Does this mean we should be reading it as, “if an apartment building is proposed anywhere within half a mile of any transit station, it cannot be rejected for any reason”?

Does your city have suburbs/exurbs as well, or is the urban center surrounded by farmland?

The pedestrians also walk across the actual crosswalk area, over the mechanism, showing no concern that those magic stripes could come back down and smush them at any moment. There are a handful of things that take this out of the realm of realism but for me it was mainly that—especially the lady carrying her baby under them

I wonder if “the same money” just means the fares themselves? Because there are all the other major costs mentioned in the article: police enforcement, legal costs to prosecute, and further junk prosecutions over fare jumpers (and others) missing court dates because they can’t afford to get to them. There’s also the reduction in driver assaults by people desperate to get on the bus without fare, which surely carry a cost to the city (in addition to how terrible it is). And, we can probably assume, there’s a cost savings in maintenance of payment systems and equipment on every bus. When you factor all that money in, plus as you say, the benefits as a social policy, I wonder how free fares really stack up against routes and frequencies—but in a perfectly world we’d want both!

Here’s a gift link: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/opinion/free-bus-rides-mamdani.html?unlocked_article_code=1.MlA.InK3.LhCVnpVIgoAo

Rails are indeed rails, but the map is showing lines. So not the physical tracks themselves (although they’re necessary to support rail lines of course), but the routes that are actively running trains.

The law in my part of the U.S. specifically says to pull to the right to let an ambulance pass, but as far as I know, it doesn’t give you the right to drive on the sidewalk (so as you say, nothing to account for a lack of places to move).

What our German friend there is describing is a convention to inform drivers whether they should pull to the right or to the left depending on lane position, which is really smart and which I’ve never heard of. If there is such a system here, it needs a marketing campaign, because it only works if everyone knows about it and clearly we’re not there yet.