If you slogged around during the first month of 2024 on the subways, you probably felt like there was a major delay every way you turned, and when you did get on the train, you were one wrong flicker of eye contact away from being a crime victim.
With subway ridership hovering around 71% of pre-COVID normal, bus ridership at 60% of normal, and commuter rail at about three-quarters, we don’t want to lose any more riders to bad service or fear.
But keeping straphangers riding the MTA will take work, just as the system has never felt more imperiled. So imperiled, in fact, that New York Gov. Kathy Huchul announced this past week that she’s calling in the National Guard to keep passengers safe.
So just how is the MTA — and the state and city governments responsible for running it and keeping it safe – doing?
Crime: F. Crime skyrocketed this year. We’ve now had three murders on the rails, all random. In January, felony crime was up 47%, compared to the same month last year. Grand larcenies rose, but subway riders and workers also suffered 110 violent felonies, up 16 percent. Compare violent felonies to January 2019, before the end of cash bail for many crimes and other criminal-justice “reforms,” and serious violence is up 61%.
Crime affects service: last Friday, after the slashing of an MTA conductor on the A line, workers walked off the line for a few hours. Last year, bus and subway workers suffered 135 assaults, up from 125 in 2022.
Continue reading the entire piece here at the New York Post
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Nicole Gelinas is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor at City Journal. Follow her on Twitter here.
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