Whether defending New York’s controversial congestion pricing scheme or opposing more-aggressive policing, progressive activists have a favorite talking point in response to concerns about subway crime. The argument, repeated in a New York Times newsletter last week, goes something like this: You’re just as likely to be injured in a car crash as you are to be the victim of a murder, rape, felony assault, or robbery on the subways. The implication, of course, is that we shouldn’t be so concerned about subway violence. While the claim about the relative injury risks associated with driving and subway crime is true, it’s not as compelling as its proponents think.
First, the nature of the risks in question are markedly different. Cracking a rib during a car crash, bad as it is, is better than being stabbed in the gut by a deranged lunatic on an uptown A train. Being assaulted, held up at gunpoint, or shoved in front of an oncoming train (should you be lucky enough to survive) is especially traumatic—much more so than enduring the whiplash associated with a typical car accident.
Second, car-crash-injury risk is highly dependent on driver behavior (drunk driving, speeding, etc.), which is why traffic fatality rates vary significantly by sex, age, and other demographic markers. While it’s also true that subway riders are at uneven risk of serious criminal victimization, they generally have less control than do drivers of finding themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Additionally, progressives making this case wrongly assume that driving is the only way that people mitigate perceived subway-riding risks. Such risk-mitigation can be achieved in other ways, including working from home more often, scheduling Zoom rather than in-person meetings, ordering in rather than eating out, or, for some, leaving the city altogether. (If one moves to a middle- or upper-middle class suburb, that also means drastically reducing one’s risk of criminal victimization across the board, not just in the subways.) None of these efforts, however, redound to the benefit of cities like New York, which has lost a significant number of residents over the last several years.
Finally, by restricting the comparison to car crashes and a small set of particularly violent crimes, we risk losing sight of the other types of criminal victimizations on the subway, such as misdemeanor assault, indecent exposure, and larceny—to say nothing of the other indignities straphangers are often forced to endure, such as inhaling someone’s recycled weed smoke, watching a raving madman, smelling the stench of urine in the station elevator, or avoiding the discarded needle on the platform.
Rather than try to debunk these rational concerns, progressive leaders, activists, and journalists should direct their energies toward making the subways safe again. Failing to deliver a clean and orderly subway system will only lead more New Yorkers to conclude that the risk they’re told is all in their head just isn’t worth taking.
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