Nicole Gelinas
Opinion
April 2, 2023 | 7:55 p.m
A person “subway surfing” on top of a 5 train in the Bronx on March 16, 2023.
Photo by David Dee Delgado/Getty Images
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority had troubling news last week: Deaths on subway-train tracks will increase in 2022, to 88.
This is a little-mentioned element of our post-2020 era of chaos and disorder.
A dysfunctional transit system presents a grave danger to New York’s most vulnerable citizens, including people suffering from addiction and mental illness.
In a functioning city, rail transit is the safest way to move from one place to another.
But like everything else in New York over the past three years, things went awry. Last year’s 88 track deaths were 35% above the 2018 and 2019 averages — 65 per year.
For context, 120 pedestrians died on the ground last year in crashes with cars or trucks, close to an average of 121 in 2018 and 2019.
The goal below ground, like the “Vision Zero” traffic-death campaign above ground, should not be death.
In fact, the death toll underground is staggering begin to rival the death toll above ground, where unlicensed and drunk drivers speed and swerve.
What is happening? Of the 1,365 known subway-track incidents in 2022 (most not fatal), about 15% were accidental falls or medical emergencies, a new review of the MTA found.
A surprisingly low number — less than 10% — are suicides or attempted suicides.
A smaller percentage are attacks – that is, people are pushed onto the tracks. (Even with pushes on the tracks that accounted for three of the 10 subway murders last year, a 30-year high, one small percentage is too many.)
In most cases — more than two-thirds — people ended up on the tracks voluntarily.
In 20% of the total cases, people are clearly mentally ill (but not attempting suicide); in another 10% or more, people are drugged or intoxicated.
And in about half of all trespassing cases, the MTA or NYPD found people just walking the tracks — walking into homeless encampments on MTA property, writing graffiti, . . . wandering around
Two such trespassers are graffiti writers from France; they died under a train in Brooklyn in April.
And some “accidents” – more and more – are subway surfers.
Two 15-year-old surfers have been killed in the past four months, and another 15-year-old had his arm amputated this year.
It’s more evidence that left to their own devices in public spaces, too many New Yorkers will be dangerous — putting themselves and others at risk.
As the MTA’s Shanifah Rieara, chief policy and communications adviser, said, the deaths are devastating for the families but “honestly tragic for our train crews.”
The good news is that we know how to fix it, and we is fixing it.
The worst spike in track violations began more than a year ago, in December 2021 through February 2022. (This includes January 2022, when Michelle Go was pushed to her death in Times Square by a mentally ill -thinking, violent ex-con.)
This winter, track violations dropped by 30%.
Why? Most police enforcers.
In January and February of this year, the MTA made 2,065 arrests in the transit system, two-thirds higher than last year and rivaling pre-COVID numbers.
Fare evasion arrests have tripled since last year.
Civil summonses, at more than 26,000, are more than 80% above last year’s levels.
Yes, it’s true that seriously mentally ill people roaming the New York subway tracks don’t need policing as a long-term solution.
But they need the police, to keep them off the subway tracks and thus keep them alive, as a short-term solution.
So are idiotic youths.
Just last week, the police stopped five teen subway surfers in an incident in Queens — potentially averting a mass tragedy.
Police stopped more than 1,000 people in such incidents last year.
But this year, as Rieara says, the trend, driven by social-media dare videos, is accelerating — “about, proliferating and deadly.”
Also last week, police seized three illegal guns from farebeaters in just four days — one reason why violent felonies are finally on the decline after a spike in 2020.
As new data from last week shows, violent felonies on the subway dropped 17% from last year for January and February, a significant achievement.
The surge in subway policing that began last fall isn’t just about reducing crime. It prevents mentally ill, drugged, or just plain dumb people from harming themselves by walking on subway trains — or falling off them.
Nicole Gelinas is a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.
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