New York
Can Faster Buses Really Be Free?
On a rough day, a bus ride in New York starts like this:
Then there are the traffic jams …
the mistimed stop lights …
the bunched-up buses …
and the cars blocking the bus lane.
Zohran Mamdani has made this grim experience central to his pledge to improve city life. Can his bus plan actually do that?
Some of the slowest buses in America plod through New York, stopping and starting, bunching and idling, at about eight miles per hour on average. Speeds have improved little over the past decade. The least reliable buses seldom show up on time.
Zohran Mamdani has built a strikingly successful mayoral campaign by tapping frustration with this system and marrying it to his broader campaign pledge to make New York more affordable.
“Fast and free buses,” he has promised, the two goals always locked together.
Get rid of fares, in theory, and that should speed things up, ending the backlog of riders lined up at every stop. More bus lanes and better infrastructure could bolster those gains. And making buses free would be a boon, Mr. Mamdani argues, for New Yorkers who have said in surveys that they’ve often struggled to come up with fare money.
“Today in the wealthiest city in the wealthiest country in the history of the world, one in five New Yorkers cannot afford the bus fare,” Mr. Mamdani said, defending his plan in the campaign’s final debate last week. Give people back that money, and more of their time, he suggests, and the economic benefits for the city would outweigh even the cost of a fare-free program he estimates could run $700 million a year.
Critics, and even some transit advocates, warn that his two goals are in tension: Spend such vast sums subsidizing the bus, and there won’t be much left over to improve it, especially at a time when the federal government is undercutting support for transit and the economy is shaky. Under any reasonable estimate, the annual cost to the city of making buses free would be more than transit officials expect to raise this year from congestion pricing, the Manhattan tolling program in the middle of its own political fight.
Whether fast buses and free ones can really go together depends on many questions, some beyond a mayor’s control, including whether Gov. Kathy Hochul would cooperate on higher taxes to raise revenue. Even if Mr. Mamdani were able to eliminate fares, what effect would it really have? And would it be enough to change the slog of riding a bus in the city?
Free and maybe faster
To understand the ambition of Mr. Mamdani’s plan, it’s helpful to first take in the vastness of New York’s bus network. It’s at a whole other scale from the subway system (and from any city currently running free buses):
Mr. Mamdani, who is the front-runner in the Nov. 4 general election, first championed the idea of free buses by pushing for a one-year pilot that made a single route in each borough free for one year starting in September 2023. Expanding the idea citywide would cover 340 routes that carry about 1.5 million paid trips per weekday.
Those rides represent a lot of money that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which runs the bus and subway systems, would no longer be collecting at the fare box. The fare today is $2.90, set to rise to $3 in January (although the actual fare collected per paying rider is more like $1.90, after accounting for free transfers and discounted fare cards). If the city were to pay for this instead, the total cost would depend on ridership numbers.
The M.T.A. says the cost of a free-fare program is probably higher than Mr. Mamdani’s estimate. As the authority cracks down on fare evasion, and ridership and fares increase, it projects that by 2028 the annual bus fare revenue, including paratransit, could exceed $1 billion — much higher than the campaign’s numbers.
About a quarter of bus riders also transfer to the subway. And if they haven’t paid for the first leg of the trip, the M.T.A. fears that more passengers may be inclined to skip the train fare, too.
John J. McCarthy, chief of policy and external relations at the M.T.A., said in a statement that the authority was pleased with the attention that transit has gotten in the mayoral race, but also expressed caution about making the buses free without more study.
“Why is congestion pricing successful? Because we took the time to study its benefits and impacts,” he said about the yearslong review for the toll program. “This proposal would demand the same kind of rigorous analysis.”
Still, the Mamdani campaign says the overall cost is relatively small — less than 1 percent of the city’s annual budget. But for the M.T.A., fare revenue covers about 19 percent of its $4.8 billion bus operating budget.
Mr. Mamdani suggests that the economic benefits of free fares could be twice as large as the costs. That’s hard to evaluate (the figure includes assigning a dollar value to the time you’d save by spending less of it stuck on the bus). His other claim is that eliminating the fare would itself speed up the buses.
That is theoretically true. All those seconds it can take each passenger to root around in a pocket, count out change or fuss with the card reader — at every stop — add up to real delays. And just one rider doing this can be the difference between making and missing a green light.
But New York’s own pilot program illustrates one hitch. Across all five free routes, ridership increased during the pilot by about 30 to 40 percent, mostly driven by existing riders taking more trips. The buses, however, actually slowed, because all those new riders still had to board the bus and request stops, offsetting the time savings from getting rid of fares.
That’s another complication: If ridership rises substantially, you have to add service to keep up with it, or you may not see any speed benefits. And that costs money, too.
Mr. Mamdani cites an estimate that free buses could shave 12 percent off trip times. The number comes from Charles Komanoff, a longtime transit advocate and mathematician whose traffic modeling helped inform congestion pricing. He first tried to assess the impact of free buses in 2007, as part of a study of whether congestion pricing could generate enough revenue to make transit free.
“That idea of free transit — it was visionary, it was lovely, it was beguiling,” Mr. Komanoff recalled recently. Politically at the time, though, “it was completely impractical.”
He put down the idea for nearly two decades. Then last December, he heard Mr. Mamdani, polling at the time in single digits, talk about free buses at a mayoral transit forum.
In April, Mr. Komanoff published a new report that is the closest thing to a white paper for the Mamdani campaign on the topic. His 12 percent time savings relies on some of his 2007-era data (bus riders then dipped a card instead of tapping it). This fall, he reran his analysis again, after riding the B41 bus in Brooklyn with The New York Times to collect new data. He estimates that ending fares could cut 7 percent off a trip on the route, assuming the ridership stays constant. That would still be, he said, “a triumph” — an improvement akin to what drivers have seen inside Manhattan’s congestion zone.
Faster but not free
The B41 bus, connecting the Flatbush commercial corridor to Downtown Brooklyn, is one of the busiest routes in the city. The comptroller’s office gives it a D grade for its poor on-time performance and high rate of “bunching” — when buses arrive too close together and disrupt scheduling. On the route’s slowest stretch, speeds dip below four m.p.h.
Flatbush Avenue is, in short, a prime target for redesign and better bus service — something the New York City Department of Transportation has already begun to work on. And it’s a prominent example of how buses could be made faster without killing the fare box.
We rode the corridor, timed how long it takes riders to board the bus, counted all the intersections, and worked with the transportation planner Annie Weinstock to analyze the route. A trip in the evening rush hour covering the Flatbush portion of the B41 takes 58 minutes on average. But if the bus were traveling the corridor totally unimpeded, it would need only 16 minutes to go from end to end. Everything else is a form of delay: The bus spends more time sitting at red lights, and almost as much time sitting in traffic:
Making the B41 substantially faster would require a series of changes:
Mr. Mamdani has voiced support for infrastructure initiatives like this, although the campaign’s estimated cost for the free-fare program doesn’t include the sizable expenses needed to do such projects in tandem. Transit advocates are also pushing the city to go further, leveraging an array of “bus rapid transit” improvements that would also enable riders to enter from all bus doors and to pay for the bus at sidewalk kiosks, while revamping more intersection signals to prioritize buses.
All-door boarding and off-board payment would logistically have the same effect as free fares, cutting the time it takes passengers to board. We asked Ms. Weinstock, who has studied how to implement faster buses in New York, to estimate how much all of these changes together would speed up the B41.
In an ideal world, all these investments could cut about 40 percent off the time of a B41 trip — far more than doing free fares alone. It certainly helps to speed up the process of boarding riders. But that’s not the thing that helps the most. And there are other ways to get those same savings while still collecting fares.
Of course, free fares are about financial savings for riders as much as time savings. But there are some other, less sweeping ways to do that, too.
About 375,000 low-income riders already pay half-cost fares under the Fair Fares program funded by the city. It subsidizes fares on the bus and subway for households making less than 145 percent of the federal poverty level.
But advocates want to push the threshold up to 200 percent — or even 300 percent, where a family of four earning as much as $96,500 a year would qualify.
“We think it would be much less costly than a totally free system,” said David R. Jones, president of the Community Service Society, which has pushed for Fair Fares. He’s also a member of the M.T.A. board.
Mr. Mamdani supports expanding Fair Fares for the subway, alongside free buses. Doing both would further drive up the total cost of his transit agenda.
Former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, who is polling behind Mr. Mamdani in the mayoral race, has said he would make the subway and buses free for New Yorkers making up to 150 percent of the federal poverty line, or about $48,000 for a family of four.
Free for some, faster for more
The allure of free buses is partly that many of these other interventions are harder. Roads must be ripped up and redesigned. Neighbors will complain. Infrastructure projects take years (the redesign of a roughly one-mile stretch of Flatbush Avenue is scheduled to be done next year). Even scaling up Fair Fares would require the city to do more to reach people who qualify — today only about a third of residents who do are in the program.
But you can declare the bus to be free tomorrow, and it will be free tomorrow. It’s a shortcut to improving an aspect of city life where nearly all other answers are slow and hard.
“It’s a guarantee that your life will be better in a way that you can feel every single day,” said Michelle Wu, the mayor of Boston and someone Mr. Mamdani has often cited.
In Boston, the city pays to offset the fares on three high-ridership bus routes that serve lower-income neighborhoods (ridership is up, travel times about the same). That’s the kind of partial measure Mr. Mamdani could pursue: a larger pilot, a targeted set of routes, perhaps while expanding Fair Fares to aid more riders citywide. Maybe that buys patience for the harder improvements.
His campaign insists that the universality of free fares is the point. It’s what gives working-class riders access to the whole city. It’s what could unlock faster speeds for everyone.
But there’s evidence that New Yorkers might like the spirit of the pitch more than the potential reality of it. A recent New York Times/Siena polling experiment of two groups of likely voters showed 56 percent supported making the buses free, even as 57 percent said the city “should not do this.”
To voters, the value of Mr. Mamdani’s promise may largely be in the signal it sends: that he sees New Yorkers struggling on the bus and wants to make things better with big ideas. And that whether or not he really turns off all the card readers, surely he’ll do something to help your wallet, and to fix the buses.
Brad Lander, the city comptroller and an ally of Mr. Mamdani who also ran for mayor in the primary, suggested “fast and free” has a logic to it that’s not necessarily literal. Yes, you need resources to make the buses faster, he allowed, but you also need political will. And Mr. Mamdani is building it in a way that might not have worked had he promised “fast buses” alone.
“If you had had someone say, ‘Well, what if we make the bus a dollar cheaper than the subway, but also produce 20 interborough bus rapid transit lanes, and do all-door boarding to help everyone!’ — those might have been really good ideas,” Mr. Lander said, poking fun at his own policy-dense campaign.
“But they didn’t sufficiently capture the imagination of New Yorkers.”
new video loaded: Protesters Clash with Federal Agents Outside ICE Detention Center in New Jersey
transcript
transcript
Protesters Clash with Federal Agents Outside ICE Detention Center in New Jersey
Protesters and immigration agents clashed outside Delaney Hall detention center in Newark, where activists have gathered for days to denounce conditions inside.
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“Get back!” “Get back, get back, get back, get back, get back!” [chanting] “ICE, ICE has got to go. Hey, hey, ho, ho.” “We’ve heard repeatedly about these horror stories of pregnant women not getting access to care, of people with injuries not being treated. People shouldn’t have to starve themselves to make their dignity known.” “Down, down with the degradation.” “Down, down with the degradation.”
By Christina Kelso
May 28, 2026
How can people possibly afford to live in one of the most expensive cities on the planet? It’s a question New Yorkers hear a lot, often delivered with a mix of awe, pity and confusion.
We surveyed hundreds of New Yorkers about how they spend, splurge and save. We found that many people — rich, poor or somewhere in between — live life as a series of small calculations that add up to one big question: What makes living in New York worth it?
Ellen Hagan grew up in a small town in Kentucky, and moved to New York City as quickly as she could after she graduated from college. She arrived a few weeks before Sept. 11, and tried to get her bearings in a city turned upside down.
She found a group of fellow young artists and writers who wanted to take advantage of everything they could in the city, on very limited budgets. They went to poetry readings and dance parties, and rented tiny apartments in the East Village.
All the while, Ms. Hagan was diligent about saving money, even when she had very little of it.
“I didn’t know what I was saving for, but I knew I wasn’t going to have a job that would give me a pension,” she said. “I wanted to make enough money to live the New York existence I was dreaming of.”
Twenty-five years later, Ms. Hagan and her husband, David Flores, whom she started dating in her early years in New York, have much more money than they used to. Still, they feel more anxious about money than they hoped they would at this point in their lives.
The couple both work at DreamYard, a Bronx arts nonprofit. Last year, they made $178,135 there collectively, with Ms. Hagan, 47, directing the poetry and theater programs, and Mr. Flores, also 47, serving as the head of visual art and design.
They typically bring in another $40,000 to $60,000 a year through their freelance work. Mr. Flores is an adjunct professor, a photographer and a filmmaker, and Ms. Hagan teaches at a graduate writing program and writes books and poetry. They try to set aside about 15 percent of their income each year to grow their savings.
The couple live in Washington Heights in Upper Manhattan with their two daughters, who are 12 and 15.
Homeownership Doesn’t Solve Everything
As a young couple, Ms. Hagan and Mr. Flores lived in a 400-square-foot East Village rental. When their rent started to tick up, Ms. Hagan began looking for a place to buy, seeing homeownership as a buoy that would all but guarantee a secure financial life in New York.
Sixteen years ago, the couple found a perfect apartment in Washington Heights and scrambled to cobble together a down payment. They pooled their savings to put a 15 percent down payment on the $335,000 home. Once they closed, they were left with only a few hundred dollars in savings, but were thrilled and relieved.
“I had this sense that when you buy, you’re set in New York City,” Ms. Hagan said.
The reality, she has found, is more complicated.
The couple’s mortgage payment is $1,300 a month, and their maintenance fees keep rising, partially as a result of a new local law that requires increased inspections and repairs for buildings. Local Law 11 boosted their maintenance by $462 a month, at least temporarily, to about $1,900 total. And when the building’s management installed a new security system, each unit had to chip in $95 a month for three months.
Ms. Hagan loves the apartment, but she worries that they may eventually be priced out of their neighborhood.
“This building isn’t going to be for us at some point,” she said. “This feels like, uh oh, they’re imagining people who have much higher incomes than we do.”
Keeping the Kids Busy
Ms. Hagan and Mr. Flores, who each maintain packed calendars, have encouraged their daughters to adopt the same approach to city living.
“I’m definitely a proponent of, let’s fill your schedule and see what you love,” Ms. Hagan said.
The girls’ public school offers free debate and band classes before and after school, and they’ll appear this spring in the school’s productions of “Annie” and “The Addams Family.”
The girls are also enrolled in a free theater academy at the People’s Theatre and writing workshops at Uptown Stories, which has a pay-what-you-can system. Ms. Hagan and Mr. Flores typically pay the full tuition, which is $800 for each 12-week session, and donate about $2,500 a year to the organizations their daughters are part of.
The couple’s older daughter, Araceli, who wants to be both a writer and a doctor, is enrolled in a medical training program for middle and high school students. She made $2,500 for completing an internship at a cardiothoracic intensive care unit last summer.
Their younger daughter, Miriam, is going to a Y.M.C.A. camp this summer, which costs $2,600 for two weeks.
Ms. Hagan and Mr. Flores spent about $500 total on holiday gifts for both girls, and the couple doles out their daughters’ weekly allowances in two installments: $25 on Mondays and $25 on Fridays.
They shook their heads when Miriam, who is known as the most stylish member of the family, came home one day wearing a Dr Pepper T-shirt she’d bought at Target.
“We were like, ‘What are you doing with your money?’” Ms. Hagan said.
The Fun Stuff
The extra income from the couple’s freelance work allows the family to splurge on theater, vacations, books and memberships at the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Sometimes, Ms. Hagan and Mr. Flores work together. A few years ago, they sold a young adult novel called “Tell Me Every Lie” they had co-written for a $35,000 advance, some of which went to their agent.
Every little bit helps. The family is spending a weekend on Long Beach Island in New Jersey this summer, which will cost about $3,500. That price tag includes a hotel room big enough for four.
The family typically travels twice a year to Kentucky, where both Ms. Hagan and Mr. Flores are from, and where the couple co-owns a home in Louisville with Mr. Flores’s parents. They put $40,000 down and spend about $12,000 annually on expenses related to the home.
The family was hoping to travel to the Philippines this year, where Mr. Flores’s father is from, but they realized it could cost as much as $15,000. The trip is now on hold indefinitely.
They spend about $700 a month on groceries from nearby supermarkets, and occasionally order grocery deliveries from FreshDirect.
Every Wednesday, when the girls come home late from theater class, someone picks up dinner at the nearby halal truck or the Dominican restaurant Malecon, which usually runs about $60.
Dinner out as a family of four can easily cost $200, so Ms. Hagan and Mr. Flores typically eat at restaurants just once or twice a month. The other night, the whole family was hungry and craved Italian food from a favorite upscale spot nearby.
They balked, and walked around the corner to a diner instead. The meal was $120, all in.
We are talking to New Yorkers about how they spend, splurge and save.
Gov. Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey, a Democrat who has clashed with the Trump administration over immigration policies, joined protests outside a detention center in Newark on Monday in support of detainees participating in a hunger strike.
Ms. Sherrill heard from family members of detainees, who have complained about rotten and spoiled food and inadequate medical care at Delaney Hall. Dozens of protesters waved signs, banged on drums, and chanted “Free Them All!” The governor told the crowd she had requested access but was denied.
“No matter what your immigration status is, you shouldn’t be treated with anything less than dignity in this country,” said Ms. Sherrill, who was dressed in a T-shirt, jeans, and blue-gray jacket on the Memorial Day holiday. At one point, she rested her hand on the shoulder of a crying relative and smoothed the hair of an upset child.
After the governor left, the scene worsened outside the detention facility. A tense standoff erupted between Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and protesters who blocked an entrance; the agents responded by firing pepper balls and spray at the protesters. Senator Andy Kim, who was trying to de-escalate the situation, was among those affected.
On Monday, the governor and other elected officials, including Mayor Ras J. Baraka of Newark, appeared outside Delaney Hall amid growing concerns over the hunger strike, which started on Friday inside the gray, cinder-block building enclosed by a high chain link fence topped with razor wire.
Immigration advocates have rallied outside Delaney Hall since Friday. Detainees said they would go on a hunger and labor strike while calling for an investigation of the detention center and its operations and for Ms. Sherrill to visit to discuss protections from ICE. Hundreds of detainees were participating, one protester told Ms. Sherrill.
The governor said in a statement on Sunday that she had contacted ICE to gain access to the detention center and was working to monitor the situation and “do what’s necessary to ensure humane conditions.”
At Monday’s protest, some protesters shouted in Ms. Sherrill’s face to criticize her for not showing up earlier in the weekend, like other elected officials had.
Representative Rob Menendez of New Jersey had arrived at 8 p.m. on Sunday and stayed all night until he was allowed into the center on Monday morning. Mr. Menendez said that he had spoken to some of the detainees inside Delaney Hall, including a young woman who just wanted to go to her high school graduation, a pregnant woman who was trying to get medical care, and a man who showed him a carton of milk that had gone rancid.
“I heard just desperation from so many people in there,” Mr. Menendez said afterward.
Angela Martinez told Ms. Sherrill that her cousin, Bolivar Bueno, 65, has diabetes and that she hasn’t been able to speak to him to make sure he is getting medication. “We don’t know what’s going on,” she told the governor.
Afterward, Ms. Martinez said, “I want for her to help me out.”
Ms. Sherrill left after about an hour, around 11:30 a.m., as some demonstrators jeered at her. Her security had to clear the road of a couple people who tried to stop her S.U.V. from leaving.
A few hours later, a convoy of ICE vehicles approached another entrance on the south side of Delaney Hall. Protesters, who had rallied at the north entrance in the morning, ran over to sit down in front of the vehicles. Many said they feared that the detainees on hunger strike inside would be transferred to other facilities.
ICE agents — most of whom were wearing face masks — pushed and shoved the protesters out of the way, even dragging one young man by a kaffiyeh around his neck. As the protesters chanted “Trump Has To Go,” they linked arms and faced the ICE agents.
The standoff prevented anyone from leaving through the south entrance. Soon after, a military-style vehicle moved toward that entrance, with a man on top holding a firearm pointed at demonstrators.
Senator Kim, Democrat of New Jersey, who had been allowed inside Delaney Hall, came out during the confrontation and walked over to support the protesters. Soon afterward, the ICE agents and military vehicles backed away from the entrance and slightly retreated toward to the detention center, but the standoff continued.
“They provoked it, they brought that tank over,” Mr. Kim said. “It’s getting worse and worse here.”
The senator said he was working to “de-escalate” the standoff through negotiations with federal officials and would push for families to be allowed to visit detainees as early as Tuesday. “I’m going to keep at it,” he said.
Not long after, the standoff escalated with ICE agents using pepper balls and mace on the crowd.
It’s not the first time Delaney Hall has faced protests. In June 2025, four men escaped from the detention center after days of unrest over meager and sporadic meals and overcrowding that forced some detainees to sleep on the floor. Detainees had smashed windows, doors and security cameras.
And Mr. Baraka, the Newark mayor, was arrested in May 2025 during a clash with federal agents outside its gates last year.
Dakota Santiago contributed reporting.
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