When Zohran Mamdani claimed victory Tuesday in New York City’s mayoral race, he led the crowd in a chant of three of his relentless campaign taglines.

One was for freezing the monthly rate in rent-stabilized apartments.

The second was for providing free universal childcare. 

Both of those promises addressed his overall theme of making one of the nation’s most expensive cities more affordable for people who work there. 

The third might surprise people who don’t live in or near a big city. 

Making buses fast and free.

When people worry about making ends meet, of course they think of where they’re going to live. Then come eating and healthcare, two things that are much more in the jurisdiction of federal and state governments. And childcare is a worrisome essential for any family with or thinking about raising children.

But transportation is often an afterthought. If I have a job, or a doctor’s appointment, or a family get-together, I’ll figure out a way to get there.

The problem is that it’s no so easy. 

The assumption in America is that everybody has a car. In suburbia, every household averages two cars – if there are teens or young adults living at home, it could be as many as four or five vehicles clogging the driveway and the garage.

But in cities, cars are a nuisance. Their main purpose is for getting large amounts of groceries or taking a weekend trip out of town.

So the idea of improving bus service in New York City – and even creating lines that don’t charge the $2.90 (make that $3 on the day Mamdani takes office) one-way fare – resonates with   city residents.

It goes to a larger issue that doesn’t just apply to New York. 

For too long, we’ve relied on automobiles as our main source of transport. We’ve been sold on the idea that they are about our freedom to travel in the style we want – in a capsule that’s heated or cooled to our specs, with our music or our talking heads, eating whatever we want.

But is it freedom?

When I think about what time in my life I would love to get back now that it’s becoming a more precious commodity, it is not the hours I’ve spent playing video games or watching the Mets lose. 

It’s the ridiculous amount of time I’ve spent sitting in traffic. Moving 10 feet at a time. Swearing at people cutting into my lane. Not knowing why this is happening – is it construction, is it an accident. One time, I swear, it was people watching a very attractive woman riding a horse on a bridle path adjacent to the road.

So the idea of making buses fast and free has quite the appeal. If you can get from your house to where your need to go quickly – without worrying about congestion, gas, mechanical issues and finding a parking space – you might sign up for that. 

In the process, you’d be saving yourself some money and – as a nice fringe benefit – help combat climate change.

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One issue I harp on is that there is often a lack of imagination in considering new public transportation. As I’ve said before, innovation in transportation has come at nowhere near the speed of innovation in telecommunications.

It doesn’t even have to be some new form of transport – like a maglev train or a vacuum tube. 

In Los Angeles, there’s a proposal to put up a gondola service from downtown to Dodger Stadium more than a mile away. It seems like the kind of imaginative idea that would help L.A., especially given it’s troubled relationship with auto.

The problem is that there are environmental concerns, particularly among residents of the city’s Chinatown. I’m not sure how a gondola would be worse than the exhaust from hundreds of cars on Alameda Street, but that’s something better suited for the folks in the community to sort out.

The important thing is that people are starting to think about this problem – particularly areas that have been bypassed in previous projects.

In New York, there’s a proposal to use abandoned freight tracks to connect neighborhoods in Queens and Brooklyn via light rail. It seems like the line won’t take forever to build and could give people a way to get places without going through the mishegas that is Manhattan Island.

Los Angeles, San Francisco, Minneapolis and Seattle are extending rail services further into their outskirts and suburbs. Austin, Atlanta and Madison, Wisconsin, are working on major bus rapid transit projects.

A lot of these projects derive their funds from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act that President Joe Biden – you know, the guy your TV talking head thinks didn’t do anything worthwhile – signed into law in 2021. That act also is responsible for the traffic congestion around construction zones around the country – which isn’t fun but still somewhat better than a chunk of interstate highway collapsing in the middle of the night. 

New ideas should be encouraged – and it’s great that some of the new projects will be here before 2028. But old ways of getting from here to there can and should be modernized, made more efficient, expanded and cost a lot less.

Zohran Mamdani understands that, when it comes to creating an affordability agenda for one of the most improbable political runs in American history, boiling it down to “fast and free buses” works nicely. 

It’s not so much that New Yorkers should hold him – and the rest of us hold our elected officials – to it. It’s that we need to put the car in the garage and help them get these plans in motion.