I always wanted to ride in a cab.
As a kid walking around New York City, those yellow cars were pretty seductive – and completely out of reach for me.
My parents wouldn’t even entertain it. “Why take a cab when you have the subway,” they’d say. The convenience, cost and the people-watching were unbeatable.
I grew up near the Jersey Shore but both my parents were from the city and lived downtown until my father “dragged” my mother south. Most of our family remained – in Brooklyn, Manhattan and Queens – and we’d go regularly. My aunt’s house in Bensonhurst was my second home, the F train at Avenue P, my stop.
Despite technically living in carburbia, my mother remained the subway’s biggest evangelist. Everyone knew to consult her on how to get around the city.
In high school, two Japanese exchange students spent a year at my school and my mom sought them out at a football game to ensure their host families were taking them to the city. They were not, so my parents did. We boarded the F train at Avenue P and watched Hiro and Nami with second hand delight. They giggled as we rolled over Brooklyn and pulled into Rockefeller Center.
About a decade ago, my mother moved back downtown and easily fell into her transit groove. As the underground turned grotty during covid, she took it less.
But she shocked me on Saturday, as she was mapping out her route to get to the Port Authority. It was convoluted, mostly above ground and wasted so much time. Why didn’t she take the nearest trains? “Kirsten, I’m scared of those stations.”
This spunky and spry woman who was for years doing free public relations work for the MTA all over Jersey, is avoiding the very thing that lured her back.
It was fresh in my mind when days later, a dismissive MTA boss Janno Lieber said, “Some of these high-profile incidents, you know, terrible attacks have gotten in people’s heads and made the whole system feel unsafe.”
Pardon?
Last year, there were 11 murders on the subway, according to Manhattan Institute – the most of the 21st Century. By the grace of God, it wasn’t 12 after an innocent man was pushed in front of a train by 23-year-old Kamel Hawkins on New Years Eve.
The 11th was the horrifying immolation of a woman by an illegal migrant. Last month, there was the double stabbing in Grand Central, and Jamar Banks, who has 54 prior arrests, knifed two straphangers last week. The list goes on and on.
Never mind how much random crime goes unreported by a public who has simply grown to accept and shrug off such disorder.
Lieber’s words were the equivalent of him instructing a subway vagrant to piss on your leg then tell you it’s raining.
This precarious feeling isn’t some illusion. I remember a time when it took only one “high profile incident” for New Yorkers, pols and agency leaders to unite and ensure there wasn’t second. Not shrug off countless more.
The subway was never perfect but there was a common sense consensus that public safety trumped the comfort of law breakers. Crime was fought, laws enforced.
Now trains and platforms are filthy, smelly and unsanitary as they’ve been turned into one big slumber party for our city’s most deranged. We’ve ceded it to our worst element.
I ride it daily because I have to, but I do so with my head on a swivel, walking that fine line between minding my own business when a lunatic enters and staying alert.
And it’s even more galling to pay for the dysfunction and watch day after day as people in scrubbed up work clothes clear the turnstiles like they’ve been trained on the vault by Bela Karolyi.
For many years, the subway was clean, functioning and safe. And we took it for granted. Now no one seems to know how to get back to the conditions we squandered.
Meanwhile Lieber and Kathy Hochul thought it was a fine time to push congestion pricing while offering a diminished product to tapped out New Yorkers, (who must trust the MTA will not mismanage those funds).
In the lead up, Hochul used the subway car for a photo op to tout its safety while Lieber tells us, fear is all in their head.
Maybe they should take a page out of former Mayor Ed Koch’s book and ask “How’m I doing?”
His arrogance, Mr Lieber, wouldn’t lower himself to ask but I’ll offer this anyway: You lost people like me and my mother, New Yorkers who championed the subway, viewed it as an essential and, yes, exciting part of the city experience.
Denial won’t fix the trains. But listening to people who love it, would be a start.
