The subway is a metaphor for the city. And the city is very sick.
During winters, I would take the F train to school and over summer I would ride it to Coney Island until I could tell which subway station I was approaching by the color of the wall tiles. I would take a breath as the subway train left the dark tunnels, rails sparking and the lights occasionally flickering out, to ascend to the ‘high line’ overlooking McDonald Avenue.
Coney Island-Stillwell Av was the last stop if it was summer or I was playing hooky on a winter beach day. It was also the last stop for Debrina Kawam, a homeless woman, who was sleeping on the train when she was set on fire by a Guatemalan migrant on her last Sunday morning.
Kawam had likely been avoiding the homeless shelters after they were overrun with violent migrants, but it did her no good. The last we saw of her, she was standing and burning, while people walked by or filmed with their phones at the last stop in view of the cold seaside air.
The murder on the F train took place weeks after Daniel Penny, a Marine Corps veteran, had been ‘let off’ after heroically intervening to stop a career maniac, who previously assaulted a number of elderly women with no consequences, restraining him on a Brooklyn bound F train.
The F train is no worse than any other subway line, traveling from Jamaica, Queens to Coney Island, letting you go from JFK Airport right to the beach (or the other way around) but it is the second longest subway route after the A train made famous by Duke Ellington. The F train did not exist yet and in any case ducks out via Roosevelt Island to Queens long before it reaches Harlem or Ellington’s home in Washington Heights which was then reachable by the A train.
The 27 mile length of the route makes the F train a magnet for homeless, scam artists, subway performers and assorted crazies who know that they can enjoy a ride of over an hour and a half (on a good day) with scenic views, three boroughs and a selection of comfortable seats, if you like orange and yellow buckets, with room to stretch out your feet from a window seat.
There was a time when subway personnel walked through the cars, warning anyone putting their feet up, but these days they have far bigger problems, not just old-fashioned pickpockets and muggers, but random stabbings, serial sexual predators who go in and out of the system, and crazies who push waiting riders onto the tracks when they get too close to the yellow line. --->READ MORE HEREMTA boss Janno Lieber brushes off subway crime as ‘in people’s heads’ as congestion pricing kicks in — despite recent rash of violent incidents
Say it ain’t so, Janno.
MTA honcho Janno Lieber pooh-poohed subway crime as being “in people’s heads” Monday following the launch of congestion pricing — which is forcing more New Yorkers into the plagued public transit system.
Lieber, during a Monday morning interview on “Bloomberg Surveillance,” touted a 12.5% reduction in transit crime last year from 2019, the last full year before the coronavirus pandemic.
He argued, similarly to Mayor Eric Adams, that a rash of recent horrifying attacks are distracting from the city’s successes in making the subways safer.
“Some of these high-profile incidents, you know, terrible attacks have gotten in people’s heads and made the whole system feel unsafe,” he said.
“The overall stats are positive.”
But Lieber’s rosy view of transit crime – which Adams and Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch largely echoed during a news conference later that day – was undercut by a closer look at NYPD data, which shows significant violence is either staying level or rising.
Besides a 25-year high of 10 subway murders last year, there were 579 felony assaults recorded by the NYPD’s transit bureau – slightly higher than 2023’s numbers, preliminary data shows.
Major crime in the transit system did drop 5.4% overall compared to 2023, largely driven by a nearly 18% decline in robberies, the data shows.
Last year, however, there were still 455 robberies in the transit system, according to the statistics.
Lieber’s cherry-picking didn’t sit well with the Transport Workers Union, which slammed the Metropolitan Transportation Authority CEO as a “fraudster” in a post on X. --->READ MORE HERE
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