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.
g42gregory · 45m ago
It's the cost of Democracy, they say.
thegrim33 · 2h ago
The entire crux of the article hinges around one graph at the end, where they compare traffic annual deaths per 100k people with subway annual deaths per 100k people .. per person who rode the subway 500 times?
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".
zamadatix · 52m ago
Regarding the comparison likely because the data source only gave homicides per ride and didn't come with the corresponding information to convert that into homicides per person year of use. The choice of 500 is a bit of an arbitrary example of what the latter might look like (~2x per workday).
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.
woodpanel · 2h ago
> other categories
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.
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".
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.
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.