NYU Marron’s Subway Plan and Mamdani’s Free Buses Deserve More Than Either-Or Thinking

New Yorkers may soon face a contrived choice between free, rapid buses and unprecedented subway expansion—a false dichotomy that imperils both transit advancement and urban equity.

There are few places where the daily drama of urban congestion plays out as acutely as on New York City’s buses. Some 1.5 million riders shuffle onto these lumbering vehicles each weekday, enduring journeys that can seem longer than Odysseus’s, if with less mythic closure. So when Zohran Mamdani, the city’s energetic new mayor, revived his campaign promise for rapid, fare-free buses, the proposal drew the expected headlines—and a sigh from many seasoned commuters. But a yet bolder idea is now jockeying for attention: a plan by NYU’s Marron Institute for an audacious 41-mile, 64-station subway expansion, the largest since the frostbitten heyday of Robert Moses.

The Marron proposal dazzles with sheer ambition. Twelve new or extended lines across four boroughs would, the Institute claims, unlock a quarter-million new homes over four decades, largely in the city’s transit deserts. The report, dubbed “A Better Billion,” is anchored in urbanist arithmetic: build transport where land is underused, and the city will absorb growth as efficiently as it absorbs rainwater. Yet, perhaps to elbow its way into a tepid political climate, the Marron team frames this vision as a direct rival—not partner—to the mayor’s free-bus initiative. With only $1 billion per year in notional funding, they urge, choose: buses or tracks.

This either-or framing is, at best, a half-truth. The promise of subway expansion is immense—raw capacity, speed, and climate resilience. But buses, free from fareboxes, offer near-term gains in speed and access, especially in low-income neighbourhoods and outer boroughs ill-served by rails. They are not Coca-Cola and Pepsi, fighting for the same consumer; rather, they are water and bread, the basis of a proper urban diet. Thriving metropolises require plenty of both.

For New York, the more pertinent constraint is not the logic of transit, but the logic of dollars. The Marron Institute’s estimates of $48 billion in capital costs evoke, with some understatement, a “black hole” in their report—details on sourcing such a sum are sketchy at best. Assumptions about recouping annual funding from operational savings or transit efficiency feel buoyant, if not fanciful, when stacked against the city’s fractured political will and aging municipal infrastructure. The free bus plan, for its part, is far cheaper to implement but possibly vulnerable to the same budgetary headwinds that have already blown gustily through Albany.

These high-concept disputes are not academic. Accessibility disparities track tightly to income, race and employment opportunity across the five boroughs. According to studies from TransitCenter and the Regional Plan Association, transit improvements in these underserved districts (think East New York, Morris Heights, or Corona) would yield disproportionate gains in upward mobility and quality of life. Sidelining buses for concrete, or vice versa, risks perpetuating patterns of transit redlining—inefficient, inequitable, and, in the end, politically myopic.

Capacity to spur housing and job creation is also at stake. The Marron plan’s projection of 250,000 new homes—without further rezonings—is no small feat in a city where NIMBY opposition and sclerotic planning processes routinely scuttle even modest infill. The follow-on might be a more buoyant property market and a stabilised rent environment. But as London, Paris and Los Angeles have lately learned, new tracks alone do not guarantee inclusive growth unless paired with policies to deter displacement and invest directly in affordable housing.

The allure of big infrastructure, of course, still seduces American cities. Yet as federal transit funding remains volatile and construction costs in New York regularly exceed those of peer metropolises (the Second Avenue Subway ran over $2.5 billion per mile, a puny return by global standards), the case for integrating incremental upgrades—be they busways, automation, or smart scheduling—becomes only stronger. Witness Seoul or Singapore, where frequent, reliable buses tie seamlessly into rail networks, maximising not just mobility but social cohesion.

Rethinking transit: abundance, not austerity

To frame mobility as a zero-sum game is to betray a pinched civic imagination. The city’s transportation authorities and mayoral team ought instead to champion an “abundance agenda,” as mooted by figures like Ryder Kessler, candidate for the Assembly. This means investing in both network expansion and accessibility, not least because the city’s economic competitiveness depends on it. New York sustains more jobs than the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex on one-thirtieth of the land area, an urban feat fuelled by density, not automotive convenience.

Yet abundance demands discipline. Bringing either proposal to fruition will require a technocratic approach to cost control, procurement reform, and union negotiations—matters that deflate many grand American transit schemes. Meanwhile, the dance of state and city budgets remains unpredictable; support from Albany may be as tepid as in past funding rounds.

The global context bodes both hope and caution. European and Asian rivals point the way to streamlined project delivery and integrated fare systems that New York has so far struggled to emulate. But their experience also portends that sustained political consensus is the linchpin—something that New York, with its fractious city/state dynamic and hyperlocal politics, finds difficult to muster.

Arguably, the biggest risk is rhetorical. To set buses and subways at loggerheads is to misread New York’s real trouble: not how much public transport, but its delivery, quality and continuity. Both initiatives, if enacted together, would signal a return to the city’s erstwhile swagger—a belief that public goods should be abundant, investments long-term, and transit policy governed less by penny-pinching than by the demands of a growing, diversifying metropolis.

In sum, prosperous, equitable cities are multimodal by nature. Free buses and new subways, allocated wisely and built efficiently, need not be adversaries but partners in a shared civic project. What New York, and American cities more broadly, requires is not another false binary, but the courage to pursue multiplicity—to refuse the meagreness of either/or, and instead press for the peculiar abundance that only robust public transport can provide. ■