Free NYC Buses is Crime and Chaos
As lead New York Mayoral candidate Zorhan Mamdani talks about free New York City Buses if he wins the November election, those of us that work for the Transit Authority know that that would be disastrous to the workers and the riding public.
In the early 1980s New York City had free buses on New Years Eve and I can tell you firsthand, that every drunk in the city that went out on the town that night took public transit including the buses and it was crazy. Buses were vandalized; fights and overall chaos broke out. Two years after that test, it ended and it did not come back until September 24, 2023, when the MTA brought it back in a pilot program on five bus routes Bx18A/B, B60, M116, Q4, and S46/96, one in each borough of New York. And what happened? The homeless and mentally ill rode those routes night and day. And when you have homeless and mentally ill people on a 40-foot bus with people going to work, school kids and senior citizens, you have problems that you did not have before.
On August 31, 2024, that pilot program ended on those five bus routes. It was a major failure and not workable. Furthermore, it led to a mindset amongst some in the public that ALL buses are free and people stopped paying on other bus routes.
On the bus, the NYC Bus Operator has a very tough and dangerous job. On the street and at the bus stops, the Bus Dispatcher has that same difficult job. Chaos on buses leads to assaults on Bus Operators and an angry public leads to assaults and threats on my Dispatchers and free fares will again lead to both.
Furthermore, every month at the MTA board meeting, they talk about fare evasion and how the loss of revenue affects the bottom line and their ability to run properly and make the updates and repairs that are needed to maintain this old and dilapidated system that runs every day by the skin of its teeth, by the shear will and grit of the blue collar hourly and supervisory workforce.
Lastly, and most importantly, the Mayor does not have the ability to make buses free. A decision like that can only be made by the Governor with the MTA board. Mamdani knows this but he says it anyway because people love to hear that they may get frees stuff. It’s a hook to get votes.
Mamdani is more than a socialist, he’s a communist that wants to tear down our city and rebuild it into a Venezuela like socialist utopia. Like all communists, Mamdani is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. He is just another rich politician, promoting failed Marxist ideas onto a young, impressionable generation that is looking for change. It’s the same old promise of free goods and services, with no way of paying for them. History is the best teacher and just like the free bus pilot, these ideas are doomed to fail as they have repeatedly throughout history. New York is the greatest city in the world and cannot be the testing ground for radicals like Mamdani with radical ideas that have already been proven to fail.
