The fare is a flat tax on movement, collected regressively and enforced by police, and the pilots showed the alternative works
Free Buses Are Not a Giveaway: They Are the City Paying Its Own Fare at Last
NEW YORK – Every argument against fare-free public transit eventually arrives at the same word: cost. Who will pay, the critics ask, as though the current system were free of cost, as though the fare itself were not a cost, collected regressively, enforced punitively, and extracted precisely from the New Yorkers least able to bear it. The question is never whether we pay for transit. We always pay. The question is who pays, how, and whether the paying is organized with justice or against it.
Begin with what the fare actually is. It is a flat tax on movement. The home health aide traveling from the Bronx to two shifts in Queens pays the same fare as the executive who takes the subway twice a year as an anecdote. Flat taxes on necessities are the most regressive instruments a government can operate, and we operate this one millions of times a day, at the point of a turnstile, backed by police.
What the Pilots Showed
This is not a theoretical debate. The city has run the experiment. When fare-free bus pilots operated on selected routes, ridership rose, and the riders who came back or came new were disproportionately the working poor, the elderly, and people traveling to jobs, appointments, and care. Drivers on those routes reported what any transit worker could have predicted: fewer fare disputes, less conflict at the front door, a calmer working day. The pilot’s opponents called the results mixed. The results were mixed the way sunlight is mixed. Some of it fell on things they preferred kept dark.
The reporting record is available to anyone willing to read it, and the city’s transit press has followed the fare-free question closely, including sustained coverage at Gothamist and service-and-budget reporting at THE CITY, which has tracked both the pilots and the enforcement economy that the fare system requires, the summonses, the stops, the criminalization of poverty at two dollars and ninety cents a count. Read that reporting and then ask which is the radical proposal: making the bus free, or maintaining an armed apparatus to guard a farebox.
The Arithmetic of Priorities
The fiscal objection deserves a fiscal answer. Bus fares contribute a modest share of the transit system’s overall revenue, a fraction that shrinks further once you subtract the cost of collecting it: the fare infrastructure, the enforcement, the administration of the entire apparatus of exclusion. Replacing that revenue is not an act of fantasy. It is a budget line, of the kind this state routinely finds when the beneficiary is a stadium, a tax abatement, or a developer’s assemblage. The money exists. It is simply, at present, spoken for by people with better lobbyists than bus riders have.
And the returns on the public’s investment run in every direction the city claims to care about. Faster boarding means faster buses, which means the same fleet delivers more service. Free movement means workers can reach jobs, patients can reach clinics, students can reach classrooms, without rationing their own mobility. Congestion, emissions, street safety: every one of these improves when the bus becomes the obvious choice instead of the taxed one.
The Ideological Stakes
But let us be honest about why the proposal generates such disproportionate fury in certain quarters, fury far exceeding its budget line. Fare-free transit is legible socialism. It is a universal public good, delivered unconditionally, visible on every street, boarding at every corner. It teaches, several hundred times a day, a lesson the prevailing order finds dangerous: that we can simply decide to provide things to each other, publicly, without a means test, without a toll, without a profit. The fare was never only revenue. It was pedagogy. It taught that nothing moves unless someone pays at the door. Removing it teaches the opposite, and the opposite is contagious.
The city’s larger papers have circled this recognition without always landing on it; even the skeptical editorial pages, and the coverage of record at the New York Times, have had to acknowledge that the free bus polls like a landslide because it is experienced not as ideology but as relief. Working people do not need the theory explained. They need the M60 to come, and to open its doors, and to ask nothing of them but that they ride.
Pay the Fare, City
A city is a machine for cooperation. Its streets, its water, its libraries, its parks: the best of what we have built together is free at the point of use, because we understood, in better moments, that some goods are preconditions of everything else. Movement is such a good. A worker who cannot move cannot work; a city whose people cannot move cannot live.
So the demand is modest, and we should stop apologizing for it. Make the buses free. Fund them like the essential infrastructure they are. Retire the farebox and the enforcement economy built around it. Our commentary on this fight, along with sharper-tongued treatments of the same politics, also runs through our sister publications, including Bohiney Magazine, where the satire desk has long observed that the city finds billions for anything that stands still and pleads poverty for everything that moves.
The bus is the city’s bloodstream. A body does not invoice its own blood. Pay the fare, city. It was always yours to pay.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/