Traveling recently on the London Tube and on the city’s double-decker buses, I wondered, as I have many times before, why New York City can’t have a comparable public transit system: safe, clean platforms; turnstiles that function with smart technology; a functioning messaging system and schedules that operate largely on time. Why are such basics unimaginable in New York?
Instead, as New Yorkers know well and international visitors are appalled to discover, we have a system that went from a source of pride to one of embarrassment. There are many reasons for the subway’s woes, from its basic funding structure to exorbitant costs to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s chronic mismanagement, all exacerbated by Gov. Kathy Hochul’s disastrous decision to abandon congestion pricing. Yes, it could and has been worse. I can remember the child’s nightmare of the subway of the 1970s and ’80s. But it’s an especial affront to see the system degrade so profoundly after a period of improvement.
Now, as if to return the city’s insult, many straphangers and bus riders are no longer paying for this diminished privilege. According to The Times, 48 percent of the city’s bus passengers skip paying their fare, among the worst rates of compliance in the world and up from 18 percent in 2018. Nearly a sixth of riders slip onto the subway without paying. Every day, over a million New Yorkers neglect to pay for public transit in New York.
If it’s easy for New Yorkers to locate blame for the system’s problems, it’s harder to admit the reasons behind the public’s malfeasance. The truth is passengers don’t pay because they can get away with it. The harder truth is that the city lets them. And the hardest truth is that the best solution is more policing.
Broken windows theory, as outlined by the social scientist James Q. Wilson and the criminology professor George Kelling in a 1982 essay in The Atlantic, holds that when minor or lesser kinds of disorder become more apparent, it invites graver forms of crime. Relatedly, the authors explained, the more significant and visible law enforcement is on the ground, the safer communities feel.
On New York public transit, cracking down on petty crimes like graffiti, panhandling and fare evasion helped improve both the atmosphere and public safety. Between 1990 and 1992, arrests and ejections on the subway increased to between 10 and 15,000 a month from 2,000 a month; in that period, subway crime declined by 30 percent. A commission appointed by the M.T.A. to tackle fare evasion in 2022 similarly found that greater enforcement reduces evasion, particularly on buses.
In other words — and to state what most people understand as common sense — to lower petty crime rates, we need to enforce the law.
Instead, we have done the opposite. Political and ideological opponents attacked what is known has “broken windows policing” for years, both for its underlying data and for its practical implications. It became intermingled in the public’s mind with the disgraced policy of “stop and frisk.” Many progressives are still loath to admit that broken windows policing works.
In the spirit of criminal justice reform, enforcement of fare compliance, like enforcement of laws against other petty crimes, was loosened. Well before 2020, critics of fare enforcement alleged that the aggressive police enforcement of the ’90s — which not surprisingly also coincided with the subway’s period of general improvement — disproportionately affected Black and Hispanic offenders and the poor.
Such disparities need to be addressed, and in 2019, the city introduced Fair Fares, a subsidized program for New Yorkers whose household income falls below the poverty line. Even so, lowering safety standards also disproportionately harms poor, Black and Hispanic New Yorkers. Black and Hispanic residents rate the quality of bus and subway services, as well as the safety of riding the subway at night, lower than white residents do.
Lack of enforcement not only deprives the fraying system of a key source of revenue for maintenance and improvement but also creates a profound atmosphere of disorder.
Fare evasion is the subway’s “No. 1 existential threat,” Janno Lieber, chief executive of the M.T.A., told The Times. “It says at the doorway: This is not an orderly place.”
It is not an orderly place. Whereas in London, I saw riders willingly comply with a station worker’s polite request to move to one end of the platform to facilitate the flow of foot traffic, in New York, riders regularly jump turnstiles in front of the few transit workers charged with monitoring the system. In stations and on buses, transit workers are too apathetic or too frightened to enforce the rules, compounding the problem.
Opponents of increased law enforcement, like the fantasists who advocate prison abolition, seem to operate in a world in which people always act according to their best instincts. It’s an elitist attitude that betrays a lack of experience with crime-ridden environments. Reality shows that when people know they can get away with crimes, they act accordingly, Donald Trump being our unfortunate national example. The more people jump turnstiles, the more people jump turnstiles.
As Nicole Gelinas wrote recently in these pages, petty crime and violent crime often go hand in hand, with both on the rise in our public transit system. According to the M.T.A., when the police declared a crackdown on so-called quality-of-life offenses in March 2022, enforcement rose by about 28 percent, to 80,000 fare evasion summonses compared with 62,380 in 2021. As Gelinas notes, civil tickets are up 22 percent as of June this year.
We have much farther to go.
Once you’ve been the victim of a petty crime, you realize how precarious public safety is. It’s all too easy to grab a phone or a wallet out of someone’s hands. People feel freer to break the law once they realize they are freer to break the law.
As for the bystanders: Who dares speak up when everyone is frightened of being victimized themselves? One survey shows subway riders are now just about as frightened in the subway during the day as they were riding at night in 2017. Fear breeds fear, distrust breeds distrust, lawbreaking spurs more lawbreaking.
On the London Tube, the seats have a pleasant fabric covering. It’s a small and relatively insignificant amenity, but its presence implies that the service cares about the comfort of its passengers and trusts them to respect public property. A similar gesture is almost impossible to imagine on New York City’s subway. Far easier to imagine is just how today’s passengers would trash it.
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