If you listen to Republicans and especially Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy, if you dare even step foot on New York City’s subway, you will immediately be brutally murdered by roving gangs of homeless illegal alien thugs who also have machine guns and scary tattoos. Still, millions of New Yorkers ride the subway daily. But just how dangerous is New York’s subway, really? Bloomberg recently dug into the numbers to find out, and while some crime does occur on the subway, it ultimately came to the conclusion that taking the subway is safer than driving your car.
Per the New York City Police Department’s latest crime report, major felonies on the subway are down 3.9% this year and down 7.3% since 2019, the last full year before the COVID-19 pandemic threw everything into chaos. That said, felony assaults are up 18% compared to the same period in 2024 and 66% higher than they were in 2019. If you adjust for ridership, the major felony rate is 13% higher than it was in 2019 but has been falling every year since 2021, while the felony assault rate appears to be an outlier and is up this year, now sitting at 128% what it was back in 2019.
Since the late 1990s, grand larceny, or thefts of items worth at least $1,000, has typically made up most of the major crimes on New York’s subway. Grand larceny rates have also been falling since 2022, and through the first half of the year, they’re currently at their lowest level since 2010. Robbery rates are also trending down and essentially at pre-pandemic levels.
Driving is far more dangerous
So while crimes do occur on the subway, and the pandemic led to significant increases, it’s also disingenuous to claim the subway is more dangerous than ever. It’s also notable that Duffy is trying to blame Governor Hochul and the MTA instead of the NYPD, as Bloomberg points out:
That said, Duffy’s concerns seem to be mostly grandstanding. He isn’t offering Transportation Department aid to combat the problem. Instead, he’s been making threatening gestures in the direction of the MTA, which is controlled by New York Governor Kathy Hochul, when it is the NYPD that’s chiefly responsible for public safety on the subway. Not entirely coincidentally, the police department reports to New York City Mayor Eric Adams, who has been on friendly terms with the Trump administration since the Justice Department dropped corruption charges against him early in Trump’s second term.
Additionally, Duffy’s focus on subway crime comes as part of his crusade against the city’s incredibly successful congestion-relief pricing. His goal doesn’t appear to be to make riding the subway safer but instead to get more New Yorkers back in their cars, where they will increase traffic, slow down buses and kill more people. And when you look at the numbers, it’s clear that driving is already far more dangerous than taking the subway.
When you look at deaths per 100,000 population, “the risk for someone who rode the subway 500 times in 2024 is 0.4 in 100,000.” Deaths from car crashes in New York City, however, were 3.9 per 100,000, more than nine times higher than taking the subway. Meanwhile, deaths from car crashes in Sawyer County, Wisconsin, where Duffy grew up, were 15.4 per 100,000. And yet, you don’t see Duffy on TV ranting about how dangerous his home county is.
In fact, it’s almost enough to convince you that Duffy isn’t really concerned about safety and may, perhaps, be a political hack pushing a far-right agenda. As the Bloomberg article reminds us, “Cars are deadly, and any transportation policy that encourages their use over public transportation is pretty much by definition anti-safety.”
