MTA chair confirms thinking about it is the strongest commitment to public transit received in four years
Satire from Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.
Hochul Forms Thinking Task Force
NEW YORK — Governor Kathy Hochul announced this week that she has formed a task force to think about Mayor Mamdani’s free bus proposal, which the governor said deserves serious consideration and a structured process and the full weight of the resources of the second-most-powerful office in the state, which she is deploying in the form of a task force that will think about it and report back by the end of the year, or next year, depending on the thinking.
The task force, titled the Metropolitan Transit Accessibility and Funding Feasibility Review Working Group for the Consideration of Zero-Fare Bus Implementation Options, has nine members, two of whom are available on Thursdays, and a budget that the governor’s office declined to specify on the grounds that specifying the budget would constrain the thinking. It will hold its first meeting in August, which the governor confirmed is when the thinking will formally begin, and that prior to August the thinking is considered pre-deliberative and therefore not public record.
The Proposal’s History
Mamdani proposed free buses during his campaign, then won the election, then took office, then signed an executive order directing the city to fund a pilot program on ten routes, then asked the MTA to implement the pilot, and then learned that the MTA requires state approval for fare changes, which requires Hochul, who announced the task force. Observers of New York State governance described the sequence as textbook, noting that the state typically requires between one and four task forces before considering any action that involves a bus, and that this is the first task force rather than the fourth, which they said is actually quick.
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority confirmed it has received the mayor’s request and is awaiting direction from the governor while also awaiting direction from its capital funding timeline and its union contracts and its outstanding bond obligations and the federal Federal Transit Administration, all of which are in various states of thinking, and none of which have formed task forces, which the MTA said suggests they are further along in the process.
Buses Continue Operating, Charging Fares
In the interim, buses continue operating on their existing routes at existing fares, which remain $2.90 per ride, a price set when inflation was lower and since adjusted upward in the direction that all MTA prices adjust, which is one direction. Ridership on the ten pilot routes proposed for the free bus programme has increased fourteen percent over the past six months despite the fares being unchanged, which analysts attribute to the mayor talking about free buses constantly and creating an anticipation premium that functions like marketing, except the product has not launched and the marketing is accidental.
Bus drivers on the proposed pilot routes have been asked by their union whether the free bus programme changes their job. The union has been told it does not, that drivers still drive, that passengers still board, and that the change is simply that no one swipes. The drivers said they understand. Several added that passengers already do not swipe on the rear door, and have not for years, and that the bus is already partly free on the honour system, and that if the city would like to extend that arrangement to the front door while also paying them on time, they are fully supportive of the thinking and the task force and whatever comes next, as long as what comes next includes the contract renewal that has also been in a state of thinking since 2024.
A Brief History of the Task Force
New York State has formed task forces to study free buses before, most recently in 2018, when a similar pilot was proposed by the MTA and studied by a transportation working group that recommended a three-year pilot, which was approved in principle, funded in the first year, defunded in the second year when the MTA faced a budget crisis, and abandoned in the third year, when nobody in the state government could locate the working group’s final report, which exists, and which recommends the same things the current proposal recommends, and which could be supplied to the new task force upon request, though nobody has requested it, because forming a new task force produces more coverage than locating an existing report, and coverage is, in the logic of the governor’s office, a form of action, which is the most expensive definition of action in the state budget and also the least effective, except as a substitute for action, at which it is very effective indeed.
Mamdani’s office released a parallel study this week comparing free bus results from cities that have implemented zero-fare transit, including Tallinn, Estonia, which went fare-free city-wide in 2013, and several US cities including Lawrence, Kansas, and Kansas City, Missouri, which eliminated bus fares and documented ridership increases of thirty to sixty percent. The study noted that New York’s scale makes direct comparison difficult, that the MTA’s operating costs are substantially higher than any comparable system, and that the funding question remains the central obstacle. It also noted that Tallinn’s mayor did not require fourteen months of task forces to determine that not charging people to get on a bus would result in more people getting on a bus, which is the kind of observation that is obvious and that no one in New York State governance appears to be permitted to make in an official meeting without forming a committee to validate it first.
More civic absurdity at https://waterfordwhispersnews.com.
SOURCE: Satirical Journalism