NYC mayoral hopeful’s free-fare gimmick: It’s an illogical path to fight transit crime

New York City mayoral hopeful Zohran Mamdani is out-raising every other candidate in the race — by pledging to spend even more of taxpayers’ money.

Among his more expensive promises is his cornerstone proposal to eliminate fares on all MTA buses. Free transit for everyone!

Perhaps anticipating some pushback from the fiscally sane, Mamdani on Tuesday offered up a whopper of a rationale for the $700M proposal: It could reduce assaults on bus drivers, he asserted on X.

His evidence?

A (very) small pilot program that made five city bus routes free for a year.

According to Mamdani, those routes saw nearly 40% fewer verbal and physical assaults on drivers during that time, while the rest of the system saw a 20% decline.

The claim that this program led to a significant reduction in assaults on operators is baseless, as is the candidate’s proposal to expand free fares as a crime-fighting measure.

Both rely on a misrepresentation of a single data point — and that’s just one of the broader argument’s flaws.

Let’s break this down.  

Mamdani’s post cited an article in The Chief, a city public-union journal, stating that bus operators experienced a 39.8% reduction in all types of assaults on them along the five routes where fares were eliminated.

Meanwhile, during the same period, the entire bus system saw a 19.8% decline in such incidents.

But the suggestion that the greater decline on these five routes was due to the removal of fares is speculative at best.

Perhaps that’s why Mamdani did not offer even a sliver of hard evidence or detailed data in support of his claim.

The aggregation of both verbal and physical assaults muddies the argument, as does limiting the claim to assaults on drivers only.

Would the reduction hold if we focused solely on physical assaults?

What if the report included assaults on riders as well?

The lack of transparency around the data leaves us unable to evaluate such distinctions — but the aggregation of the two measures suggests that the physical-assault numbers, if presented separately, may look dramatically different from the figures on verbal assaults. 

Another key point to consider is the baseline: How frequent were these assaults to begin with?

Percentage changes can sound impressive, but they lack meaning without context.

Did these incidents drop from 10 to 6 on the free routes, or from 10,000 to 6,000?

Without this crucial information, any sweeping conclusion about the efficacy of fare elimination is premature and misleading. 

Even if we accept for argument’s sake (and we shouldn’t) that fare elimination directly caused the declines and that the declines weren’t a byproduct of natural variation or other factors, the underlying logic of Mamdani’s proposal is concerning: It essentially amounts to paying off offenders in exchange for better behavior.

This raises serious questions about policy precedent.

Do we reward would-be shoplifters with discounts at retail stores if they promise not to steal?

The implications are absurd and counterproductive. 

Perhaps most damning, however, is the glaring admission buried in this proposal.

By implying that fare evasion correlates with antisocial behavior like verbal and physical assaults, Mamdani has unwittingly acknowledged a reality that proponents of fare-evasion enforcement have been highlighting for decades: That those who evade fares are not harmless, marginalized individuals just seeking transportation access, but often deeply antisocial thugs liable to assault hard-working bus operators over a $3 fare.

This reality weighs heavily against Mamdani’s proposal insofar as it would eliminate important opportunities for police to encounter, and hopefully arrest, fare evaders who are also engaged in more serious criminal conduct. 

Just last week, NYPD transit officers stopped a man for hopping the turnstile in a Midtown train station — and found he was unlawfully armed with a loaded firearm and wanted on a warrant. 

Also weighing against Mamdani’s crackpot theory are the experiences of leftist cities that have already attempted this experiment.

Portland, Ore., for one, reversed course in 2012 after making part of its public transit system free. Why?

Because, as a local news outlet reported, a study from the engineering firm Parsons Brinckerhoff found fare elimination caused problems with “security, safety, crime, undesirable behavior and attracting panhandlers.”

A larger analysis by the Transportation Research Board noted that “some public transit systems that have experimented with or implemented a fare-free policy have been overwhelmed . . . by the presence of disruptive passengers, including loud teenagers and vagrants.”

Mamdani’s argument for expanding free transit based on such limited and shielded data is both unsupported and dangerous, and handing out free services is neither a rational nor moral response to bad behavior.

Simplistic solutions like “just make it free” may sound appealing but often fail to withstand the slightest scrutiny.

Rafael A. Mangual is a Manhattan Institute fellow, a contributing editor of City Journal and author of “Criminal (In)Justice.”