Progressive NYC pols push to eliminate bus fares amid MTA money woes
You’ve got a ticket to ride — and they don’t care.
A pair of Queens’ progressives want to make all city buses free — adding hundreds of millions of dollars to the MTA’s beleaguered budget needs, which they insist the state can fill with higher taxes.
The proposal by State Sen. Mike Gianaris and Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani would make riding the bus free-of-charge one borough at a time beginning next year, according to Streetsblog, requiring an extra $638 million per year by 2026 on top of the multi-billion dollar deficits already anticipated by MTA bean counters.
“Their proposal is upside down. They should be thinking about how to finance [the MTA], not how to undermine their finances,” warned NYU professor and transit expert Mitchell Moss.
“The MTA depends on the farebox. I don’t think that’s something we should just give away. Financially, this is not the right time,” Moss said. “If you believe in buses, you don’t eliminate one of the key elements to help finance them.”
The Queens pols also propose more than a billion dollars in additional spending to freeze subway fares for two years and increase service to run buses and trains every six minutes.
They point to other cities pursuing free buses, including Los Angeles, Boston and Washington, D.C., which just announced plans to go fare-free citywide next summer.
“This isn’t pie in the sky stuff,” Mamdani posted on Twitter on Wednesday. “Our entire package ($3.26B/yr) costs 1.5% of the State’s budget ($222B). And that’s before we #TaxTheRich, which will [increase] state revenue.”
Speaking to The Post, Gianaris, the second-ranking Democrat in the State Senate, insisted the proposals are “not adding more to the money that the MTA needs.”
“We’re not proposing this in a vacuum. This would be part of a significant stream of additional revenue for the MTA to fund this and other needs,” he said. “You need revenue to improve service. It doesn’t need to be revenue out of the pockets of working people.”
Transit officials claim they lose $500 million each year to people who refuse to pay fares or tolls. Farebeating accounts for about one-third of all bus trips and 12% of subway trips.
The authority’s end-of-year financial plan anticipated annual budget gaps of over $1 billion — even if officials hike the cost of a bus or subway ride from the current $2.75 to over $3.