re paying their fare. It’s an additional question to the one that we originally asked, which is: Does this lead to fewer assaults on bus operators? There is evidence from the pilot here in New York City that the answer might be yes.

Yonah Freemark: It’s interesting that you bring this up because, you know, one of my former colleagues, Lindiwe Rennert, she did a lot of research on this issue of assaults of transit operators. And this is a problem that affects bus operators obviously far more than train operators because of the direct contact that’s happening there. And this assault problem has affected a lot of transit agencies, and is making the quality of work for people who would be operators more difficult. It’s discouraging them from staying in place, and that’s reducing the quality of service for the transit agencies who are unable to fill positions. So my perspective is that if you are able to reduce that contact, you know, you will see some benefit. I think that the contact reduction could be done in a few ways. One is making fares free. Another is simply having the driver not enforce, which is to say, allow people to fare evade which, you know, may not be a popular thing to say but, you know, maybe we should stop expecting bus drivers to drive the bus and tell people to pay the fare. But, you know, it’s absolutely important from a labor perspective.

Doug: The study from the free bus pilot that ran from September 2023 to September 2024 showed the bus operators experienced 39.8 percent fewer verbal and physical assaults from customers. And that was more than double the system-wide decrease of about 19 percent during the same period. And that’s according to the MTA.

Sarah: Another thing about that is that when a bus operator gets assaulted, that is traumatic and off-putting to everybody who’s riding the bus. That that is another thing that adds to the stigmatization of the bus, and the perception and the reality that it might be something that you want to avoid. So it affects riders as well as operators.

Doug: And the ability of the right, Sean Duffy and others, to use those viral moments, even if they are increasingly rare, although very serious for the people involved to fearmonger about the bus. You mentioned, Yonah, Montpellier, France. There, there was a 26 percent drop in—this is very French— “incivility against property and people,” including the tram and the bus. So even there, we’re seeing some decrease. And a pretty significant one. So I think it’s an additional factor. Thankfully, Zohran’s talking about that.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Doug: Sarah, to bring it back to something you were sort of hinting at earlier, I’m agnostic about this still. I think—you know, I think our discussion here has been very helpful. But you can see there are pros and cons. What I really, really like about this discussion that is being led by a major candidate for office in a major city in the United States is that someone is finally centering bus riders.

Sarah: Yes.

Doug: Like, we have not had an election in New York fucking city that said: How can we make service better for the bus? And my feeling is, like, if Zohran tries and fails, what’s the worst that could happen? He makes bus service free on 10 lines and speeds up service on 20 more? Like, that would be a pretty good outcome. As an advocate, my feeling is always you ask for a lot more than you think you’re gonna get, and you get more than you would have gotten if you hadn’t asked.

Sarah: Yeah. And I will say that having Mamdani at this Transportation Alternatives rally about the 34th Street busway—he was there with the other elected officials representing that area, and Brad Lander—you know, having him there leading this walk down 34th Street, trying to prove that pedestrians can currently walk 34th Street faster than the bus can drive it was so inspiring. And it was just a really amazing New York moment to have somebody who’s aiming to lead this city prioritizing the movement of people on buses. It was a revelation, frankly. I think that he has already completely changed the conversation around this mode of transportation. And to me, that is just an incredible value right there.

Doug: Yeah. And I think also you’ve seen that 34th Street bus plan has been in the works since the Bloomberg administration. And to be very honest, the thing that got it moving again was Eric Adams understanding that he was losing ground politically to this young upstart who keeps talking about the bus, so they dusted off this plan that had been stalled even very recently and said, “Let’s do it.” And you don’t also have Andrew Cuomo coming up with his slightly more watered-down plan without, again, Mamdani moving the Overton window and saying, “No, you’re gonna respond to what I’m talking about.” Which I think should be a lesson, Democrats, for how you might want to think about politics: Don’t respond to what the other side is doing, have them respond to what you’re saying and doing.

Yonah Freemark: I think that—and it’s not just in New York City. I mean, that’s something that’s worth emphasizing here, is that maybe we’re seeing a change in the mentality in progressive movements in general about the value of transit and specifically bus improvements. You know, we’ve seen Michelle Wu in Boston prioritize bus. That’s why, you know, they ended up with free fares piloted in Boston. But, you know, she’s also implemented a number of busways throughout a lot of the sort of low-income parts of the city. And then you have people like Katie Wilson, who’s running for mayor in Seattle, and just led in the primary—she’s going on to the general election against the current mayor—who is the head of the Transit Riders Union there, and who explicitly sees transit as a key part of her constituency. And so, you know, I think there’s something here to be said that people are responsive to the message about the value of better transit. And, you know, whether that’s free buses or faster buses or both types of buses, you know, I think we should be super happy about this being part of the public conversation. I mean, for those of us who are, like, in the urban space, frankly, it’s been too many decades that nobody cares about the subjects that matter to us, and it’s exciting to see candidates taking this seriously.

Sarah: On the topic of the bus in particular, you know, a lot of the time urbanists get slammed—and sometimes rightly so—for pushing bike lanes, other public space improvements that are sometimes perceived as being gentrifying or sort of tone deaf in terms of a neighborhood’s real needs. But what I love about the bus is that the bus really is a completely democratic and inclusive transit form at its best. It is accessible; it is there in front of you on the street. It is part of the life of the city in a way that other things aren’t. It’s actually something that you can point to and say, this does serve people from all kinds of backgrounds, with all kinds of needs, with all kinds of abilities and disabilities. And this is a democratizing influence in our society. And right at a time when we need exactly that. We need these public spaces and public goods that bring together people from all walks of life, from all backgrounds, to create solidarity in our society, which is so fractured. And the bus is sort of uniquely able to do that. So I just love to see buses coming into the forefront. We did an episode, a bonus episode a little while ago in which we talked about—Doug brought in a book that he had read about clergy people responding to traffic violence back in the ’60s. And at the end, we were sort of like, “Well, what would Jesus drive?” And I said, “Well, Jesus would be a bus guy, you know?” [laughs] And I sort of do believe that. I think that the bus is something very beautiful that we should be cultivating and loving. And that’s just my incredibly idealistic view of it.

Doug: No, I love that. I also think part of what I love about what Mamdani is doing too, juxtapose free buses for everybody with Cuomo’s response, which was basically an expansion of what we call here in New York, Fair Fares, where if you make—if you’re very low income, mid-$20,000 a year, you can apply for free bus service. And that is such a Democratic consultant think way of doing it, where we’re gonna means test this benefit, and if you happen to have the luxury of being able to do paperwork and have the right documents, you can get it. And a lot of people fall through the cracks of that, as we know. Or if you’re just on the other side of that arbitrary income line, you might feel resentment for the folks who get it. “Why not me? I make $27,000 a year.” So I think it cuts to the heart of a problem in the Democratic Party, which is means-testing benefits. And we need to just say, you know, there are public goods, there are things that should be free. We don’t means test you when you walk into the library. So I just like that he’s really cutting to this idea of what is a society that is as wealthy as ours going to do with all of its money? And if it’s not working to make people’s lives better, people who aren’t millionaires and billionaires, then what are we even doing? To me, that is what I’m so inspired by in the conversation around just free buses.

Yonah Freemark: Yeah. You know, I think that both of you are making amazing points about the value of bus service within a democratic society. You know, I think that there has been a movement—I mean, one might say it’s the difference between being on the left and being a liberal is that, you know, being on the left suggests that we need to create, you know, greater democratic institutions that are more inclusive and that are not means tested, for example, that have a greater public sphere, greater public sector. Whereas, you know, the liberal approach over the last 30 years has been means testing everything. Everything is like, you go in and you have to prove documentation of, you know, how much money you make. But guess what? That has really big challenges associated with it. The Fair Fare system that you mentioned in New York City is only attracting a minority of the people who are eligible to the system because there are so many bureaucratic hurdles getting in the way of people actually benefiting from the system, and as a result, people don’t actually get to take advantage of what we’ve designed for them in a lot of ways.

Yonah Freemark: You know, that’s especially true for people who are at the greatest margin of our society, especially under the Trump administration, undocumented people. Undocumented people can’t prove their income levels in a way that will satisfy all of the bureaucratic things that we’ve stuck in front of them. If in New York City or other cities throughout the country, you want undocumented people to be fully part of the system and be fully welcomed into the public sphere, then means testing is not really going to solve that problem for you, because they’re not gonna want to sign up and stick their names on a form, even if they were somehow able to. And, you know, I don’t think we should dismiss that issue. But, you know, I think just getting back to the point that you brought up, Sarah, of constructing a public sphere, I think that that is the sort of goal that many urbanists have, whether or not they think they’re trying to pursue it. When we create spaces for people, whether that’s a plaza or a third space like a coffee shop or a bus line or park, I think a really good urbanist is somebody who says, “I want this to be a space that’s open to everybody, that lets people be who they are, is shared with a diversity of people around them, and who are able to live in that space as a public sphere.” And I think that what you’re saying about having the bus system serve that role as well is really a compelling message. And it’s the opposite from what we’re hearing from people like Elon Musk who want to build a taxi tunnel essentially, under Las Vegas or Nashville, right? They want to stick people in individualized units, individualized cars, so they can go individually between their destinations. That is the absolute opposite of creating this vibrant, diverse public sphere that we talk about when we talk about the bus. And that’s really an exciting thing to be sort of visualizing as a future for our cities.

Doug: Yonah, we couldn’t have ended that any better. I think that is a perfect place to wrap up. Yonah Freemark, thank you for joining The War on Cars.

Yonah Freemark: Thanks for having me.

Doug: That’s it for this episode of The War on Cars. Thanks again to Yonah Freemark. You can learn more about Yonah and his research at YonahFreemark.com, and follow him on Blue Sky. We’ll put links in the show notes.

Sarah: Remember, you can support us and get exclusive bonus content, pre-sale access to live show tickets, free stickers and more by signing up on patreon at Patreon.com/thewaroncarspod. Big thanks to everyone who already supports us, including our top contributors: Charley Gee of Human Powered Law in Portland, Oregon, Mark Hedlund and Virginia Baker.

Doug: And don’t forget to pre-order our book and find us on tour this fall and beyond. You can go to LifeAfterCars.com for more information.

Sarah: Thanks also to Cleverhood. Listeners of The War on Cars can save 15 percent on everything in the Cleverhood store now through the end of August by going to Cleverhood.com/waroncars and entering code SUMMERRAIN.

Doug: A big thanks as well to Upway. For a great deal on a certified, pre-owned e-bike, visit Upway.co, and you can save $150 off any e-bike order over $1,000 with code WARONCARS now through the end of September. Again that’s Upway.co. This episode was edited by me. Our theme music is by Nathaniel Goodyear, transcripts are by Russell Gragg. Our logo is by Dani Finkel, who is also the proprietor of Mamala Food. I’m Doug Gordon.

Sarah: I’m Sarah Goodyear, and this is The War on Cars.

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