Political and public policy debates, on the express and local tracks
The subway is New York City’s biggest stage. Out of the system’s 3.6 million daily riders burbles a continuous stream of real-life tragedies, romances, adventures. A century ago, the throngs inspired the characters of Edith Wharton and Ralph Ellison; today’s performers, artists and curators have made trains their literal platform, including Kareem Rahma’s short-form talk show @subwaytakes, photographer Hannah La Follette Ryan’s portraiture @subwayhands and Rick McGuire’s endless freakshow @subwaycreatures. Often it’s just an errant video rocketing across our digitized world, like skateboarder Tyshawn Jones kickflipping the 145th Street gap or a well-nourished rat scaling a sleeping commuter. The well-worn setting confers on these clips a feeling of intimacy: Events on a familiar station or train car returns local viewers to their own commutes, with the feeling that “I could have been there.”
What makes the subway such a political and cultural flashpoint? It is our truest “public square,” a space woven into the daily life of nearly every New Yorker, where even distant happenings can seem oddly proximate, whose governance we take personally. Naturally, in times of division and polarization, the subway is where we stage some of our most profound political disagreements, about the degree of responsibility we owe one another and how to best pursue the collective good.
Congestion pricing’s disappearing act
No subway-adjacent topic has so dominated politicians’ and journalists’ recent attention as congestion pricing. Decades in the making (a history exhaustively chronicled by USA Today editor Ben Adler), the policy has been promoted as a way of plugging a persistent hole in the Metropolitan Transit Authority’s budget with a new toll on cars entering the busiest parts of Manhattan. Its whipsawing prospects have only made it the subject of greater fascination — from advocates’ hard-fought campaign to institute the measure to Gov. Kathy Hochul’s eleventh-hour “pause” in early June to more recent attempts to revive it.
One of the first to rejoice the governor’s retreat was the New York Post’s editorial board, which called on her to “kill congestion pricing for good” and “address the MTA’s funding woes without pilfering the pockets of hardworking New Yorkers.”
Some supporters of congestion pricing have been circumspect, trying to malign no one while keeping options open. Kathryn Wylde, CEO of the Partnership for New York City and a member of the Traffic Mobility Review Board that helped shape the tolling structure, called the governor’s decision “disappointing” and hoped aloud that the pause would be temporary. (More recently, she told New York Focus she was concerned that even delaying the decision could imperil it, if Donald Trump is reelected president).
But for transit advocates, environmentalists and New York City’s progressive electeds, the governor’s decision defined her as a creature of politics rather than of principle. Bronx Congressman Ritchie Torres wrote on X that the “arbitrary” pause would make it harder for the MTA to invest in new infrastructure and thereby would harm communities of color “under the pretense of helping them.” The New York Times produced a dynamic graphic depicting a long list of upgrades the MTA said it would forgo, from upgraded signals to new subway cars to already overdue elevators and ramps meant to increase accessibility. A video posted by adaptive ski racer Trevor Kennison showing how a person in a wheelchair has to enter the New York City subway racked up tens of millions of views. In late July, the governor allocated $54 million in state funding to continue work on the Second Avenue Subway extension, but that’s a miniscule share of the revenues the MTA had been planning around.
State Sen. Zellnor Myrie, who is exploring a mayoral run, condemned the governor’s decision and castigated Mayor Adams for falling in line. “New Yorkers deserve leadership, not silence.” Perhaps no one made more hay of it than Comptroller Brad Lander, who is also vying for the mayorship and warned of “preventable subway delays, worsening gridlock, air quality alerts, and even MTA service cuts.” Later, in July, he joined Public Advocate Jumaane Williams and attorneys to announce lawsuits challenging the governor’s authority to stop the policy.
In August, after state Attorney General Letitia James said she would not defend the governor against the litigation, state Sen. Liz Krueger, who chairs the state Senate’s Finance Committee, applauded her, saying Hochul was “just plain wrong on her legal power to institute this pause.” Aside from congestion pricing, to achieve the goals of reducing emissions and traffic while raising substantial revenues for the MTA, “there is no realistic alternative.” Word circulated that the governor was still open to instituting the toll if it were lower and public workers were exempt, setting off its own wave of gripes — but no public decision is expected until after the election, likely in the context of a state budget process that ends next spring.
Beating fare beating
In parallel to debates over congestion pricing, concern has grown over transit riders’ flagging interest in paying for the services they already receive. When fare evasion on both subways and buses spiked postpandemic, MTA chair Janno Lieber called it an “existential threat” and established a panel to study the issue (including Vital City co-founder Liz Glazer). That report came out last year.
At its May 2024 board meeting, the MTA detailed measures taken, such as more widely marketing reduced fares for low-income New Yorkers, deploying unarmed civil guards to deter evasion and changing the physical design of turnstiles and gates. Later in the summer, the MTA expanded its free MetroCard program for schoolkids, who say their allotment isn’t sufficient to cover extracurricular activities.
Critics of congestion pricing often call for cracking down on fare evasion as their preferred means of meeting the MTA’s budget needs. “Don’t tax — enforce!” wrote the New York Post’s Michael Goodwin, who blamed the proliferation of fare evasion on “pro-criminal, far-left legislators and so-called prosecutors.” New York Times opinion writer Pamela Paul echoed the sentiment, writing, “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.” (“I almost fell over when I saw Pamela Paul’s op-ed,” tweeted former police commissioner Bill Bratton. “Believe it or not, it was in the New York Times!”)
Ramped-up ticketing on bus routes, where the share of passengers evading the fare is greatest, has met with mixed reactions from riders and transit advocates. “Inconveniencing all riders to nab fare beaters reinforces the falsehood that other riders—and not our elected leaders—are to blame for poor, underfunded bus service,” Riders Alliance tweeted. Others pointed out that motorists’ use of obscured and unreadable license plates costs the City a comparable sum — $200 million annually, per Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine.
And more encounters with armed officers means a greater risk of escalation. In mid-September, officers confronted a man at a subway station in Brownsville who had evaded the fare and had a knife in his hand, pursued him onto a train, fired tasers at him and then their guns, hitting four people. Body camera footage later revealed the man appeared to be standing still at the time of the shooting, contrary to earlier police accounts. “It was unnecessary, and they were putting everybody’s lives at stake for $2.90,” one local resident told the New York Times.
Mayor Adams lamely defended the police; few bought his argument. “A manufactured police pursuit, escalating a fare evader into someone so worth shooting that police are willing to spray a subway car and platform with bullets, is laughably bad policy in action — knife or no, ‘mental distress’ or no,” wrote Choire Sicha, an editor at New York Magazine.
But commuters who pay their way are inevitably frustrated at the sight of others hopping the turnstile and riding for free. In a widely shared post on X, historian Asad Dandia wrote that the constant fare beating “reflects a total breakdown in social trust and civic belonging, gives rise to a sense of lawlessness, and hurts the MTA. I don’t have a solution but I am not a fan of this state of affairs.”
Safety first
More concerning to most straphangers is violent crime on platforms and trains, however minuscule the risk. Last spring, when City and state leaders increased the number of law enforcement in the subway system, there were naysayers (public advocate Jumaane Williams tweeted, “that alone is insufficient”). Overtime pay for extra officers in the subway leapt from $4 million in 2022 to $155 million, according to Gothamist. And Mayor Adams’ penchant for new technologies (a gun-detecting scanner being piloted at the Fulton Street station was the latest unveiled) has often failed to meet expectations (remember the Times Square police robot?) But by July, data showed large and continuous declines in subway crime in each of the previous six months.
The New York Post nonetheless threw cold water on the announcement, saying “the falloff isn’t nearly as terrific as they make it sound. Nor does it include a long-term plan for keeping crime on a downward path.” And salacious incidents continue to shock the public’s conscience — the cellist walloped with his own metal water bottle in an unprovoked attack in February, the mentally ill woman who pushed two tourists onto the tracks in the Lower East Side in August, the 11-year-old Venezuelan boy arrested for stealing another subway rider’s phone. (The reaction to violent crimes creates perverse incentives, too — like the MTA employee who slashed his own hands and blamed an unknown assailant in order to take the summer off.)
But careful observers saw in the improving numbers a potential success story. Vital City contributor Nicole Gelinas penned a widely shared op-ed hailing the MTA’s SCOUT program that responds to mentally ill clients with teams of clinicians and police, paired with a rebound in the policing and prosecution of transit crimes. “If this approach works, it could become a model for other American cities struggling with crime and mental illness.”