The murder of Michael Gordon earlier this week was doubly tragic. The slain 45-year-old Jamaican immigrant leaves behind nine children. And New York City has lost another of the entrepreneurs who daily supply much-needed relief to tens of thousands of New Yorkers in need of reliable, reasonably efficient transportation — something the New York City Transit Authority, a slow-moving statist monopoly, has never been able to provide.

Back in 1980, when a transit strike crippled the city, entrepreneurs like Mr. Gordon, unprompted by grants, loans, or government programs, began ferrying passengers from the far reaches of the city to their homes, jobs, and shopping centers. So efficiently have they become at performing this service that an estimated 30,000 New Yorkers now use the vans every day.

That hasn’t stopped recalcitrant anti-market forces from trying to stamp out the vans. Chief among these is Local 100 of the Transit Workers Union of America, which fears the loss of bus driver jobs. Years of campaign donations, endorsements, and pressure from the union have encouraged many politicians to fall in line and blindly condemn an urban success story.

By statute, the Transit Authority has a legal monopoly on bus service. But even confronted with the daily threat of arrest, expensive summonses, and confiscation of their vehicles, the van drivers have pressed on, aided by allies that include Mayor Giuliani, the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, and the estimable former City Council Member Una Clarke.

While these advocates for business pressured the city into taking its first steps toward licensing the vans, the unions and their allies have fought the vans assiduously, winning legal sanction for their monopoly on bus service in a crucial court case, Ricketts v. City of New York, that was settled by the Court of Appeals a year ago.

All of which brings us to the troubling case of State Senator Carl Kruger of Brooklyn. As reported at page three by our Errol Louis, the murder of Mr. Gordon prompted Mr. Kruger to rush to the scene of the tragedy — literally, almost before the body was cold — to call, once more, for the elimination of the vans from the streets of New York.

His timing was bad: The New York Daily News reports that a “commotion” ensued when Mr. Kruger attacked the van system, and ended only when the police spirited the senator away from a gathering crowd of angry drivers. Even so, the senator failed to get the message.

According to Mr. Kruger, neighborhoods are being “terrorized” by the entrepreneurs who pick up passengers that would otherwise be languishing on late, dirty, crowded buses. The Kruger solution? “If we were to get the community off the vans and at the bus stops, filling those fare boxes, we would be able to ask for more service,” he says.

The facts say otherwise. In 1998, prompted by Mr. Kruger, the 63rd precinct issued 8,000 summonses to van drivers, made 80 arrests, and confiscated 100 vehicles. This seems to have forced people back to the public buses: according to a report by the Straphangers Campaign (aptly named “Standing Still”), ridership on the B41 bus line, which runs down Flatbush Avenue to Kings Plaza, jumped 22% from 1997 to 2002. But actual service on the line increased only 2% over that same five-year period.

In other words, a lot of people took the advice of Mr. Kruger and the TWU and waited at the bus stops to fill those fare boxes. And waited. And waited. When the best Mr. Kruger’s vaunted system could muster was a paltry 2% increase in service, many riders opted to go back to the vans.

The Transit Authority has admitted that New York City has the slowest bus service in the nation: while buses in other major cities move, on average, at 13 miles an hour, the comparable number for New York City is 8 mph. Manhattan buses crawl along at 6 mph.

We offer our condolences to the family of Mr. Gordon. And we fervently hope that his story will help unions and misguided politicians to finally see the wisdom of joining men like him in building a city, and marketplace, that is free.