Mamdani’s NYC Victory: How Free Buses Challenge Capitalist Transit and Center Working-Class Mobility Justice
In a historic rebuke to car-centric urban planning that has long prioritized individual wealth over collective mobility, Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral victory signals a fundamental shift in how New York City approaches transportation as a human right rather than a commodity. His campaign’s centering of buses—the often-invisible workhorses that carry the city’s working class, elderly, disabled, and caregivers—reflects an understanding that public transit is not merely infrastructure but a site of class struggle.
The Invisible Labor of Public Transit: Who Rides the Bus
While subway systems capture the cultural imagination, buses provide 10.6 million trips daily across America—four times the number of daily flights. In NYC alone, 1.1 million daily bus rides represent the equivalent of Boston’s entire population commuting by bus each day. These riders are disproportionately women, people of color, low-wage workers, and those performing society’s essential care labor—domestic workers, home health aides, childcare providers—whose mobility has been systematically devalued under capitalist urban development.
Gendered Dimensions of Transit Dependence
Women make up the majority of bus riders in most American cities, often chaining together multiple trips for care work responsibilities—dropping children at school, visiting elderly parents, commuting to multiple part-time jobs. The current system, which charges per boarding, effectively taxes this care labor. Mamdani’s free bus proposal recognizes what Islamic principles of social welfare have long understood: that society has an obligation to remove barriers to those performing essential community care.
From Commodity to Commons: The Radical Promise of Free Transit
The concept of fare-free public transit directly challenges the neoliberal framework that treats mobility as a purchasable service rather than a public good. As transit researchers have documented, fare collection systems themselves consume substantial resources—infrastructure, enforcement, payment processing—that could instead fund service improvements.
Islamic Economics and the Right to Movement
Islamic economic principles emphasize maslaha (public interest) and the collective welfare over individual profit. The Quranic mandate to care for the vulnerable—the orphan, the widow, the traveler—extends naturally to ensuring accessible, dignified mobility for all community members. Free buses embody this principle of sadaqah jariyah (continuous charity) where infrastructure serves as ongoing social benefit rather than profit extraction.
The Racial Capitalism of Car-Centric Planning
The degradation of bus service is not accidental but structural. As geographer Mimi Sheller documents, post-war highway construction deliberately destroyed Black and brown neighborhoods while subsidizing white suburban automobile ownership. The resulting system serves as racialized wealth extraction—those with least resources paying most for inferior transit while car owners benefit from massive public subsidies in road construction, parking, and pollution externalization.
Class Struggle on the Streets
When 14th Street’s busway faced opposition from affluent residents who “simply could not believe tens of thousands of people took the bus,” it revealed the deep class divisions in urban mobility. These homeowners’ lawsuits and resistance exemplify what Marxist analysis identifies as bourgeois defense of private privilege against collective good. That the busway ultimately succeeded—speeding buses from a pathetic 4.5 mph to 6 mph—demonstrates what organized political will can achieve against entrenched car-centric interests.
Disability Justice and the Politics of Access
The article’s observation that two-thirds of subway stations remain inaccessible reveals the violence of ableist infrastructure planning. For disabled New Yorkers—comprising one in 20 bus riders compared to one in 33 subway riders—buses become default transportation not by choice but by systematic exclusion from other options.
Care Infrastructure as Feminist Praxis
The tension between spacing bus stops for speed versus accessibility for disabled, elderly, and caregivers with strollers reflects broader contradictions in optimizing systems designed for able-bodied efficiency. A feminist, disability justice approach centers those most marginalized, recognizing that true progress cannot come at their expense. This means simultaneously demanding accessible subways and adequate Access-A-Ride while improving bus service—not forcing disabled communities to shoulder inadequate infrastructure.
Privatization’s Broken Promises
The article’s dismissal of “self-driving cars” and “flying taxis” as politicians’ “shiny promises” cuts to capitalism’s core delusion: that technological innovation can substitute for public investment in collective infrastructure. These fantasies serve ideological purposes—maintaining faith in private sector solutions while public transit withers from deliberate defunding.
The Real Innovation: Democratic Control
True innovation lies not in gadgetry but in democratizing control over essential services. Mamdani’s platform represents what socialists have long advocated: treating mobility as public utility, removing profit motive from essential infrastructure, and centering workers’ and communities’ needs over capital accumulation. The technological improvements buses have already achieved—electric powertrains, real-time tracking, accessible digital information—demonstrate how public investment in existing systems serves people better than speculative private ventures.
The Politics of Speed: Who Controls Urban Time
That buses travel at “a brisk walk” speed—4.5 mph—is not technical limitation but political choice. Each delay represents car owners’ prioritization over transit riders, individual convenience over collective efficiency. When cities dedicate lanes to buses, install signal priority, and allow all-door boarding, they make explicit political statements about whose time matters.
Temporal Justice for Working Communities
For workers stringing together multiple low-wage jobs, for mothers balancing childcare and employment, for home health aides traveling between clients, time poverty compounds economic precarity. Slow buses aren’t merely inconvenient—they’re structural violence, extracting hours from those with least to spare. Free, fast buses represent temporal redistribution, returning stolen time to working-class communities.
The Long Road: Organizing Against Capital’s Inertia
The article’s documentation of failed Bronx busway attempts and years-long battles over 34th Street reveals how entrenched interests weaponize process against change. That Trump administration concerns about “trucks and emergency vehicles” could halt a busway serving tens of thousands daily exemplifies how reactionary politics serves capital’s mobility interests over workers’ needs.
Building Counter-Power
Mamdani’s election demonstrates that organized socialist politics can overcome business-as-usual governance. Yet as the article notes, even a committed mayor faces “quite the task ahead” against “inevitable opposition and lawsuits.” This underscores that transit justice requires sustained grassroots organizing, not just electoral victory—workers, riders, and community members building collective power to defend and expand public goods against capital’s resistance.
Conclusion: The Bus as Site of Possibility
In elevating the “humble bus,” Mamdani’s campaign reveals infrastructure as inherently political—each transit decision encoding values about who matters, whose labor deserves support, whose mobility merits investment. The bus, carrying working women to childcare pickups and cleaning jobs, disabled elders to medical appointments, immigrants to multiple shifts, becomes not just transportation but democratic public space—a site where collective provision challenges market logic.
Islamic teachings about communal responsibility, feminist ethics of care, and Marxist analysis of class struggle converge in demanding what Mamdani promises: transit that serves people over profit, that recognizes mobility as right not commodity, that rebuilds cities around collective flourishing rather than individual accumulation. Whether four years proves sufficient to overcome decades of capitalist negligence remains uncertain. But in making buses central to political imagination, this campaign has already begun the work of reclaiming urban space for those who actually move through it daily—the workers who make cities function.
As bus riders know well, transformative change requires patience, organization, and recognition that the journey itself—who travels together, under what conditions, toward what ends—matters as much as the destination.
