Consultant's mindset, or why Jarrett Walker is wrong about free buses

Zohran Mamdani is surging in polls for New York City mayor, closing the gap between him and his chief competitor, the disgraced former governor Andrew Cuomo. But one person not feeling the momentum is the transit consultant Jarrett Walker, who in a series of social media posts criticized Zohran’s proposal to make buses fare-free (along with streets and signal changes to speed them up).

Walker’s case isn’t really specific to New York City, where a study showed free bus fares would bring 12% faster rides and 20% more riders. In fact, many of Walker’s arguments are so self-evidently flimsy they’re hardly worth debunking point by point. For example, he tells us “People will demand a bus duplicating every subway line so they can avoid the fare,” as if planners would not simply shrug off such a demand; does he think we’re governed by a dictatorship of penny-pinching bus riders? And did he even read the City & State NY article he linked to? It cites an MTA estimate that a mere “2% [to] 4% of subway trips would switch to bus trips under free bus service.”

But it’s not simple inattention to facts that keeps Walker from recognizing the strong case for free fares. His core argument is mistaken. Free fares should be off the table because, he asserts, “any money you spent on that would be more productively spent on better service.”¹ This is a bit like saying there shouldn’t be a subway under Eighth Avenue because you’d have higher ridership along Sixth Avenue. It makes any transit supporter want to reply, “Why not both?!”

And the reason why not both is: Jarrett Walker is a consultant.

When cities and transit agencies bring in Walker’s firm, the assignment is: “Our budget is X million dollars. How can we best use this fixed budget to deliver service?” Even the best consultant² has to work within such terms. A consultant who retorts, “Your budget is too small for a world-class system. You need to go to the voters and politicians for better funding,” wouldn’t get hired again. That’s not their job.

Walker’s error is to project that same role onto voters in a democracy.

When we vote, when we organize, when we advocate with elected officials, we’re not consultants deciding where to put a fixed pot of money. We’re engaged community members making a collective decision about values and priorities.

And if we want to make fares free—to increase ridership, speed up buses, realize mobility as a human right, and decrease potentially deadly contact points between transit riders and police—we can find or raise new revenue to do that. And if we want to increase service and speed it up—adding signal priority, queue jump lanes and the like—we can find or raise revenue to do that, too. Both free fares and service improvements will increase ridership, creating a positive feedback loop that increases political support for transit, and hence funding.

Zohran Mamdani’s transit platform proposes to do both in New York City. That should be cheered by transit supporters everywhere. Don’t limit yourself by bringing a consultant’s fixed mindset to transportation politics. We deserve so much more from our transportation system in this country, and we need bold, all-of-the-above visions to get there.

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