Before TRU Campaigns Manager Joel Batterman came on staff, he helped found a national network of transit rider organizations, Transit Riders of the United States Together – TRUST for short.
Back in 2023, TRUST hosted a panel of advocates from several different states discussing how to win more state funding for transit. The New York panelist was a young state legislator from Queens by the name of Zohran Mamdani.
In case you missed it, after a stunning upset in the June 24 primary election, Mamdani is the front-runner in the race for New York City mayor. One of his key campaign promises was making city buses “fast and free.”
You can watch a video of Mamdani’s advice to TRUST at this link. (Thanks to our friends at Pittsburghers for Public Transit for compiling it!)
In brief, here are a few takeaways:
Get loud. “We were trying to politicize what is typically a backroom discussion,” Mamdani explained. “If you just had a quiet internal budgetary fight, you’d get screwed over as you do every year.”
Go big. Transit advocates are used to getting crumbs, but now is the time to stop settling. “Ask for everything that you want,” Mamdani said.
Engage riders. Legislators should treat winning their legislative priorities like their own electoral campaigns, and meet riders where they’re at – like the buses and subways. Talking to riders at transit stations about the need for more transit funding, Mamdani recalled, was “the easiest canvassing that I’ve ever done in my life.”
To be sure, transit organizing in a city like New York, where the majority of people ride transit, is not the same as campaigning in metro Detroit, where riders are a small minority of the population. Organizing transit riders is still important here, but we also need help from allies to build our power.
That said, Mamdani’s recent victory on a transit-heavy platform is cause for encouragement for transit advocates around the country, and it offers a rich trove of lessons for our own campaigns.