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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Yes, now we continue our election series, 30 Issues in 30 Days. It's day 20 and issue 20. Are free buses the best bang for our transportation buck? Free buses, as you probably know, are a pillar of Democratic mayoral front-runners around Mamdani's transportation plan. The proposal piloted by Mamdani as Queens' assembly member. Last year, there was a pilot project aimed to speed up the notoriously slow bus system and help New Yorkers struggling with the city's high cost of living.

In our 30-issue series, we've been addressing some with explainers and some with debates. This is going to be on the debate side. Joining us to make their arguments are Charles Komanoff, transit activist and mathematician. His Excel traffic spreadsheet model was used by New York state officials in drafting the 2019 congestion pricing law. You either love him or hate him for that. He has endorsed Mamdani's free bus plan.

Eric Goldwyn, assistant professor and program director at NYU's Marron Institute of Urban Management. His article in the journal Vital City is more skeptical. It asks, "Are there other ways to achieve Zohran Mamdani's campaign promise to make transit more affordable?" Charles and Eric, thanks for coming on WNYC today and engaging. Hi, there.

Charles Komanoff: Hey, Brian.

Eric Goldwyn: Hello. Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: Let me start with a clip from last night's Channel 4 POLITICO Telemundo mayoral debate. Since this is Mamdani's core proposal, let's start with what Mamdani had to say when asked about free buses on the debate stage last night. 30 seconds.

Zohran Mamdani: We will make buses free by replacing the revenue that the MTA currently gets from buses. This is revenue that's around $700 million or so. That's less money than Andrew Cuomo gave to Elon Musk in $959 million in tax credits when he was the governor. The reason that we will do so is that making buses free doesn't just provide economic relief, but also public safety, because what we've seen is that it decreases assaults on bus drivers by 38.9%. New Yorkers deserve more than the slowest buses in the country. I know that because I was on the M57 not too long ago, and its average speed is 4.9 miles an hour.

Brian Lehrer: He's making cases about decreasing crime as well as increasing speed, as well as affordability. We're going to play a clip of Cuomo in a second and a clip of Sliwa. Charles Komanoff, you're the pro-free buses person here. Why do you buy all that?

Charles Komanoff: Brian, I first want to say, I would reframe your question. Free buses are not necessarily the best buy for our transportation bucks, but they are a very good buy. The cost-benefit works out quite beautifully. The reason is that free buses will be faster for two reasons. One, passengers getting on the bus aren't going to have to fumble with tapping their card or their payment mechanism. Second, passengers will be able to get on the rear bus if they see that that's the faster way to go than everybody bunching up at the front.

I've quantified that in my modeling. Free buses, I estimate, will lead system-wide to a speed gain of about 12% or 13% for New York City buses. That's huge. That will make a big difference to bus passengers, especially considering that many of them are low-income. They're disproportionately low-income. Many of them are working two jobs. Time savings are dearly important for them as they are for every New Yorker. That's a great benefit. That's the biggest reason that I support Mamdani's free and fast buses campaign plank.

Brian Lehrer: Eric, want to start weighing in with some skepticism about that?

Eric Goldwyn: I don't know that I would say I'm skeptical. I actually quite admire Charles, and if I woke up tomorrow and the buses were free, I would continue to live in New York. What I will say is I think focusing on speed gains is the right priority. I think there are other ways to get there without getting rid of the fare. The other thing that I would add is I think the cost of $700 million that the candidate put out there is quite low. When I looked at the numbers from 2019, and I get that's not where we are currently.

Fare revenue was about $1.4 billion in 2025 dollars. That cost is actually quite a bit more. It's an annual cost. Every year, we have to come up with that. I think there are other things that we can do to get our buses to be faster. If we're going to spend a billion dollars a year, let's meet in the middle. I think they're just better opportunities for expanding transit capacity with subway extensions, for instance, that would just make the city and provide greater access to all New Yorkers.

Brian Lehrer: I'm going to play a second clip right here, and we'll follow up on what you were just saying, the two of you, as well as bringing in another issue. Now we're going to bring an issue in that's a downside argument from Andrew Cuomo in last night's debate, that homeless people would start sleeping on the buses, and they would be like the worst of the subway cars in that respect. All the time. This is a minute of an exchange that starts with Cuomo and Mamdani will respond.

Andrew Cuomo: I think having free buses is a mistake. It costs about $700 million. Just to give you an idea that we only raise about 500 from congestion pricing. It's been done before in other cities. It was a disaster. They stopped. They basically became mobile homeless gathering places. What I say is free buses for working families who can't afford it and free subways for working families, but don't subsidize rich people on a bus. It's been tried and it failed.

Moderator: Mr. Mamdani, can you just respond quickly on the point about the mobile homeless gathering places?

Zohran Mamdani: This is something that we heard when we were fighting to make buses free in Albany, when we delivered the first fare-free bus lines in New York City history. What we saw is when we made one bus route free in each borough of New York City, there was no increase in homelessness on those buses. There was no increase in fare evasion in the surrounding area. What there was was an increase in ridership of up to 38%.

Moderator: Thank you, Mr. Mamdani.

Brian Lehrer: All right, so what about that homeless gathering spot as Cuomo described it. Charles Komanoff, do you think that's a red herring? He says it happened in other cities.

Charles Komanoff: It's a total red herring for New York City because any unhoused person looking for a place to sleep is going to choose the subway rather than the bus. The bus is just too uncomfortable a place to be able to sleep. The fact-- when you consider that right now 45% of all rides on New York City buses are unpaid by passengers, why don't we see unhoused people now using the buses? That wouldn't change if we made them free for everybody.

Anything that Andrew Cuomo says about transit has to be taken with a whole salt shaker's worth of salt. This is a person who never uses public transportation. He is a self-proclaimed car guy. Yes, I give him credit for launching congestion pricing back in 2017, although he later abandoned it. This is not somebody that we should be looking to for wisdom about how to make New York City transit better.

Brian Lehrer: Eric Goldwyn, was Cuomo citing real examples from other cities where they became rolling homeless encampments?

Eric Goldwyn: Yes, he was citing some real examples, but I think he also focused on not subsidizing wealthy people. As Charles mentioned earlier, the majority of bus riders are not wealthy. I do think we have a program, Fair Fares, that is imperfect. I think it can be expanded. Mamdani has said he does not like means testing, which I get. Like, every kid in New York City gets an OMNY card. We have ways of getting fare relief to people who need it if we focus on it. I think that would be a better way. I also think the imbalance between subway and bus is a little bit problematic because we're incentivizing people to take a less efficient, lower-capacity mode versus the higher-capacity, more efficient mode.

Brian Lehrer: They generally probably only take the buses anyway when the subways don't go there. Right? There are a lot of places that the buses go that the subways don't.

Eric Goldwyn: Many people transfer from bus to subway. The numbers from Brooklyn, I think something like 50% or 60% of people transfer from buses to subway.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. I grew up in a no-subway zone. I had to take the Q28 bus to Flushing whenever I was going to come into the city or go other places by train. Eric, let me stay with you on this, since you brought up means testing as opposed to universal. How would Cuomo's means testing proposal that he was referencing there be different from today's Fair Fares program? Because means testing already exists, do you think that it would be different? Is he proposing anything that's actually different that would be an improvement?

Eric Goldwyn: I have no idea the specifics of his proposal. I'm sure he's just saying it. There's a wonderful book by the author, Jen Pahlka, and she talks about-- she founded Code for America. I'm going to get it all wrong. I forget the exact title, but she says that what they found in her work, and she worked in the federal government, she worked on the West Coast, is they do auto enrollment for people who meet certain criteria.

If you live in public housing, everyone in public housing gets an OMNY card. If you receive certain benefits, everyone who receives those benefits automatically gets the card. There are ways to do this where you don't have to go to a website on your phone with spotty Internet and fumble through the process of signing up and getting the numbers. You just give the stuff to the people who need it. That is perhaps a better way. I think that is a better way.

Brian Lehrer: Charles, you want to jump in?

Charles Komanoff: These ideas are complementary. They don't have to be mutually exclusive. Fair Fare is a, on paper, a fantastic program. Again, it's something that advocates had to fight for for years. It didn't just come floating down from enlightened mayors. The Riders Alliance and the Community Service Society of New York advocated for it for a long time. It finally came into existence about a dozen years ago. Now they're fighting to raise the income threshold so that more people, more New Yorkers, can qualify for it.

Eric's points, they're great. There ought to be automatic default enrollment, and there's no reason that we can't do that in addition to-- That then would apply for the subways. Making buses free pencils out, very beneficial when you consider, especially, the time savings for bus passengers. Notwithstanding all of Eric's excellent complementary points, I'm 100% for it.

Brian Lehrer: Is there a larger conceptual thing here about making things universally free? Charles, I think you were referring before to Mamdani doesn't like means testing in general. Another one like that is childcare, which he would start a universal free childcare program for. There are a lot of relatively upper-income people who don't need the free childcare. Yet it's going to cost the taxpayers money. Do you have a overarching thought on means testing versus universal as the way to economic justice?

Charles Komanoff: Brian, I'll stick to my lane, which is transportation. There is spare capacity on most New York City buses most of the time. Making the buses free, which I estimate will lead to about a 20% to 25% increase in bus patronage, because of the combination of the fare incentive, the fare would now be zero. Also, that buses would be faster. That isn't taking things away from people. As you know, I was a strong supporter of congestion pricing because the space that any car or truck occupies on New York City streets and roads does take something away from other people.

Then in other sectors, public libraries, of course, they should be free because literacy and reading enhances-- my reading enhances everybody else's and vice versa. There's no universal rule that we can apply. We have to pick and choose. I think that candidate Mamdani has done an excellent job in prioritizing-- Here now I'm speaking not as a transportation guy, but as a voter in prioritizing free childcare and free buses both.

Brian Lehrer: Eric Goldwyn, for you, as the skeptic of free buses, another specific Mamdani argument in the clip is that crime went down, at least assaults on bus drivers, that particular crime went down 38% during the pilot program. Do you think that's real, or would be even more broadly the case in a universal free bus program, or not?

Eric Goldwyn: I think that that is real. I'll just-- a little digression. I did a Brooklyn bus network redesign with my colleague Alon Levy in 2018 or '17, I don't remember, and we interviewed several bus drivers in Brooklyn, and we did a survey with, I think, over 300. They all universally were like, "Please, get the fare out of my zone. I don't want to deal with it. It creates conflict." I think in 2017, there may be 50 assaults on bus operators in Brooklyn. The thing is, there are other methods to do that.

We could have, and we have the technology to have all-door boarding, for instance. Our select buses, you pay either when you get on or you get the ticket before you get on. The bus operator doesn't have to deal with that. There are other ways to deal with collecting the fare that can remove the bus operator from peril.

Brian Lehrer: One more clip. We heard from Cuomo. We heard from Mamdani. Here's Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa, who is against the free buses, and his way in was to rail against the amount of fare evasion that people are allowed to get away with right now. 25 seconds of Curtis Sliwa.

Curtis Sliwa: Could I address that on the buses? Because half the people don't pay their bus fare to begin with, Zohan.

Zohran Mamdani: Zohran. Curtis, Zohran.

Curtis Sliwa: Zohran. It's a complete disaster. If you have free bus fare, and the Citizens Budget Commission said just last year, 2024, a billion dollars of fare evasion in all different forms, this MTA system will collapse. There's not enough money out there to make up for fare evasion. Pay your fare. If you don't pay your fare, they have Fair Fare programs for the poor and the indigent, but everybody should be forced to pay their fare.

Brian Lehrer: Now, I will note that Mamdani has had to correct both of his rivals, Cuomo in a previous debate, and Sliwa there, on just how to say his name. You got to wonder, are they mispronouncing his name on purpose? Anyway, but that's another show on this notion of fare evasion as opposed to raising taxes on the rich and on corporations to fund the MTA. Eric, you want to weigh in briefly?

Eric Goldwyn: Yes. I think that my biggest issue with the free fares is that it's not clear how we'll pay for it. I understand that we've said we'll raise taxes on a select group, and that will cover the costs. If you look at the free fare programs in Boston or Kansas City, these are $8 million a year, $10 million a year, and they can't find the funding for them. Now, should we fund public transit better? I absolutely think that we should. I'm so happy to have a mayoral candidate who wants to grab that mantle and be a transit mayor.

I worry that, okay, let's say we make it free next year, and then we have a new administration and we can't come up with the money. It's a billion dollars a year. It's not $8 million a year. That money has to come from somewhere. Unless someone's going to identify how that's going to come to be and be honest with the voters about it, I just think we don't have good information, and we shouldn't take this idea too seriously.

Brian Lehrer: Charles, 30 seconds for a response, and then we're out of time.

Charles Komanoff: Curtis is right. There's a lot of evasion going on, but it's not just restricted to fares. There's parking evasion. With the massive amounts of free parking given away, which is a traffic accelerant and a gridlock accelerant. There's placard abuse, which, to his credit, Andrew Cuomo zeroed in on last night in the debate. I'm not saying that there has to be a quid pro quo here, but there are many ways to extract revenue from transportation that will improve traffic and improve mobility.

Brian Lehrer: There you go, folks, with issue 20 in our 30 Issues in 30 Days election series, are free buses a good idea? We thank Charles Komanoff, transit activist and mathematician, and Eric Goldwyn, assistant professor and program director at NYU's Marron Institute of Urban Management, for engaging in this debate. Thank you both so much.

Charles Komanoff: Thanks, Brian.

Eric Goldwyn: Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. More to come.

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