Mamdani Doesn’t Care about CO2 Emissions

In answer to critics of his proposal for free bus transit, New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani posted the video below pointing out that the Staten Island Ferry is free. “Who said public transit can’t be free?” he asks.

Yet it isn’t really free for three reasons. First, taxpayers spent $154 million operating it in 2023 (plus $19 million on capital replacement costs to keep it running), which worked out to well over $10 per trip. In 2019, before the pandemic, ridership was higher but it cost more than $7 per trips.

That money had to come from somewhere. Mamdani apparently thinks he can tax the 1 percent highest-income people in New York City to pay for all his dreams, but they are already paying nearly half the taxes collected by the city. Increases in taxes will lead to some of them moving out, which will probably reduce total tax collections.

Second, the reason why it is free to users is that nearly all of the riders are expected to transfer to some other form of transit at one or both ends. In 1997, New York City implemented a Metrocard system to pay for transit rides, allowing users to pay one fare to ride, say, a bus and then connect to a subway. Rather than spend a lot of money installing card readers for the Staten Island Ferry that (since most riders would continue on a subway or other transit line) wouldn’t generate much net additional income, the city decided to let passengers ride the ferry for free.

While that seemed like a sensible decision at the time, it is due to such decisions that the city’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority has driven itself so heavily into debt and expects to run $1 billion to $2 billion deficits each year for the foreseeable future. Mamdani proposes to reduce fares on the buses that connect to the ferry to zero, thus eliminating the reason why it made sense to make the ferry free in the first place.

The third reason why it isn’t free is the environmental cost. Ferries are notorious energy hogs. Operating the ferry in 2023 consumed 8,800 British thermal units (BTUs) of fuel and emitted 647 grams of carbon dioxide per passenger-mile (up from 4,962 and 363 in 2019). The 2023 numbers are well over twice the amounts used and emitted per passenger-mile by the average light truck and three times the emissions of the average car and even the 2019 numbers are worse than an SUV. Apparently, carbon dioxide emissions are only a problem if they come from automobiles, not from expensive substitutes for those autos.

People are debating whether to call Mamdani a communist, Marxist, socialist, democratic socialist, or municipal socialist. That’s just semantics. Whatever you call him, it is clear that he doesn’t understand the relationship between revenues and costs or why prices make markets into a feedback system that works for most goods and services, including grocery stores and transportation. Judging from his videos, he seems like a nice guy that anyone would be happy to host for dinner, but not someone who should be put in charge of a major portion of the nation’s economy.