Once and a while a free-lance magazine writer (among other things) is wrong. I am one of them.
Certain things that I hoped would never be almost completely free – like music – turned out that way, leaving tens of thousands of small garage-bands without any gigs, better bands with fewer gigs, and most of the top musicians in the country earning a fraction of what they did only a few years ago. Only the mega stars continue to flourish – yet one could effortlessly hear their music for free, while the Rich and other die-hard fans, at great financial sacrifice, pay the enormous ticket prices to see and hear these stars perform, live, in large arenas. (And it would cost one $1 or $2M to hire a Taylor Swift or Lady Gaga to play at one’s mansion.) Other things, like photographs, suddenly became free, along with numerous other items when digital technology began to multiply the possibilities, endlessly, as the money shifted away from all but top-line photographers to companies making and selling the apps The “play-store” became an unthought-of treasure trove of free stuff for tens of millions of Americans, and likely billions all over the planet, who could afford little or none of it two decades away. So even if a handful of billionaires profited handsomely from this redistribution of wealth, an exponentially large number of less-well-heeled peons, and members of the lower middle class, repeated plenty of benefits.
But free photos are one thing (even while the cell-phone manufacturers and the deals they struck with the lucky few app manufacturers effectively reaped the money, in a different way). But I was caught by surprise when free buses began emerging. Two years before Covid-19 struck, Kansas City’s bus fares disappeared: With fares covering less than six percent of the fleet’s operating costs (not counting the buses, for which the Federal Transit Administration was already paying 80 percent of the costs), it cost about as much to collect and process the fares, and pay for the technology to do so, than the fares covered. Unwilling to support meals for 42,000,000 Americans, the last thing I thought would be free were buses. Nearly a year ago, Washington, D.C. – which before COVID was covering the nation’s second-highest percent of its buses’ operating costs from passenger fares passed a City Council resolution to make the City’s bus fares free beginning on July 1, 2025. Yet this never happened. Trend-wise, I thought that those cities that agreed to support free buses would be a percentage of those where fares covered practically none of the costs – like Los Angeles County, where two years before COVID-19 struck, was covering a mere 8.5 of percent of its transit system’s operating costs (including subways) from the farebox. After COVID, and just before this percentage began to sneak up by a few percentage points, President Trump’s occupation of Los Angeles by 800 guards to support the already unneeded and illegally-confiscated National Guard to, in turn, support the illegal activities of ICE agents (an employment bonanza for former Proud Boys and Oath Keepers), this occupation immediately reduced fare revenue by another sixth. A crude guess is that, by November 2025, L.A. County’s fares covered perhaps four percent of the system’s operating costs. (For a sobering contrast, the “operating ratio” in Tokyo was 160 percent.)
Regardless, the last place I thought we would ever see free buses was in New York City, with, again, the nation’s highest percentage of operating costs covered by fares. So I thought newly-elected Mayor Mamdani’s plan to address the 48 percent of bus riders who were already not paying fares (far evasion was a headline only weeks before) by eliminating fares for the other 52 percent was, frankly, nuts. Yet this trend is beginning to occur in city after city, even while the trade-offs New York City will have to make up for the loss of an estimated $6B a year in bus revenues, which would have to be provided through some other costs – never mind the First Class riders I suggested to help offset these costs in an article I authored for National Bus Trader magazine this past August (see https://transalt.com/article/multiplier-costs-of-national-interference-with-local-transportation-services/). Instead, I thought that cities throughout the country – particularly in Red States where support for the Poor was dimming by the lux – would result in the disappearance of buses altogether in numerous cities and states.
I could not be more wrong. As a starting point, Iowa City Made its buses free, traffic cleared, and so did the air (New York Times, November 18, 2025). And not only were these vehicles jammed by the tired, the poor and the huddled masses, but a complete cross-section of employes from countless fields jumped on board almost as a celebration. Beginning as a two-year “pilot program,” this program was almost immediately extended by another year – with the lost revenue covered by a 1 percent increase in utility taxes and, far more creatively doubling most public parking fees from $1 to $2. Of course this is not New York, where parking fees for more than 2 hours can cost $70, bridge and tunnel fees are $17, and the City just expanded it by another $15 or so with congestion parking fees for vehicles traveling below 60th Street (a block above the southern border of Central Park).
Yet in Iowa City, ridership has already surpassed pre-pandemic levels by 18 percent. Private motorists drove an estimated 1.8 fewer miles on city streets, and emissions dropped by an estimated 24,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide a year – the equivalent of taking 5200 cars off the road. (Figures thanks to the New York Times.)
To date, free bus service in the United States is still relatively rare. But if it succeeds in New York City – where non-Rich motorists are saddled with exorbitant parking, bridge or tunnel fees and now congestion parking fees – there is no telling how far it will spread. The reader should keep in mind, of course, that while such a restructuring of modes will likely decrease traffic (and increase travel speeds in Lower Manhattan), and the costs of these other fees to the Rich, who infrequently ride buses (compared to the City’s subway, at $2.90 a ride), the hardship to those who cannot reach the City by bus, and who much drive in by car, must be unbearable. But why should a populist mayor care? The Press and Media almost never cover the downsides.
In any event, I have thus far picked up no news of any cities shutting down their cost-draining transit systems. And to be fair, transit efficiency has had a steady decline since the early 1960s, when on the brink of collapse, it was rescued by President Johnson’s Model Cities Program (initially in HUD) in 1964, whose Urban Mass Transportation Administration (UMTA) paid for 80 percent of a city’s buses. Three years later, when USDOT was formed, UMTA as quickly relocated from HUD to USDOT, and began covering a large percentage of the operating costs of these buses. This decline stemmed from the gradual reduction in the support elements upon which transit service depended — park-and-ride lots, feeder services, ride-sharing [whose initial forms were designed to actually compete with buses], high-occupancy vehicle lanes and – almost completely forgotten, almost any interest in alternative work schedules or the construction of a coherent public transportation network (see https://transalt.com/article/making-public-transportation-work-part-1-alternative-work-schedules/; https://transalt.com/article/making-public-transportation-work-part-2-park-and-ride-lots/; https://transalt.com/article/making-public-transportation-work-part-3-feeder-service/; https://transalt.com/article/making-public-transportation-work-part-4-system-design-and-networks/; https://transalt.com/article/making-public-transportation-work-part-5-ridesharing/, and https://transalt.com/article/making-public-transportation-work-part-6-high-occupancy-vehicle-lanes/).
Americans make different choices than those in most other countries. But these are largely the choices of a nation with rich resources quickly being consolidated by a couple thousand billionaires who, frankly, couldn’t care less how many Americans go hungry as long as their private limousines and rooftop jet helicopters can shave a few minutes off their travel time from meeting to meeting or from restaurant to spa. Those optimistic about the demise of President Trump feel that he can be stopped before the nation is fully-controlled by a few thousand billionaires who have managed to lock up the vast lion’s share of its vast resources. I am not among those so optimistic. At the same time, my belief in the demise of free transit illustrates how even an expert in the field (public transportation) can be so wrong when anticipating the demise of a costly give-away like free transit. Perhaps it will take a few more large crumbs for the nation’s marionettes to maintain the allegiance of the vast hoards of the growing starving Poor – imitating the distribution of wealth common to the entire planet a mere 500 years ago.
But if I am wrong about these costly crumbs providing satisfaction, to the masses, I could be wrong about almost everything. Just be careful to not bet on it.
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