New York Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani has made a lot of promises, and many of those really don’t seem workable at all. Maybe he’ll figure out a way to at least try them, which wouldn’t be awful because when they fail, they’ll fail spectacularly and serve as a living example of just why listening to such promises is a stupid thing to do.
One of his promises is free buses. The idea is that if the buses are free, people can go and do whatever they want, whenever they want, and it’ll be a boon to poor people throughout the city.
Well, poorer people do tend to need the bus, and New York is an expensive city, so while I understand the issue pretty well, there’s a problem here. If anyone can get on the bus without paying anything, won’t that also include a lot of the wrong sort?
But Mamdani has claimed that the free buses will be safer, and that’s not entirely without some evidence. There’s been a pilot program with a free route, and sure enough, there hasn’t been as much crime there.
The thing is, he’s reading too much into that. The safety of those buses might not mean what he wants it to mean.
The final report on this pilot came out in June 2025. Most of the results were unsurprising. Free fares meant that more people used the buses: nearly 50,000 more rides were recorded than the previous year. But it also meant that the buses collected less money—an estimated $16.5 million in forgone revenue.
But one result was surprising: free buses also seemed to make buses safer. Mamdani has highlighted this finding throughout the campaign, writing in The Nation that assaults on bus drivers dropped by 38.9 percent. Because drivers no longer had to challenge people attempting to board without paying, the argument goes, they could focus on driving the bus without worry.
This would be an impressive result, if it were accurate, but it’s an overestimate of the pilot program’s true effect. We can’t be confident that the pilot had any impact on driver safety.
First, the 38.9 percent figure was an early estimate of the program’s effect after the first nine months of free buses. When the report for the full year came out last June (including data from summer 2024, when teens were out of school), the reduction was smaller—31.9 percent.
Mamdani is running for mayor and so perhaps should not be expected to read updates to evaluation reports. But a second problem with the analysis is that he has focused on the reduction in assaults on the pilot routes without comparing that reduction to the change in assaults throughout the overall bus system. A reduction in assaults on the free buses can’t necessarily be attributed to the pilot program if assaults were falling on non-free buses, too.
In fact, the final report shows, assaults across the system during this period fell by 15.4 percent. In order to assess the impact of the free-bus system, we should look not at the change in assaults on the pilot routes but at the change in the pilot routes relative to the system as a whole. A simple comparison (31.9 percent minus 15.4 percent) suggests an actual impact estimate of 16.4 percent—less than half of the 38.9 percent Mamdani previously claimed.
Now, that might look really good, even if it’s been overstated, and not without some cause.
However, everything is in the details.
This piece goes on to note that this pilot route saw 47 assaults the year before the pilot program, and 32 the year after. While I agree with the author that even one assault being prevented is a good thing, looking at the raw numbers, we can see that the difference really isn’t that major. We can’t even really be sure the difference is statistically significant when compared with the bus system as a whole.
Let’s also look at Mamdani’s overall views on criminal justice. He doesn’t think anyone should be in prison, ever. He doesn’t think that people should be locked up. If he’s able to exert any influence over that, and he most definitely can, then we’re likely to see more criminals returned to the streets. That means more potential people to commit assaults on bus lines, which may well lead to an overall increase in assaults even without the abolition of fares.
In short, the benefits being touted are minimal compared to the bus system as a whole, perhaps not even statistically significant, and when considered in contrast to other policy positions held by the mayor-elect, it’s entirely probable that those benefits will evaporate in the long term, if they even exist in the first place.
But hey, New Yorkers voted for what they voted for and they deserve to get it good and hard.
It’s just a shame that those who didn’t vote for it are still bound by the draconian rules against concealed carry that might actually let them protect themselves and others. Sure, they can carry, but mostly it’s only in theory.
Editor’s Note: The Schumer Shutdown is here. Rather than put the American people first, Chuck Schumer and the radical Democrats forced a government shutdown for healthcare for illegals. They own this.
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