Mass transit in the United States lacks mass appeal. In a 2024 study of data from nearly 800 cities, Asian urban residents used public transit for 43 percent of trips; 24 percent of Western Europeans in cities did the same. In American cities, the figure was less than 5 percent.
One significant reason for this disparity is that American governments have typically prioritized building roads over rail lines, and the needs of drivers over bus or subway riders. And because the costs of constructing public transit are much higher in the United States than in other developed countries, new projects are rarer and more slowly built than they ought to be. Other problems flow from the cost issue, such as low service quality: Trains and buses make less frequent stops in the U.S. than in peer nations, and public transit tends to serve a much smaller area.
But an underappreciated factor in low ridership is crime—and fear of crime—on public buses, trains, and other mass transit. About 40 percent of Americans describe public transit as unsafe; just 14 percent call it “very safe.” Those fears aren’t unmerited: Large transit agencies reported just shy of 2,200 assaults last year (almost certainly an undercount), and cities such as Los Angeles, New York, and Washington, D.C., have recently struggled with surges in subway crime.
Some dismiss concerns about subway crime and disorder as baseless, the result of insufficiently hardened attitudes toward life in the “big city” or misperceptions about crime’s prevalence. But if policy makers ignore people’s fears, they will miss an opportunity to make transit better for everyone. Riders who are afraid of transit retreat from it, leaving the system—and the public square—poorer and less functional as a result. People who care about public transit need to care about more than infrastructure and design; they need to take into account rider safety.
Americans’ sense that their transit systems are unsafe is perhaps one reason the recent killing of Iryna Zarutska, a 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee, aboard a light-rail train in Charlotte, North Carolina, resonated with so many people. Charlotte has spent billions on its light-rail system. Nonetheless, ridership is anemic. It peaked in the third quarter of 2019, at roughly 30,600 riders on an average weekday. As of the most recent figures, it was down to 21,000, a trivial number considering that 2.9 million people live in the Charlotte metro area.
Safety is a big part of why so few people use Charlotte’s light rail. In polling from last year, only 37 percent of respondents agreed that Charlotte public transit was safe from crime; just 29 percent agreed that the stations were safe from crime, consistent with research showing that new stations on the system’s Blue Line—on which Zarutska was killed—causally increased crime in the stations’ vicinity. The system clearly failed to exclude Zarutska’s killer, Decarlos Brown, a repeat offender with a history of violent crime and schizophrenia. Such people can impose a disproportionate burden on public-transit systems: The New York Post recently reported that just 63 people account for more than 5,000 arrests on the New York City subway.
Anyone who has ridden on an enclosed train car with a disruptive, unstable, or possibly violent person understands why such people drive potential transit riders away. Tightly packed, little-policed public spaces rely on a shared expectation that everyone will follow the rules. When people violate the rules, and when the state hardly enforces them, other would-be riders avoid public options, choosing, for example, to drive to work instead.
This dynamic can create a vicious cycle. As more rule-following people select out of the public space, the ratio of rule followers to rule breakers declines. Left unchecked, the space becomes unusable, no matter how many dollars are poured into infrastructure.
These are more than just academic concerns. With abundance being the buzzword of the Trump-era Democratic Party, many are dreaming of a more robust public-transit future. Improving public safety must be part of that effort.
Many abundance advocates, to their credit, have recognized the need to take public safety seriously. Commenting on Zarutska’s death, the liberal economist and blogger Noah Smith wrote that “America’s chronically high levels of violence and public disorder are one reason—certainly not the only reason, but one reason—that it’s so politically difficult to build dense housing and transit in this country.” But others have the instinct to downplay these problems; Smith’s fellow center-left commentator Matt Yglesias, for example, insisted in a reply that public transit is safe, and that its declining use is mostly driven by quality and quantity of service.
Yglesias is correct that these other factors matter a great deal. But a renewed commitment to public services requires public buy-in, which means in turn that the public can’t be scared away. And insofar as individual sense of safety depends on collective action, fear can choke off ridership even in well-funded systems like Charlotte’s.
This argument applies in other areas of public life as well. Take the much-needed expansion of housing supply. Fear of crime and disorder remains a major impediment to building more housing, surveys show. People worry that new construction can mean new rule breakers, and oppose new housing developments on that premise. Much as with public transit, if safety and order are not guaranteed, residents will shift to the private alternative, walling themselves off behind gated communities, aggressive homeowner associations, and other NIMBY measures. Either the state provides safety as a public service, or private actors will do it themselves—as evidenced, for example, by the rise of private security in Los Angeles.
It’s possible, though, for the feedback loop to run in the other direction. Make a public place—a train, a neighborhood—safer, and people will flood in. This will in turn increase the number of law-abiding people, making the public space feel even safer. This is the core insight of the great urbanist Jane Jacobs: Communities are kept safe by the number and diversity of “eyes on the street” that watch over them. Too few eyes, and the public square empties out. But restore the eyes, and vitality comes back.
Such a virtuous cycle is what America saw, for example, in the great crime decline of the 1990s. A 2009 study found that declining crime drove up home prices in urban zip codes. The 10 percent of areas with the largest drops in crime saw property values rise 7 to 19 percent. This reflects surging demand. As the paper’s authors write, “The crime drop was a major contributor to the recent resurgence of cities.”
A similar phenomenon happened around that time on public transit. In New York City, for example, transit authorities targeted pervasive crime and petty disorder starting in the late 1980s and ’90s. Not coincidentally, ridership on the city subway went from stagnant to rapidly growing in the mid-’90s. That mirrors national data, which show public-transit ridership mostly rising through the late 1990s and 2000s as cities became safer.
Keeping the subway safe, it should be noted, doesn’t just mean dealing with major crimes. It means enforcing rules governing responsible, shared use of the subway. That includes imposing consequences for fare evasion—something certain big cities stopped doing in recent years. It also means ticketing, ejecting, or even arresting unruly passengers, including those who panhandle aggressively or play loud music. Such strategies were integral to the increase in public-transit ridership in the ’90s, and could likely help restore use of transit today.
Cities should do these things because policing disorder can reduce crime, but mostly because public spaces should be for the law-abiding public. This is a fact that the left and the right both miss: the left because it is wary of preferring the “law-abiding” and the right because it is often skeptical that the “public” is worth preserving. These two attitudes, working in tandem, can spoil public transit, or any public space. By contrast, if Americans want a more robust public life—which many on both sides do—we have to take safety and orderliness in public seriously, too.
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