If you have ever stood on Utica Avenue watching a B46 crawl toward you slower than you could walk it, Mayor Zohran Mamdani has a plan for you. What he does not have, yet, is the free ride he spent a year promising.

On Wednesday, July 8, in Downtown Brooklyn, Mamdani stood alongside Governor Kathy Hochul, MTA Chair Janno Lieber and city Department of Transportation Commissioner Mike Flynn to unveil a plan called “Next Stop: Fast Buses, Better Service.” The city will spend a total of $882 million over five years to make the buses move, targeting a 20 percent speed increase on 50 priority corridors and shaving up to six minutes off a trip. “In New York City, time is money, and we are going to give New Yorkers some of that time back, six minutes to be precise,” Mamdani said.

New York runs the slowest buses in the country. City officials put the average city bus at 8 miles per hour. “For decade after decade, the working people of our city who rely on the bus have had their precious time treated with disdain,” Mamdani said, noting that the city’s buses carry more riders than the next four largest American bus systems combined and that many crawl at an average of five miles per hour. His own transit official, Diniece Mendes, put a number on the worst of it on the mayor’s “Talk with the People” livestream: the B46, which runs up Utica Avenue, averages about 2.3 miles per hour. You can walk that.