I'm not afraid I'll get stabbed but I'm not a fan of some dude staring daggers at my wife and I while he laughs and talks to himself. When I've traveled alone I've seen fights, peeing, groping and all sorts of stuff. Nobody I saw ever got killed but I can't say I miss public transit.
Why is there some 500 ride part thrown in? Why is it not just simply comparing "X people in NYC / Y people die yearly on subway" with ""X people in NYC / Y people die yearly in traffic"?
They also don't link to their sources for subway crime. They do link to a MTA document, but that document only shows subway crime rates for 6 months out of the year, not the whole year.
Also the comparison they do make at the end is apples to oranges; the issue isn't purely about death rate, but there's the other categories of series crime on the subway, like assault/rape/etc., that aren't really factored into the final claim. They moved the goalposts and deftly switched from a discussion about "safety" to a discussion about "deaths".
Exactly. By the time my co drivers start staring me down, turning up their boombox, or worse their cellphones, leaving graffiti, food waste, vomit, used needles, and feces in my car, this apples-to-oranges comparison will make sense.
What they really want to compare is per equivalent trip in the city (same mileage, same path, same time) but that's a bit impossible to do directly. Showing the number for going to work and back every day for a year is 1/10th that of traffic deaths in NYC as a whole gets the same idea across despite the lack of precise data anyways.
wavemode•4h ago