On Friday, the New York Times published an op-ed from Emily Galvin Almanza, a former public defender and nonprofit executive, on the supposed benefits of free busing of the kind proposed by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani. While the Times topped the essay with a utopian thumbnail of dancing pigeons, commuters, and rainbows, Almanza’s argument itself is far short of perfect.
Almanza makes a case that is long on enthusiasm but light on evidence. As proof of free buses “easing traffic [and] promoting public safety,” she cites pilot programs in Kansas City, Boston, and New York City. All three experiments failed, leading to huge losses of funds and a worsened commuter experience.
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In Kansas City, the results were especially disastrous: homeless residents remained on buses all day, and while assaults on drivers declined, assaults on passengers went up. In Boston, the city’s free buses were notoriously slow, “effectively canceling out the benefits of free fares,” according to one local transit advocacy group.
Even if these programs had worked, they would be poor models for the Big Apple. New York City’s bus ridership alone—an estimated 1.3 million riders per day—more than double the entire population of Kansas City.
New York’s own pilot program, which Almanza quickly references, lost approximately $16.5 million and saw no measurable increase in new ridership, according to the MTA. This does not stop Almanza from confidently asserting that “better, cheaper, faster bus rides give automobile owners an incentive to leave their cars at home.” The MTA’s own evaluation, released last June, found the program far more lackluster.
Almanza also attempts to argue that free bus programs pay for themselves. She asserts that in Washington State, free busing actually cost nothing: “When Washington State’s public transit systems stopped charging riders, in many municipalities the state came out more or less even—because the money lost on fares was balanced out by the enormous savings that ensued.” Her evidence: a 1994 Washington State DOT study that recommended free busing specifically “for small to medium sized transit agencies,” where the cost of enforcing can outweigh the revenues generated. Seattle, by contrast, ended its partial implementation in 2012 after losing $2.2 million annually.
The core of Almanza’s case for free buses comes from her work as a public defender. She relates the story of one of her first clients, charged with fare evasion. “Precious resources,” she writes, “had been spent arresting, processing, prosecuting and trying her, all for the loss of a few dollars. This is a daily feature of how we criminalize poverty in America.”
Confusingly, Almanza cites no evidence beyond the anecdotal to support the claim that “eliminating bus fares can clear junk cases out of our court system, lowering the crushing caseloads.” Her allusion to the loss of a “few dollars,” furthermore, belies basic arithmetic: while it is true that one fare evader costs only a few dollars, the total cost of fare evasions was approximately $1 billion alone in 2024.
Most importantly, Almanza confuses the criminal-justice implications of fare enforcement on the city’s subways and buses. Bus fares are rarely enforced, and that enforcement is carried out primarily by unarmed MTA employees who issue summonses. Making buses free, therefore, would not even reduce the backlog of farebeating cases in the criminal justice system.
To prove that fares cause harm, Almanza points to the September 2024 officer-involved shooting of “a fare beater.” She interjects dramatic rhetoric—“pause for a moment to think about that”—but initially omitted the most crucial information: the person in question was holding a knife and was asked more than 30 times to drop it before being shot. (An editor’s note appended after publication updated the essay with this information.)
Lastly, Almanza cites a widely circulated but misleading statistic: that New York City’s free-bus pilot reduced assaults on bus drivers by 39 percent. This implausibly large figure comes from an evaluation of only five bus lines, which reported just 32 assaults over the study period. As City Journal has previously pointed out, assaults on bus drivers also fell on regular-fare lines during the same period, raising the question of whether the measured decline was attributable to the free-fare program or a coincidence. And as Kansas City’s experience demonstrates, reduced assaults on drivers may simply displace violence onto other passengers.
As I wrote in City Journal, bus fares in New York City are already relatively cheap, especially given the system’s scale and effectiveness. And discounted fares are available to those who qualify. Offering wishful thinking and anecdotes, Almanza offers a weak case for changing how the city’s bus service.
Photo by Noam Galai/Getty Images