(Bloomberg) -- New Yorkers are having an unsettling start to 2025.
Several violent incidents in recent days, including on the subway, are deepening the sense that chaos and disorder are gripping the city and undermining public safety.
They helped make 2024 one of the most dangerous years on record for commuters, at a time when the biggest US city is still working to rebound fully from the pandemic. Office buildings have been drained of workers — vacancies stand near 20% - and weekday ridership on the city’s buses and subways are below pre-Covid levels. That’s a big concern for business leaders who say their workers are fearful.
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority is going to have to spend more to improve safety on trains, said Kathryn Wylde, who runs the Partnership for New York City, a business group composed of the city’s largest companies, including JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc.
“Those are all extraordinary burdens on the MTA, but they really don’t have a choice because, literally, this is the top priority of employees,” she said.
The cash-strapped MTA, the state-controlled agency that runs the city’s subways, buses and commuter railroads, is trying to encourage people to use mass transit by charging drivers entering Manhattan’s central business district. But if people don’t feel safe, the agency risks losing more riders.
On Monday, the first weekday of the congestion pricing program, MTA Chairman Janno Lieber told Bloomberg Radio that the agency is accelerating a program to install barriers at the edge of subway platforms.
Currently 14 stations — out of a total of over 400 — have platform barriers, according to the MTA. The program started a year ago.
Lieber acknowledged that riders are growing more uneasy. “There’s no question that some of these high-profile incidents, terrible attacks, have gotten into people’s heads and made the whole system feel less safe,” he said.
On New Year’s Eve, in the heart of Manhattan, a man suffered a broken skull and ribs as well as a ruptured spleen after he was shoved off a subway platform into the path of an oncoming train. A 23-year-old with a history of arrests for assault, possession of weapons and harassment was charged in the incident.
A day later, one person was repeatedly stabbed on a station platform in Morningside Heights, another was slashed on a No. 2 train and a third was knifed early the next morning.
All that follows an incident a few weeks prior that captured international attention when an undocumented migrant allegedly set fire to a woman, Debrina Kawam, sleeping on a train near Coney Island. She died of her wounds.
They’re just the latest instances of violence that marked New York City throughout 2024 and made the public increasingly fearful. Mayor Eric Adams and Governor Kathy Hochul have made numerous efforts to bring down subway crime, but little seems to make a difference. Not more cops. Not cameras in cars or bag checks. Not even the deployment of the National Guard.
Even with all those measures, 2024 still turned out to be one of the most dangerous years for subway riders in at least several decades, according to government data compiled by policy research group Vital City at Columbia Law School.
Felony assaults hit 573 in 2024, the most since at least 1997, according to New York Police Department data. There were also 10 murders on the subway, double the figure from the prior year.
Some lawmakers blame the violence on the city’s policies toward people with mental illness and what they say is an inadequate criminal justice system that often tosses repeat offenders back onto the streets.
“How many more random slashings, stabbings, and shovings must be perpetrated against innocent New Yorkers before the State of New York gives the Mayor the authority he needs to relocate dangerous people from the streets and subways?” US Representative Ritchie Torres, a moderate Bronx Democrat, said on X.
Hochul and Adams responded to the spate of New Year’s violence with pledges to seek legislation that would grant more power to authorities to commit people with severe mental illness to hospitals, and keep them there — even against their will.
“Many of these horrific incidents have involved people with serious untreated mental illness,” Hochul said on Friday. “We have a duty to protect the public from random acts of violence, and the only fair and compassionate thing to do is to get our fellow New Yorkers the help they need.”
While felony assaults rose last year, city officials note that overall major crime in the transit system fell 5.4% from the previous year, when it also dropped. But more needs to be done because people don’t feel safe, said Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, who spoke alongside Adams at a press briefing on Monday.
Tisch said she’ll move more than 200 police onto the trains to do specialty patrols and will send more cops onto platforms in the 50 highest crime stations. Meanwhile, Adams said he’ll press Albany to change state laws that he said are leading to rising recidivism.
“This is just the beginning,” Tisch said. “This month we will roll out substantial additional improvements to our transit deployments to be even more responsive to the terrifying acts of random violence we have seen recently.”
What the city really needs is far better coordination to make its efforts stick, said Elizabeth Glazer, the founder of Vital City, who is also former director of the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice under Bill de Blasio.
“Assaults have just been skyrocketing,” said Glazer, a former federal prosecutor. “You have city cops, you have national guardsmen, you have MTA cops, you have on the clinician side nonprofits, you have the state funding things, you have the city funding things, but who’s going where and when?”
Crime on the subway as a percentage of rides is still extremely rare, Glazer said, attributing the uptick in part to economic and emotional strains from the pandemic. But with weekday ridership still about 20% less than before Covid, each incident becomes that much more visible.
A citywide surge in homelessness has complicated conditions on the subway. Some unhoused people have not only been blamed for the violence but have also become its most vulnerable victims.
“The subway is a daytime and nighttime place of last resort for New Yorkers who don’t have anywhere else to go, especially when it’s very hot or very cold,” said Danny Pearlstein, policy and communications director at Riders Alliance, an advocacy group. “We need investments that address these crises.”
Samantha Muscato, a pediatric occupational therapist at a hospital in Manhattan, says that when she rides the subway she stands up against a post far from the platform so that she can’t be easily pushed. Her unease, she said, has gotten worse than when she rode the train alone to work during Covid.
“I used to do a lot more reading on the subway,” she said.
--With assistance from Sri Taylor and Alicia Clanton.
(Updates with NYPD Commissioner Tisch and Mayor Adams comments starting in 17th paragraph)
©2025 Bloomberg L.P.