The Kansas City fare-free bus scheme that inspired NYC Socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani to gift Big Apple commuters a gratis ride is no more.
Pay-as-you-go is returning because the Missouri metropolis ran out of money to fund free travel and the $50 million experiment simply evaporated when the financial well went dry.
The end of the five-year zero-fare transit experiment came as operating costs ballooned to about $15 million a year — nearly double the initial expected price tag, Bloomberg reports.
“This is my shocked face,” Rich Azzopardi, the man behind Mamdani’s campaign rival Andrew Cuomo reportedly said on hearing the news per the NY Post.
“The math was never going to work and for the good of New Yorkers, let’s hope this becomes yet another instance where Mamdani breaks his word — and while we’re at it he should ditch the nonsensical Soviet-style grocery stores too.”
As Breitbart News reported, Mamdani first mooted the service last year. Even then critics were asking the simple question: where does the money come from?
The Kansas City Area Transportation Authority initially estimated it would lose out on about $8.8 million a year in fare revenue as it became the first major U.S. city to eliminate bus fares in 2020.
The true cost of running a free bus network was later found to have skyrocketed to roughly $15 million annually partly due to unexpected costs and inflation, the NY Post further reports.
“As we ran out of the money and the support, we were forced to make more service cuts or move to fares to support those services,” Tyler Means, chief mobility and strategy officer at Kansas City Area Transportation Authority, told Bloomberg.
Was anyone surprised at the outcome?
RELATED: What a Surprise! The Socialist Has Run Out of Money
“Zero-fare means worse service,” Jarrett Walker, a public transportation planning consultant, told Bloomberg.
“Taking out fares creates a much bigger hole that requires much bigger service cuts unless you find money somewhere else.”
Former British Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher made the same point many years ago when she said:
“The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.”
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2026/06/23/city-bus-plan-that-inspired-zohran-mamdanis-fare-free-scheme-runs-out-of-money-starts-charging-riders-again/
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