Good afternoon in New York City, where fast and free buses will soon be hitting the streets.

Mayor Mamdani has managed to deliver, at least in part, on a number of his biggest campaign promises, but he has yet to make good on his goal to eliminate bus fares across the five boroughs. The effort has run headlong into the brick wall of Albany. Governor Hochul, who exercises considerable authority over the state-controlled MTA, refused to back the proposal, citing hundreds of millions of dollars in lost fare revenue every year.

Instead, the mayor is turning his attention to an easier sales pitch: reducing route times for a collection of bus lines notorious for being some of the slowest in the country, with average speeds of 8 mph.

Last week, Mamdani and Hochul unveiled an $882 million plan to improve bus speed by 20% along 50 priority corridors. The administration says that the changes, including dedicated bus lanes, new enforcement cameras and all-door boarding, will save riders up to six minutes per 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 while unveiling the plan alongside Governor Hochul in Downtown Brooklyn.

One of those priority lines is Brooklyn’s very own B46. Despite running along Brooklyn’s busiest corridor, and transporting an average of 40,000 riders a day, the B46 moves at just 6.9 mph.

Mayor Mamdani wants to turn the B46 into a “world class bus route” by placing Utica Avenue among one of only five areas being considered for the city’s “rapid transit” treatment. Under the proposal, bus lanes would be added to the middle of the street and stops spaced farther apart, at an estimated cost of $220 million. The plan also includes stronger enforcement strategies to prevent cars and vans from blocking lanes.

Of course, not everyone is convinced. “They’ve been trying to do that for a long time,” Wayne Townsend, a retired MTA bus driver, told Gothamist. “It’s New York, it ain’t gonna never happen.”

In the past 12 months, the NY Knicks won an NBA Championship for the first time in 53 years and a 34-year-old, no-name Muslim Democratic-Socialist State Assemblymember became mayor. So perhaps this is the year when it does happen.

Surely you’ve heard this turn-of-the-20th-century tale: John Henry, the legendary steel-driver on the Chesapeake & Ohio Railway, swung two ten-pound hammers and drilled fourteen feet into solid rock to beat a steam-powered drill inside Big Bend Mountain in West Virginia. He won the race, then dropped dead, hammer in hand.

It’s a story of courage, pride and inevitability. John Henry won the battle. The machine won the war.

Today, a new generation of John Henrys works in newsrooms. They’re furious, organized and convinced they’re defending the essential. 

At McClatchy, the newspaper chain, more than 30 journalists at papers like the Sacramento Bee, Miami Herald and Charlotte Observer staged a byline strike, refusing to let their names appear on stories generated by a “content scaling agent” that repurposed their own archived work. They called it a betrayal of public trust.

The anger is real, but the strategy may be self-defeating. Much of the public conversation about AI and journalism has been wishful thinking wrapped in moral certainty: comforting fables about what machines can never do, delivered by the very people most afraid of being replaced.

The contradiction is glaring. Journalists insist AI could never match their work while simultaneously fearing it will take their jobs. You can’t have it both ways.

Read on to learn more.

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