It turns out “free” has a price after all. The one American city that inspired New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s signature promise of free bus service has just slapped fares back on its riders — because the experiment quite simply ran out of money, the New York Post reports.
Kansas City, Missouri, brought bus fares back this month after its zero-fare program, launched with a flood of federal COVID relief cash in 2020, collapsed under its own costs. The Kansas City Area Transportation Authority initially figured it would forgo about $8.8 million a year in fare revenue. The real bill came in at roughly $15 million annually — nearly double the estimate — once unexpected costs and inflation were tallied. All told, the experiment burned through about $50 million before officials pulled the plug.
The free buses did not just drain the budget. Riders and drivers described the system as unreliable, filthy, and overrun — “rolling homeless shelters,” in the words of critics — once the federal money dried up. In other words, exactly what skeptics warned would happen if the same idea were imported to New York.
“As we ran out of the money and the support, we were forced to make more service cuts or move to fares to support those services,” Tyler Means, chief mobility and strategy officer at the Kansas City Area Transportation Authority, told Bloomberg.
Transit experts say the outcome was predictable. “Zero-fare means worse service,” public transportation planning consultant Jarrett Walker told Bloomberg. “Taking out fares creates a much bigger hole that requires much bigger service cuts unless you find money somewhere else.”
That is the problem Mamdani has never solved — and has barely acknowledged. The self-described socialist has repeatedly held up Kansas City as a model of success, yet he could not find room for free buses in his own $124 billion city budget. Instead, he has punted to Albany, asking the state to keep a limited fare-free pilot running on a handful of routes. Making every city bus free, by the city’s own math, would cost roughly $800 million a year to replace the lost fares.
Mamdani’s rivals were happy to twist the knife. “This is my shocked face,” said Rich Azzopardi, the chief spokesman for Andrew Cuomo, dripping with sarcasm. “The math was never going to work and for the good of New Yorkers, let’s hope this becomes yet another instance where Mamdani breaks his word — and while we’re at it he should ditch the nonsensical Soviet-style grocery stores too.”
The mayor’s office is not backing down. “Mayor Mamdani promised New Yorkers to make buses fast and free, and he intends to keep that promise,” said deputy press secretary Jeremy Edwards. Keeping the promise, of course, is the easy part. Paying for it is where Kansas City’s socialist dream turned into a struggle bus — and New York, with eight million riders and a far bigger bill, would be next in line.
Source: nypost.com
