The Revolution Will Arrive on Time: Why Mamdani's Fast Bus Socialism Is More Radical Than You Think

Mamdani's promise to Speed Buses is in in the Tradition of the Sewer Socialists Who Strengthened Local Control of Urban Infrastructure

Zohran Mamdani – a self-proclaimed democratic socialist and the frontrunner in New York’s mayoral race – has made a signature issue of speeding up New York City’s buses.

On the surface, it sounds almost comically modest. In a city beset by crises, why focus on something as mundane as bus speeds? Detractors scoff that this goal is hardly the stuff of socialist revolution. But Mamdani’s push for “free and fast buses”is far more radical than it may appear. In truth, it strikes at the heart of who controls the most valuable resource the city owns: the streets themselves.

The city controls 6,300 miles of roads covering tens of thousands of acres, roughly a fifth of all land in the City, a public land treasure likely worth hundreds of billions of dollars if appraised on the open market. That street system is no doubt the most valuable real estate asset owned by any single government in the United States aside from the federal government’s vast land holdings. If you care about who owns the means of production, this is one key element of that in New York City.

To illustrate the sheer scale of this urban commons, consider a rough breakdown of the value of NYC streets by borough (see this excel sheet for data sources and calculations)

Table: NYC’s street network is an enormous public landholding. This is a relatively conservative estimates, the land value of city-owned streets easily exceeds $300 billion – a trove of real estate traditionally dedicated almost entirely to private car use.

However, city streets may be publicly owned on paper, but in practice they’ve been given over to a car-driving minority – usually free of charge – while the non-driving majority fights over sidewalk scraps. New York’s 6,300 miles of roads include around 19,000 lane-miles for driving and a staggering 3 million free on-street parking spaces. By design, all of this street space is devoted to moving or storing cars, even though less than a third of New Yorkers commute by car. Meanwhile, truly public uses of streets – like dedicated bus lanes, bike lanes, and pedestrian space – remain microscopic slivers of the pie (e.g. bus lanes are <0.1% of street area). In short, generations of policy have handed over priceless public land to the private automobile, free riders literally and figuratively, while straphangers and pedestrians get crumbs.

In that light, Mamdani’s plan to take back a chunk of that public property to speed up buses by dedicating more lanes to public transit, reclaiming curb space from private parking, and giving priority to people over cars is downright revolutionary. It means the city treating its street real estate as something to be managed for the public good (moving the most people in the most efficient way), rather than as a private good where individual car owners reign. No wonder entrenched interests are screaming,

Radicalism of Restricting Car Use of Roads Shown by Capitalist Backlash

Mamdani’s campaign to take back street space for buses is therefore hardly modest – it’s taking on a century of plundering the most valuable asset owned by the city for the narrowest of purposes. The measure of its radicalism is the fierce, histrionic opposition from the car lobby and its political allies.

You can see just a taste of that opposition from the attack on New York’s congestion pricing plan, not just from local interests but as a top priority for defeat by the Trump administration and conservative media outrage across the country. Congestion pricing is designed to charge vehicles entering Manhattan’s busiest core a tiny fraction of the value of that real estate to fund transit with the proceeds. It is supposed to raise $500 million per year initially and as much as $1 billion per year when planned increases in fees kick in - but that is a miniscule return overall on the hundreds of billions in value of the overall road network available for free to drivers.

Despite this, after being approved in 2019, it was delayed by endless reviews, by lawsuits and by Governor Hochul until 2025, whereupon the new Trump White House tried to revoke federal approval. Trump’s Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy went on national media repeatedly and somewhat obsessively raging that making drivers pay a $9 fee in Manhattan was an attack on the working class and small business owners. Trump gloated initially that he had killed congestion pricing, reinforcing the message that it was a national priority to attack any attempt to pry even a dime or a lane away from car traffic to pay for public transit.

But this is just a small taste of a century of deeply entrenched capitalist interests that molded our cities around the automobile. In the 20th century, the auto and oil industries and suburban real estate development forces executed a hostile takeover of American urban streets. This isn’t conspiracy theory; it’s on the historical record. A GM-controlled entity infamously bought up and dismantled transit systems in dozens of U.S. cities, including streetcar networks that once efficiently moved city dwellers. This included 1,344 miles of trolley tracks in New York which once connected what are now transit deserts in Brooklyn and Queens.

In collaboration with powerful government figures, from corrupt mayors like Jimmy Walker to, infamously, power broker Robert Moses, these interests paved over urban neighborhoods with highways to deliver urban residents to rapidly developing suburbs, which would be subsidized with free streets and expanded street parking to let them access urban amenities while not contributing to its tax base.

Moses, backed by those real-estate and road-building interests, spent decades diverting resources to roads while sabotaging mass transit expansion. He built 13 expressways across New York City, literally replacing more than a score of neighborhoods with highways and showing open contempt for public transit and the people who relied on it. (Moses once refused to add a rail line down the center of the Long Island Expressway when it would have cost only 4% more – a decision that permanently limited commuter rail capacity. He left every bridge he built without so much as a streetcar or pedestrian path, stranding entire boroughs without transit links.)

Perhaps the starkest illustration of how cars seized the streets is the very concept of “jaywalking” – a propaganda victory by auto interests in the 1920s. Before the automobile, city streets were truly commons: open to pedestrians, pushcart vendors, streetcars, and children playing tag in the road. As cars proliferated and pedestrian deaths escalated, rather than limit auto access to the roads, instead, through aggressive lobbying and PR, auto interests managed to rewrite laws and social norms so that walking in the street became an offense, and if a car hit you it was your fault for being in the way.In New York, a generation of children grew up forbidden from playing stickball on their own blocks where their parents and grandparents once roamed freely. By mid-century, autos had claimed, largely for free, what in today’s dollars was a multi-hundred billion dollar asset all to themselves. The bustling street life of old – kids at play, peddlers hawking wares, neighbors socializing – was largely banished in favor of traffic and parking.

The Human Deaths and Brain Damage from Cars that Subsidized the Theft of Urban Streets

The human costs of this century-long automobile hegemony have been staggering. It’s not just the social loss of street life or the communities literally bisected by highways – it’s measured in bodies and minds harmed.

The suburbs and US car culture were doubly subsidized - by the access to free streets but also by the theft of the air urban residents breathed as city neighborhoods were choked in tailpipe pollution for decades. Most obviously, those traffic emissions continue to lead to asthma, heart disease, and other ills with low-income areas of the South Bronx and Harlem (sliced by Moses’s roads) suffering disproportionately high asthma rates linked to traffic exhaust.

And consider the silent, nationwide poisoning caused by leaded gasoline: for decades cars spewed lead particles into the air, settling particularly in children’s bodies in the gridlock of urban streets. By the 1970s, lead poisoning from gasoline was a full-blown public health catastrophe. Estimates vary but a 2018 Lancet study estimated that up to 400 000 annual deaths were attributable to lead exposure.

Beyond death, scientists have drawn direct links between childhood lead exposure, which damages the brain’s impulse control, and violent crime rates years later in life. The wave of crime that plagued U.S. cities in the late 20th century has been attributed to lead gasoline by a number of studies largely to the brain-damaging lead fallout of the car boom. It was only when lead was removed from gasoline in the 1970s would we see a drop in crime as the first generation without lead-damaged brains reached maturity in the 1990s. Those decades of rising crime would feed fears that further encouraged suburbanization and devastated the tax base of cities like New York, a further subsidy to the suburbs due to free access to urban streets.

In short, the domination of cars didn’t just change our streets – it shortened lives, blighted lungs, and even warped social outcomes for generations.

The Radical Promise of Putting People First on Our Streets

Mamdani’s bus plans means he faces a hundred years of capitalist privatization of our streets - and he has recognized the scale of this fight when he says he will “stand up to… power players who oppose making streets safer and buses faster.” It pits him (and the transit-riding public) against a formidable coalition of interests: big oil, big auto, real estate developers who still think more highways equal progress, and the politicians who do their bidding. Every bus lane or car-free busway reallocates street space from private vehicles to the public at large. And in New York, that’s a high-stakes reallocation.

What would it mean if Mamdani succeeds? The changes could be transformative for working New Yorkers. Speeding up buses is a massive transfer of time (and thus money) back to working people. Today, New York’s buses crawl along at an average of only 8 mph – and some routes, like Manhattan’s M57, barely top 4.8 mph (yes, that’s walking speed). These delays steal countless hours from riders – often low- and middle-income workers with the longest commutes. Bus riders waste time in gridlock that drivers cause, effectively paying a “time tax” so that cars can have free reign. One study found that traffic congestion and reckless driving cost New Yorkers over $6 billion a year in lost time and productivity. A fast bus network would give a huge chunk of that time (and money) back to everyday people. It means a parent gets home in 45 minutes instead of 70, a delivery worker can run an extra route and earn more, a nurse isn’t late to her shift (or fired for tardiness). In a very real sense, better buses boost incomes and job security for those who rely on them.

Then there are the broader economic and social benefits. Efficient transit is the backbone of an equitable city. When buses are reliable and rapid, employers can count on workers showing up on time – and workers can reach better job opportunities that might have been inaccessible with a two-hour slog. Neighborhoods far from the subway (of which there are many in the outer boroughs) suddenly become viable places to live and work without a car, which in turn can spur transit-oriented development – housing and retail built up along bus corridors. Studies have shown that reducing car traffic and improving transit/bike access actually boosts local business activity: bus lanes and bike lanes tend to increase foot traffic and retail sales for small businesses on the corridor. (Despite fears that removing parking will hurt merchants, the opposite often occurs – a swarm of pedestrians and transit riders patronize shops more than a trickle of drivers did.)

By prioritizing buses and bikes, the city can create more jobs and stimulate neighborhood economies, all while cutting pollution and noise. It’s a virtuous cycle: faster buses mean more people using transit instead of driving, which means cleaner air and safer streets, which makes the sidewalk environment more pleasant and draws even more people out to shop, stroll, and socialize. And of course, every additional person on a bus is one less car clogging the road, benefitting even those who do need to drive.

Bus riders gain time and dignity, drivers even gain a saner commute (with fewer fellow drivers), local businesses gain customers, kids gain safer routes to school, and all of us gain cleaner air and more pleasant city life. The only “losers” are the entrenched interests who profit off the old car-centric chaos – oil companies selling more gas for idling engines, car dealers selling more vehicles to frustrated commuters, and perhaps a few political patrons who equate free parking with the divine right of kings.

Crucially, better bus service is also a matter of environmental justice and public health. The current car-centric status quo has imposed heavy burdens on low-income New Yorkers and communities of color – those who breathe in the exhaust on traffic-clogged avenues and suffer higher asthma rates as a result. It is these same communities that are often transit-dependent and stand to gain the most from improved buses. Replacing stop-and-go car congestion with smooth-flowing electric buses would significantly reduce smog, soot, and carbon emissions in densely populated neighborhoods. Fewer children would grow up wheezing. Fewer seniors would die on 90-degree days because vehicle pollution exacerbated their heart conditions.

Congestion pricing is a dry run for the broader promise of speeding up traffic throughout the city. And the results in just its first six months have been staggeringly successful. Average bus speeds in the congestion zone increased with 11% fewer vehicles entering the zone- with overall traffic delays down by 25%. Traffic deaths were down 40% from the year before. But the benefits have extended far beyond the congestion zone, with rush hour delays down 65% in the Holland tunnel and traffic delays down 9% across the whole metropolitan region. And the zone is on track to deliver $500 million in 2025 for upgrading subways, buses and trains for the MTA throughout the region. Note that the benefits extend not just to bus riders and not just to those within the zone but to the whole region. This is a small taste of what reclaiming the streets across the city for the broadest public uses can deliver for everyone.

Fast Bus Socialism is a Natural Successor to Sewer Socialism

The knock-on effects from all of this– lower healthcare costs, higher quality of life, even lower crime (cleaner air and better transit access have both been linked to crime reduction) – are the kinds of big, society-wide improvements that sound idealistic until you remember we’ve done it before.

Indeed, Mamdani’s agenda has a proud lineage in American urban history. Over a century ago, the original “sewer socialists” and other radical reform mayors fought to municipalize essential infrastructure – things like water supply, sewers, and electricity – to wrest them from private monopolies and use them for public benefit. At the time, providing clean drinking water to everyone was viewed by some as radical socialism. Yet it saved countless lives. Take Milwaukee’s socialist mayors in the 1910s: they were mocked as “sewer socialists” by elites (and other socialists in some cases), but in short order they built public sanitation systems that virtually eliminated cholera and other endemic diseases. Milwaukee went from a sickly industrial city to the healthiest city in America, roughly doubling its residents’ life expectancy within a decade. They achieved this not with high theory but with public control of infrastructure – delivering clean water, safe sewage disposal, parks, and transit for all. That is the lineage Mamdani is tapping into. Speeding up the M57 crosstown bus is obviously not by itself as dramatic as curing cholera, but street by street it can add up to a revolution in energy use that can be a major factor if replicated in stopping climate change which is an existential threat of everyone.

The ethos is the same as a hundred years ago: take a public asset that people’s lives depend on, and run it for public good rather than private profit or convenience.

For the last 100 years, New York’s streets have been treated as a one-dimensional car conduit – effectively a giant, city-owned gift to automobile owners and the oil companies, at the expense of everyone else. Reimagining those streets as truly public spaces that serve the majority (bus riders, pedestrians, cyclists, kids, seniors – all of us) is a profound shift. It means reclaiming the value of a half-trillion dollar asset for public use – in saved time, cleaner air, safer mobility, stronger communities – instead of letting it remain an asphalt exclusive for horn-blaring, exhaust-belching private vehicles.

Mamdani is betting that New Yorkers are ready to choose the public good. And if he’s right, we may finally see a new chapter in the city’s long history: one where the street system is, at long last, treated as public space and a valuable asset to be managed for people who collectively own it. The wider vision is a city where public wealth (our streets) is used to generate public health, public safety, and public happiness. Now that’s a radical idea worth running with – or in this case, riding with, on a bus that finally arrives on time.