NYC piloted five free bus routes over the last year. Very interesting results.

Overall ridership on these routes went up by around 30%-38%.

Unfortunately, the free fares program will be scrapped because:

“Our hope was this pilot would get people out of their cars and onto buses on these routes,” said Demetrius Crichlow, the interim president of MTA New York City Transit. “We did not see anything that aligned with that initial intent.”

As we wrote at Nominal News - this result was actually expected. Traffic does not fall because of public transit due to the ‘fundamental law of road congestion‘