Riding at Your Own Risk
New Yorkers learn pretty darn quickly that to ride the subway is at their own risk.
After igniting conversation at her family Christmas dinner, Allysia Finley in the WSJ reports, “New York subways are a microcosm of its disorder. A video of a 33-year-old undocumented immigrant from Guatemala allegedly lighting a sleeping subway rider on fire. Police identified his most recent address as a homeless shelter in Brooklyn for men with substance abuse problems.
Safety in Deploying National Guard
The video, as Ms. Finley reports, is a “snapshot of the city’s problems: crime, mentally deranged and intoxicated vagrants, undocumented migrants, and unsafe subways. It’s also an apt metaphor for the destruction of the Big Apple and of other once-great cities by progressive arsonists.”
Liberals blame public fright about rising crime on supposedly distorted perceptions. Before Christmas, Gov. Kathy Hochul deployed more National Guardsmen to the subways in hopes of making riders feel safer.
Not Just in the Big Apple
(Crime) seems to be an epidemic in big Democrat-controlled cities like Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles. Their residents are doing what their elected leaders won’t do: protecting themselves, mainly by using other modes of transportation like Uber.
Thanks to declining ridership—owing also to remote work and population flight—mass transit systems across America are bleeding red ink. New York’s subway ridership was a third lower last year than in 2019. Ridership on California’s Bay Area Rapid Transit is down about 60% from before the pandemic.
Most mass-transit systems had budget problems before the Covid lockdowns owing to generous union contracts that inflate wages and benefits and limit efficiencies. A “telephone maintainer” for New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority earns on average $42.24 an hour and gets a Cadillac health plan.
Making Cities Livable
Tops on Democrats consideration is making cities “livable,” Livable to them means reducing the number of cars.
But their high taxes, crime and chaos have become unbearable. It’s no surprise they are losing population, which has been offset in part by an influx of migrants from south of the border. Adding insult to injury, migrants receive better public amenities than taxpaying natives.
A Public Relations Problem for Democrats
Americans in the rest of the country associate the Democrat party with chaos and mismanagement.
When Christmas dinner conversations turn to a poor soul burned to death on a New York subway, Democrats have a five-alarm fire on their hands.
