Riders Alliance Fund fights for reliable, affordable, world-class public transit in order to build a more just and sustainable New York.
About
Riders Alliance Fund educates and organizes bus and subway riders from across the city, with a shared vision: a reliable, accessible, and affordable public transit system that works for every New Yorker, in every community.
Our movement is growing stronger every day. Since we formed in 2012, riders have become one of the most powerful constituencies in New York City. Our members have identified the most pressing issues facing transit riders, organized their communities, and won ambitious agendas around improving public transit.
Most recently, riders have won and fought to defend the enormously successful first-in-the-nation congestion pricing program, implemented in 2025, which will deliver cleaner air, safer streets, and $15 billion to modernize and fix the subway. We successfully lobbied our state leaders for a major expansion of subway service through our ongoing #6MinuteService campaign.
At the city level, we organized to win half-price transit fares for low-income New Yorkers with income under 145% of the Federal Poverty Level through the Fair Fares program. And we continue to organize and advocate for the implementation of 150 miles of busways and bus improvement projects won by riders in 2019 to speed up the slowest buses in the nation.
Betsy Plum, Executive Director
Betsy has spent her career in the social justice field. Before joining Riders Alliance, she served as the Vice President of Policy for the New York Immigration Coalition. While at the NYIC, Betsy led multiple winning policy campaigns, oversaw robust rapid response efforts and organizational growth, and helped set the vision for what a more inclusive New York must look like. She joined Riders Alliance in 2020 bringing her commitment to build a stronger, more thriving New York and a belief that we arrive at this place by investing in our public systems and holding those in power accountable.
In addition to her role at Riders Alliance, Betsy serves on the Board of Directors of Central American Legal Assistance and is a Sterling Fellow, a network of systems leaders working to increase economic mobility across New York City, with racial equity as a central guiding value. She is a graduate of Bard College and the London School of Economics.