Opinion | Taking the City for a Ride

Traveling recently on the London Tube and on the city’s double-decker buses, I wondered, as I have many times before, why New York City can’t have a comparable public transit system: safe, clean platforms; turnstiles that function with smart technology; a functioning messaging system and schedules that operate largely on time. Why are such basics unimaginable in New York?

Instead, as New Yorkers know well and international visitors are appalled to discover, we have a system that went from a source of pride to one of embarrassment. There are many reasons for the subway’s woes, from its basic funding structure to exorbitant costs to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s chronic mismanagement, all exacerbated by Gov. Kathy Hochul’s disastrous decision to abandon congestion pricing. Yes, it could and has been worse. I can remember the child’s nightmare of the subway of the 1970s and ’80s. But it’s an especial affront to see the system degrade so profoundly after a period of improvement.

Now, as if to return the city’s insult, many straphangers and bus riders are no longer paying for this diminished privilege. According to The Times, 48 percent of the city’s bus passengers skip paying their fare, among the worst rates of compliance in the world and up from 18 percent in 2018. Nearly a sixth of riders slip onto the subway without paying. Every day, over a million New Yorkers neglect to pay for public transit in New York.

If it’s easy for New Yorkers to locate blame for the system’s problems, it’s harder to admit the reasons behind the public’s malfeasance. 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.

Broken windows theory, as outlined by the social scientist James Q. Wilson and the criminology professor George Kelling in a 1982 essay in The Atlantic, holds that when minor or lesser kinds of disorder become more apparent, it invites graver forms of crime. Relatedly, the authors explained, the more significant and visible law enforcement is on the ground, the safer communities feel.

On New York public transit, cracking down on petty crimes like graffiti, panhandling and fare evasion helped improve both the atmosphere and public safety. Between 1990 and 1992, arrests and ejections on the subway increased to between 10 and 15,000 a month from 2,000 a month; in that period, subway crime declined by 30 percent. A commission appointed by the M.T.A. to tackle fare evasion in 2022 similarly found that greater enforcement reduces evasion, particularly on buses.