The Kansas City fare-free bus plan that played the role of the muse for New York City socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani to try doing the same thing in the Big Apple has officially gone the way of the dinosaurs. Pay-as-you-go is making a comeback because the Missouri city has run into the problem socialists have struggled with since its inception: other people’s money.
Kansas City ran out of money to fund free travel and when the cash dried up, the $50 million experiment imploded. The program ran for five years, but what struck the death blow for it was the cost spiking to $15 million a year, which is double the initial expected price tag for it. “This is my shocked face,” Rich Azzopardi, the man who ran Mamdani’s campaign rival Andrew Cuomo’s mayoral campaign, said after hearing the news about the program.
“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,” he added. Mamdani first brought up the idea of zero-fare travel for New York commuters in 2025. Critics immediately asked where the money to fund the program would come from.
According to a report from Breitbart News, The Kansas City Area Transportation Authority first estimated it would lose about $8.8 million a year in fare revenue as it became the first major city in the country to completely ditch bus fare in 2020. However, the actual cost of running a free bus transportation system later shot up to $15 million a year, in part due to unexpected costs and inflation.
“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, said during an interview with Bloomberg. Jarrett Walker, a public transportation planning consultant told the outlet, “Zero-fare means worse service.”
“Taking out fares creates a much bigger hole that requires much bigger service cuts unless you find money somewhere else,” he added. The Breitbart report then noted that former British Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher drove this point home with her famous quote, “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.”
Someone in the Breitbart comment section pointed out that liberals who promise the world and under deliver are actually employing a smart strategy, as they can pin the failure on conservatives and rich people. “Actually, they could be considered smart. This is how they get votes. When they come up short on their promises, they just point to Conservatives and rich people to blame them for the failure of their wild ideas.”
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The same person then added, “Democrats have always been more socialist than capitalist in political ideology…..which is their problem in a capitalist society.” Another commenter pointed out that socialism has been tried many times in history and in different parts of the world, but always with the same result. “Socialism is a failed experiment everywhere it is tried.”
Featured Image: screenshot from embedded video