Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s promise to make New York City’s buses free has hit roadblocks. But he and Gov. Kathy Hochul on Wednesday announced a concrete plan to make them faster.
In the 51-page plan, called “Next Stop,” the city and state commit to a range of service improvements, road redesigns and traffic enforcement upgrades that officials say would speed up commutes by up to six minutes per ride on at least 50 bus corridors.
“The wealthiest city in the wealthiest nation in the history of the world shouldn’t have some of the slowest buses in America,” Mr. Mamdani said in a statement.
The average city bus travels at eight miles per hour. By comparison, subway trains move at about 18 m.p.h, and cars in the city at up to 25 m.p.h., according to the plan. The changes would increase bus speeds by up to 20 percent, officials said, including on 25 of the slowest bus routes in the city.
“New York is in the midst of a transit renaissance,” Ms. Hochul said in a statement, referring to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s $68 billion capital plan and other investments. “Now, working with Mayor Mamdani, we are advancing a bold and ambitious plan to move buses faster, dramatically expand bus priority, reduce delays and make our bus system the envy of the world.”
The plan sets several ambitious goals for the city and state by 2030, including:
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Advancing 28 bus lane projects across the five boroughs by the end of the year.
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Purchasing 2,500 new buses to replace more than 40 percent of the fleet.
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Expanding in 2027 the use of “all-door boarding” to reduce bottlenecks caused by riders waiting to board and pay fares only at the front of the bus.
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Building 300 bus shelters by 2028, adding seating and trees at more bus stops and making dozens of stops wheelchair accessible every year.
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Introducing five “rapid bus corridors” in underserved parts of Brooklyn and Queens, with features like bus lanes that run in the center of the road and traffic-light priority to reduce travel time.
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Increasing traffic surveillance to automatically ticket scofflaws who block bus lanes, and deploying police officers to enforce rules on 20 daily routes, up from 14.
The bus network carries 2.75 million riders a day, three-quarters of whom have a household income of less than $100,000 a year and identify as people of color, according to the plan.
Increasing average speeds from eight m.p.h. to less than 10 m.p.h. may sound piddling, but the effect would be substantial, transit experts said.
Betsy Plum, the executive director of Riders Alliance, a transportation policy nonprofit, said the plan could lead to one of the biggest improvements in bus service in decades.
“Slow buses are not just an inconvenience,” she said. “They are a barrier to opportunity, a drain on family time and a daily indignity for the New Yorkers who rely on them to reach work, school, child care, health care and other basic needs and opportunities.”
The work will require collaboration between the city’s Department of Transportation, which controls the streets; the M.T.A., the state agency that runs the bus network; and the Police Department, which operates the city’s traffic enforcement agency.
The mayor will also have to contend with business owners and residents whose complaints about road changes have scuttled past projects.
And the scope of the work is vast. While the New York City street network covers 6,300 miles, there are only 170 miles of bus lanes.
Progress in recent years has been uneven. A law passed in 2019 required the city to create 150 miles of bus lanes with barriers or camera enforcement and 250 miles of protected bike lanes, over five years. But the administration of Mr. Mamdani’s predecessor, Eric Adams, who had promised to be the “bus mayor,” never kept pace with the plan.
From 2022 to 2025, the city installed about 44 miles of such bus lanes and 106 miles of bike lanes. Bus speeds fell during Mr. Adams’s tenure, from a high of 8.7 m.p.h., according to M.T.A. data.
So far, Mr. Mamdani and his transportation commissioner, Mike Flynn, have made bus improvements a priority.
Last month, the city advanced a plan to create dedicated bus lanes on 34th Street in Manhattan, after threats from the federal government had halted the project. In April, officials announced a long-sought redesign of Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn that they said would improve bus speeds. And on Tuesday, the mayor’s office announced the completion of a bus lane project on Madison and Lexington Avenues in Manhattan that it said would benefit more than 150,000 daily riders.
A spokesman for the mayor’s office said the city has committed nearly $900 million in capital and expense funding toward the plan over the next five fiscal years.
Improving bus speeds may be simpler than the mayor’s other goal of making them free for all riders.
Such a subsidy could cost $1 billion a year, according to the M.T.A., at a time when the city faces hard budget choices. (Mr. Mamdani has said the cost would be closer to $700 million a year.) Janno Lieber, the head of the authority, has not endorsed the free buses plan, and the City Council has shown a preference for funding transit discounts for lower-income New Yorkers.
An M.T.A. review of a yearlong free-bus pilot program, which was championed by Mr. Mamdani when he was a state assemblyman and started in 2023, found that eliminating fares on a few lines increased ridership and reduced assaults on bus drivers. But it did not improve speeds.
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