NYC mayoral hopefuls free-fare gimmick: Its 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 ph...