It’s Not Just About the Bus

Who knew the discussion about free transit was so contentious?

Well, we all kinda did because it’s been a debate for the last decade in our specific policy circles. But with the election of Zohran Mamdani to be the NYC mayoral candidate for the democrats, the debate has gone off the charts.

Friend of the newsletter David Zipper wrote this thoughtful piece in Slate that follows several of the other pieces he’s written related to the subject, but at least on BlueSky some of the replies became a bit rabid and not really helpful. People were defending Mamdani as they felt he’d been getting it hard from the media lately.

There was also some thoughtful debate on major media negatively attacking the democratic socialist candidate more generally, but we’re all still left wondering whether a program of free buses would work in a big city like New York and whether, as David says, the tradeoffs are worth it if there are other important goals to achieve.

If there are tradeoffs, I personally lean towards giving people better service. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t explore the idea or a permutation of it. Apparently there’s a LOT of free parking in the city that perhaps could be leveraged. We also know from chatting recently with Madeline Brozen that people benefit not just monetarily from free transportation access, but from a public and mental health perspective.

Which brings up another point about socially beneficial policy; transportation (access to goods and services and our personal networks), care infrastructure (health care, children’s and adult’s care, nourishment), and housing (shelter and management of it) are all intertwined intimately in determining people’s quality of life. We’ve done a horribly poor job in the United States of creating a safety net where people don’t fall through the cracks on these subjects specifically. And all our policies and the discussions or arguments that ensue are generally a jumbled mess because of it.

That discussion, which pulls in free buses, boils down to a larger one about the safety net and ultimately that’s where the passion on different sides of the argument comes from. Well, except the side that doesn’t think it should exist. But I would love to have a passionate well reasoned policy discussion over other silly distractions that we’ve been seeing lately and am honestly open to being persuaded.

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