Public Transportation and Crime are not About Each Other
Noah Smith is trying to make public transportation and YIMBYism about crime, and I don’t think he succeeds. In short, he says that transit cities and higher housing growth levels would be more publicly acceptable if American central cities were more sensitive to conservative concerns about crime. In effect, he is making public transportation investment not a matter of frequency or network design or reliability or good maintenance or transit priority on streets or low construction costs or any of the other technocratic issues that distinguish the Seouls and Zurichs and Stockholms of the world from the Los Angeleses (which, to give credit, he acknowledges are important), but about crime, conceived as a culture war issue about more police and more police visibility. And in this, he ends up ignoring both the literature on this and what makes good government tick in parts of the developed world that are not the United States.
Now, Noah is a pundit, who’s more pro-transit than the average in his milieu. He’s not the reason American cities are poorly governed or the separate suite of reasons American public transit is so bad and isn’t improving. He writes as a way of trying to engage conservative NIMBYs, I just don’t think he succeeds – and the way he fails is for many of the same reasons American public transit managers fails. Chief of those is American triumphalism, of the kind that will retweet a viral tweet that pretends Europe has no biotech or advanced physics and that uses the expression “europoor” unironically in a flamewar. People who fail to recognize how Europe and East Asia work are not going to be able to learn what works here and how to adapt it; I’m less familiar with Asian discourse, but Noah’s description of Europe is unrecognizable. Even the basic thesis about urbanism and crime isn’t correct in a global perspective. This leads to serious problems in diagnosing how European cities got to have the housing and transportation policies that they do; the solutions are, by the black-and-white polarization of American politics, best thought of as a blue-and-orange spectrum, starting with lack of local empowerment and inattention to neighborhood-scale stereotypes
Cities and crime
The American association between high crime rates and deurbanization is not at all normal. Globally, it’s the exact opposite; Gaviria-Goldwyn-Galarza-Angel find that high risk of violence leads to higher urban density, because of the effect of safety in numbers. Simon Gaviria roots this in the history of his own country, Colombia. In Latin America, crime rates are infamously high. Noah’s post compares the American homicide rate with a selection of European and Asian countries, topping at 6.8/100,000 in Russia (US: 5.8), but in Colombia it is 25.7, and in the 1990s it ranged between 60 and 85. People can’t suburbanize the way they have in the United States, even with a GDP per capita in line with that of midcentury America, because, in a sufficiently high-crime environment, driving to work means taking the risk of being carjacked at an intersection.
Now, public transportation in Latin America is not especially good, not by European or East Asian standards. Most cities haven’t built much recently; Mexico City deserves especial demerits, but Brazil has been flagging as well, and Argentina has no money for anything. Chile and the Dominican Republic are both expanding metros, Santiago doing so rather rapidly, and both have the same order of magnitude of homicide as the US (Chile: 4.5, Dominican Republic: 11.5), rather than that of Colombia or Brazil or Mexico. But this still does not make high crime a relevant factor in deurbanization.
Now, in the history of the United States, people do associate postwar suburbanization with high crime rates. While the crime rate rose rapidly in the 1960s, and remained high until the 1990s, there was little transportation risk. The stereotype of poverty-induced social disorder as seen from a car in an American city, at least in the 1990s and 2000s, was a panhandler coming to the car at a traffic jam with a squeegee, washing it, and expecting payment; jacking was (and still is) more or less unheard of. The stereotype was, safety on the road and in the suburbs, danger in the city. But that is a feature of relatively moderate crime rates. Indeed, the destruction of American public transit in the middle of the 20th century and the suburbanization of the middle class and aspirants both came before the increase in crime rates; two thirds of the fall in New York subway ridership from its twin peaks in 1930 and 1946 to its nadir in 1982 had occurred by 1960, on the eve of the explosion in the city’s homicide rate.
And to be clear, this is a matter of stereotypes, more than reality. New York is one of the safest large cities in the United States (4.7/100,000 in 2023). San Francisco is even safer: in 2024 through December 10th, the pro-rated homicide rate was 4.3. Texan urbanists outside Austin (4.7) have to contend with higher homicide rates: 15.7 in Dallas, 12.8 in Houston, 8.4 in San Antonio, all averaged over the first six months of 2024 and pro-rated. But Dallas and Houston are perceived as far safer than New York. This can’t exactly be racism – these two cities are nearly as black as New York and considerably more Hispanic. But whatever is causing the stereotype needs to be separated from the reality; the Texan rail advocates I talk to on social media don’t treat crime as a major obstacle for finding more money for public transit, and instead cite car culture, low perceived value of rail, and high costs, and if that’s not a problem there, it shouldn’t be in New York or San Francisco.
Stereotypes in Paris
Noah talks about how Europe succeeded in curbing crime rates – and to again give credit, recognizes that New York is safe – and says that this is driving greater acceptance of public transportation and housing growth here.
Except, this isn’t quite right. I don’t have comparable surveys asking people if they find Paris safe, but I do have access to French discourse at hand, and it does not at all say “Paris is safe, people who think crime is a problem there are idiots,” except maybe when an American is in the room and then the point is to pull rank on the American.
In Paris, in French, there are lists of sensitive city quarters, and there are arrondissements that are more fashionable than others. The 18th, 19th, and 20th are usually negatively stereotyped, if less so than the adjacent department, Seine-Saint-Denis, which is extremely negatively stereotyped. The 13th is negatively stereotyped, but this is likely to be missed by Americans – the population there is disproportionately Asian, and negative stereotypes of Asians by white people are worse in France than in the United States. Belleville, straddling the 10th/11th/19th/20th boundary, was listed as a sensitive quarter when I lived just outside its limits and went in frequently to buy tahini – and at the time, I saw either British or American media, I forget which, list these quarters as no-go zones.
Now, these are residential areas. The center of Paris is well to the west of these. But Paris has a low job density gradient within city limits between commercial areas (like the 1st or the 8th) and residential ones, and the Ministry of the Interior, for example, is located in the 20th, close to Nation. People commute to these neighborhoods, usually by the Métro or RER. Nation, at the 11th/12th/20th boundary, is a mixed zone, with features that connote middle-class consumption (like the farmer’s market) and others that connote poverty (like a Resto du Cœur; see citywide map here). The sort of people in France who see a black or Arab person on the street and immediately panic find the area dangerous, including at one point the minister of the interior himself, who professed to being shocked at seeing ethnic food at the supermarket.
And none of this matters to public transportation investment, or to housing. In a country where people treat the entire department of Seine-Saint-Denis as a no-go zone except for football games at the Stade de France, where the RER B has such a negative reputation for passing through this area that two different airport connectors are planned to parallel it, Grand Paris Express is still planned to make stops in Seine-Saint-Denis, and connect it better with the rest of the region, including the wealthy suburbs around La Défense. This was a bipartisan decision – there were differences between the Socialists’ and the Gaullists’ ideas of what exactly to build, but there was core agreement on a circumferential line through the inner suburbs, and it is considered a social policy to connect working-class suburbia with jobs.
Stereotypes and local empowerment
The stereotypes of crime in parts of the Paris region do not affect urban rail investment plans. Where they do matter is at the level that doesn’t matter: the local one. Anne Hidalgo is a committed leftist (and NIMBY), but centrist and center-right politicians in the region have long wanted an urban renewal project around Gare du Nord, which they consider a poor area, not because it’s especially poor, but because it’s where the commuter trains from Seine-Saint-Denis go and thus young black and Arab men congregate there, and the station’s facilities could genuinely use some modernization. Occasionally the negative stereotypes of the station even get to British media. But whether Paris engages in a wholesale renewal project around the station to make it more upscale is not going to matter in the grand scheme of things to either its public transport ridership or its overall level of housing production.
The difference between Paris and New York or San Francisco is not that it has lower crime, although its homicide rate is certainly lower. It’s that it doesn’t derail its social policy discourse by turning technocratic issues into culture wars. Paris has unstaffed sanisettes; in a handful of areas there’s drug use, seen as used syringes. San Francisco, like Paris, has a handful of areas with drugs in its sanisettes, but the moral panic got to the point that the city decided to staff all sanisettes 24/7, with two attendants at night. Paris’s 435 sanisettes cost 11 million € a year to operate, 25,300€ per unit; San Francisco’s annual operating costs are on the order of $1 million per unit because of staffing.
This isn’t because of crime, because San Francisco is not sufficiently more dangerous than Paris to explain this, or even the perceptions thereof. The difference is that European governance is, across the board, better than American governance at disempowering local actors, who are driven by stereotypes. Anne Hidalgo doesn’t want to build housing in significant quantities, but does want to build some public housing in rich neighborhoods to own the libs (French definition of libs), and she’s the mayor and the residents of the 16th are not; Ile-de-France writ large wants to do more transit-oriented development, and so it builds some, even with some local grumbling about how redeveloping a disused factory brings gentrification.
And the way forward is to build institutions that bypass and disempower those local actors. People almost never stay within a neighborhood, but the small minority who do are overly empowered in the system of councilmanic prerogative that governs American cities. This does not involve treating their perception as if it is based in reality; this does involve passing preemption laws at the level where democratic politics is possible, such as the state, and doing much more than the weak bills California allows.
Ideology and reform
I think Noah is uncomfortable with American YIMBY praxis, because the rhetoric in a place like New York or California aims at the median Democrat in the state, to activate liberal political ideology as a substitute for the failures of non-ideological localism. This ideology is not especially radical, but does violate maxims that liberal pundits who specifically pitch to a conservative audience have learned to follow, like the taboo on calling people racist. The mainstream of political YIMBY advocacy has, I think, chosen better, understanding that at the end of the day, an upzoning bill in a safely blue state passes without Republican votes, and cutting deals with state Democratic actors, which can be localist (like exempting certain NIMBY suburbs with low transit-oriented development value) or more left-wing (like bundling with some left-wing elements, like Oregon’s introduction of weak rent controls).
And in a way, this is also how YIMBYism and public transportation investment work here, politically. As of late, social democratic parties have leaned on YIMBYism as a reason for non-pensioners to vote for them, calling for more housing permits; Olaf Scholz even called for redeveloping Tempelhofer Feld. Because it lives within a party, rather than among people who try to acknowledge culture war paranoias, the policy is clear, and sometimes can even be enacted – Germany would have built more housing if interest rates hadn’t simultaneously risen for unrelated reasons (namely, the combination of inflation and the Ukraine war). In France, it was a bipartisan effort in the sense that there wasn’t much daylight between the center-left and the center-right on the need for more housing in Ile-de-France, but the enactment did not involve the sort of horse trading that Noah envisions. This is not too different from infrastructure investments with bipartisan support elsewhere, such as the Madrid Metro, or Crossrail.
I think it’s telling that the greatest successes in the United States have not been in the most liberal places, but in swing states with liberal governance but competitive elections, like Minnesota. The barrier is not that the cities have crime or are negatively stereotyped (suburbanites around Minneapolis have plenty of those against the city), but that safe states have developed such a democratic deficit that they can’t govern. I’m fairly certain Noah is aware of this (Matt Yglesias certainly is). It just implies that this really is about seizing control of state government through ideological persuasion – in other words, reminding the Democrats of safely blue states that they are Democrats – and not about telling people way to the right of the median in these states that they are valid. We don’t do that here and American YIMBYs don’t need to do it on their side of the Pond.
Pedestrian Observations 
I was glad to read this tonight because I was thinking about this specific problem while on SEPTA in Philadelphia today. While waiting for the subway, multiple people were shooting heroin on the stairs leading down to the train and on the platform. Drug use on the platforms or on the trains is pretty frequent, to the point where the train cars often smell like smoke. It’s gotten better since 2021 but it’s still pretty bad, and is why I’ll get on the L line on elevated stations but otherwise take the bus. This isn’t a “crime” problem in the way that homicide is, but it is absolutely a reason I would not want to take my kids (or parents) on the train.
I do not think Philadelphia’s government really has the capacity or imagination to deal with this. There were SEPTA employees cleaning the station while this was happening, and were correctly choosing not to engage. SEPTA police were not present and would frankly likely make the problems worse. Notably, this is much more of a problem off-peak and on holidays like today.
Yeah, and I’ve heard stories of people smoking on the platform. But I’ve never seen that in the US (granted, only in New York and Boston – I’ve heard Philly and Chicago are worse), whereas I did see that once on the train in suburban Paris (in like 2016) and once recently on the platform here.
Paris has a supervised needle injection site, mentioned in the link on sanisettes – is there such a thing in Philly?
There was an attempt to create a supervised needle injection site, not on the subway but near it, and they were sued by neighborhood groups and the parent organization of the injection site was defunded by the new mayor.
I also want to note that, while this occasionally happened pre-pandemic, it was quite rare, while now it is certainly common to see people smoking various substances on the train with you. Again, more common off peak when there are fewer riders, and I do think that if we had the transit usage even of 2019, this would largely go away.
But there is a new status quo that didn’t exist before and it seems stubbornly difficult to change. It’s now been almost 5 years since the start of the pandemic and this is how the subway system is largely viewed.
There is a separate, but related, issue of just mass turnstile jumping.
I live in Frankfurt Germany and I experience people smoking crack in public spaces (we used to be a heroin city but giving out free heroin actually has drained the swamp and there’s almost no new heroin addicts). One day on my way home i had on each step from my office door down to the subway platform even on the subway car as well as my “home” station people smoking crack literally within a radius of two meters. And that was at 6pm and not 4am in the morning! The city also uses parts of the system as emergency shelters in the winter. Still people in Frankfurt don’t feel unsafe we have been living with addicts in public spaces for over 40 years. I don’t know if people who struggle with addiction and homelessness in the us are a different breed but i always find it funny when people are afraid of them here.
notably frankfurt a city known in Germany for crime and public drug use has higher public transit patronage (350 million linked journeys and about 450 million unlinked ones) within its tiny municipal boundaries than any metro area in the us outside new york
All of this is also downstream of Mayor Parker’s initial sweep of Kensington (Philly’s Hamsterdam) in 2024 with zero plan of how to mitigate dispersed drug use throughout the city. So drug sales still fly under the radar, but now the police force addicts to leave how they came, including via the El.
Ben, while I find your point emotionally satisfying I’m not convinced that the causality is right. The peak of drug use on the trains was probably 2020, and it’s gone down since then, but has plateaued at a higher level than pre-pandemic, just as ridership has plateaued on a lower level. It may be arguable that but for Parker’s Kensington sweep, drug use would continue to go down, but I’m not sure there’s evidence for that. Have incidents on SEPTA risen since the sweep?
Your other point, that “addicts leave how they came,” is really important. A great many of the heavy drug users in Philadelphia and on SEPTA are not Philadelphians, but are white suburbanites, or at least were, and still identify as such. They are from the same class of people who look down on Philly as a nest of degenerates and as a place it’s ok to trash. In some ways, their actions are different in degree, but on in kind, to Villanova kids smashing up cars in Center City on St. Patrick’s Day.
Incidents involving SEPTA police are down, but actual drug use has probably not meaningfully changed. Non-police stats are untracked, but SEPTA has recently implemented somewhat standardized protocol through SCOPE. This means that pandemic-era drug use levels could reflect longer loitering on the system, whereas now they are more quickly escorted off. Anecdotally I take the El less then daily, but twice in past month I’ve had the train stop for an OD with ~15 min delays.
Respectfully, I think this really misses the mark.
I can primarily speak to Los Angeles transit. But anti-social behavior has gotten extremely prevalent outside of a few core commuting hours and it hugely impacts ridership (per public polling by transit agencies and the hundreds of people I have talked to personally about it). Many things that are threatening or deeply unpleasant but don’t register in the homicide statistics. Things I have personally witnessed on metro trains in the past year, in some cases tried to report or called 911 (without any effect). And I don’t even ride metro that often (a few times a week).
-consumption of hard drugs, people urinating/defecating in the middle of the train car; people with severe untreated mental illness screaming, shouting violent threats, shouting lewd or threatening sexual comments, getting in fights with eachother; people visibly experiencing a break from reality flicking knives open and close, throwing bottles at people; several cases of people wandering around unclothed or masturbating in public; always some idiot blaring loud music, often several competing idiots in the same train car. It is a rare and notable that I ride metro and there isn’t some major unpleasant thing occurring in the train car.
riding transit in Europe recently was a night and day experience.
Admittedly the situation on LA metro buses is a lot better. But people do not feel safe, and the ridership experience is often deeply unpleasant, even when people aren’t fearing actual violence. And yes, a lot of this goes to larger structural issues like the complete lack of public treatment for mental health in California, and the fact the the mentally ill are largely warehoused on city sidewalks, and we have a undeclared police strike that has basically stopped enforcing a bunch of misdemeanors.
And yes, the reason LA metro expansion is so slow and pathetic is suburban nimbyism and institutional sclerosis. But the public disorder aspect is extremely real in the under-utilization of existing transit infrastructure in California.
On the contrary, I think that’s exactly what Alon means when they say this: “It just implies that this really is about seizing control of state government through ideological persuasion – in other words, reminding the Democrats of safely blue states that they are Democrats…”
The problem isn’t ultimately about the drugs and the crime, even if that is what presents itself as the issue to solve. The problem is that too many Democratic-led places aren’t governing on their purported values–things like more equal access to healthcare, housing, and social supports (and, of course, transportation). The lack of access to these necessities is at least a large part of why people resort to thing like crime and drug use, and places like California which let local interests (which are fundamentally individual and not communal interests) overrule everything else cannot honestly say that they value small-d democracy and social welfare. That’s why I usually will say to people that California is not really a liberal state in the American sense of the word of a more activist government. It’s culturally liberal, but ultimately libertarian more than left-leaning.
It’s especially frustrating for a fairly-committed leftist like me to see a place like California (or my home state of Oregon) considered to be on the left (which I grant compared to, say Kentucky, it is) when it’s not doing almost anything that an international left would recognize as part of its values. Newsom is ultimately not a democrat, even if he is a Democrat, and I think it’s that nominative confusion that Alon’s pointing out here. Democrats need to govern well; they cannot just say they will and then abdicate responsibility.
(As an aside, this is also why I find the EU so frustrating. It ought to have been a triumphant demonstration of the potential success of a government which is very democratic and centered on providing social welfare. It’s not a total failure on that front, but the European Commission’s actions post-’08 to protect the interests of capital over those values has made the entire thing a major disappointment, so far.)
The inequality trajectory of Europe in the 2007-19 was fairly flat – most countries had flat disposable income ginis (source), with a few moving one point in either direction and fewer moving more. The EU writ large probably saw reductions in inequality because of higher growth in Eastern Europe than Western Europe. What happened overall in and after the Great Recession, in both Europe and the US, is better understood as degrowth – per capita income growth in both the US and EU over this business cycle was 1%/year, well below historic norms.
my perspective as someone that lives fairly close to the red line:
The land use in Los Angeles is so bad that transit cannot compete on time. What I mean is a trip from rail station to rail station is reasonably competitive but the last mile (or multiple miles) on each side can add up to the point it is no longer competitive. Buses on the other hand have great coverage but are strictly slower than driving since they sit in the same traffic cars do and cannot reroute around traffic as cars do.
so if transit cannot compete on time, can it compete on price? Mostly no. A car is a sunk cost for most and the price of parking is rarely prohibitively expensive, often free.
so that’s where the comfort issue comes in. If transit is already slower and you own a car why would you subject yourself to the discomfort of taking transit?
Too many urbanists online focus only on physical safety, but psychological safety is poor no one who can afford not to will subject themselves to that.
I think the critique of crime rates <> YIMBYism <> transit is fair. But I think this reads as someone who has visited New York/Boston disproportionately, and missed the sheer disorder that you see in American lesser cities (SF, Austin, Chicago, Seattle). Disorder that, notably, is a bit separate from crime or crime rates.
To be brief, I think you underrate the prevalence of disorder in urban America, and the cultural perception that has on attempts to expand cities and transit. Specific critiques on the crime rate to density relationship seem reasonable. But “drug addicts or assholes treat vital public spaces like their living room” is not something that is common in Europe (though obviously not unheard of) and, thanks to European faith in the state, is something that they try to deal with directly. American cities often seem unable to even try to protect the usability of public spaces.
That has meaningful ramifications for the transit rider experience in all American cities, but particularly the worse transit cities. It’s true that it’s a symptom of state dysfunction. It’s true that solving it won’t magically produce YIMBY and transit expansion majorities. But it is still true that Paris or Berlin policing towards anti-social behavior in public spaces is far more aggressive, and that helps protect public spaces as a place for everyone. Does that lead to more support of cities? It’s unclear, but it is a manifestation of the lack of state capacity and working on fixing it would, in theory, also help address that state capacity deficit.
Yes it caters a bit to the “get the poors away” taste of urban conservatives. But families or women should be able to sit in a park or take a train without fearing the half dressed deranged man high on drugs will assault them.
Who was it who pointed out that European countries have much higher numbers of police than the US, when scaled by the amount of crime they have?
Matt Yglesias is where I saw it referenced, but it was not his empirical work.
That’s a really stupid scaling, I’m sorry. The resources available for police spending vary much less than the crime rate; this metric vacuously is going to find that the ratio of police officers to crime negatively correlates with crime, because of the simple fact that the homicide rate in rich countries varies over more than a full order of magnitude and police spending does not. If we scale things with homicide, then Singapore has 10,400 sworn officers and what looks like 6 homicides a year (its standard reporting categories don’t look anything like what you expect), by which standard, to match, New York with 360 annual homicides would need 624,000 cops, which almost by definition is never happening, so by that standard obviously American cities would look underpoliced.
It’s stupid if the goal is to choose an ideal number of police to hire. It’s smart if the goal is to understand why less severe crime goes unpoliced.
No it’s still not smart for that because it is confuses the impact of numerator and denominator. A town with 10 police officers and one major crime per month will be able to devote more resources it (and presumably have a better clearance rate) than a same size town with 100 officers and a major crime every day. But that better performance isn’t from higher staffing but a much lower crime rate.
I don’t think we’re disagreeing.
One aspect of living in a high crime metro area of Texas is that crime is very concentrated in very poor areas and homicides typically involve gangs or someone feeling disrespected. So if you’re middle class or affluent, it’s quite easy to stay on the low-crime side of the city for everything and never go in those areas. In contrast, the Tenderloin in SF is right next to the hotels and the touristic city center and in NYC everyone uses the subway, so it’s more visible. Also, people associate the suburban cities with “Dallas” or “Houston” while SF/NYC have a distinct identity from the suburban areas.
When I discuss visiting New York or SF to people who live in Texas, they remark on seeing a lot more homeless drug addicts. The overdose rate in Texas is actually substantially lower than that in CA or NY, so there is less of a drug problem. When people complain about “crime” in the US usually they’re complaining about having to see homeless disorderly drug addicts and not murder, rape, or robbery. Most people never get murdered, raped, or robbed, so their perception of crime is mostly from how many homeless disorderly drug addicts they see.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/drug_poisoning_mortality/drug_poisoning.htm
While the U.S. might have less homicide than places like Colombia, for the drug overdose problem the U.S. is in the worst in the world per capita.
Another factor is that Texas has much lower rents and property prices than SF/NYC, so the middle class can more easily choose to live far away from high crime areas. In more expensive cities, a lot more people with decent incomes will still stay near high crime areas. There are places with more drug deaths like West Virginia, but cheap housing means that drug addicts are in some building and are not visible on the street.
I do think that many people have noticed that NYC subway homicides have gone up from 2 to around 8 a year despite a fall in ridership, and therefore are slightly less likely to use the subway at night.
This is also true of crime in New York. The risk of homicide to someone living in a middle-class neighborhood is very low, and is mostly domestic violence; for example, the NY Post pointed out 11 years ago that of 2013’s 334 homicides, only 29 were committed by strangers (link). Clearance rates in the US are low by German standards, but much of this boils down to knowing which gang killed the rival gang member but not which specific member did.
The high drug overdose rates in the US include so much death from prescription drug abuse that I don’t think it’s right to connect this with street crime; people getting addicted to painkillers and dying in the safety of their own homes is not what people think about when they talk about social disorder.
The subway homicides include two very high-profile cases in which the homeless person was the victim – Jordan Neely (debatably justifiably, but as I understand it, the statistics include justifiable homicide), and the homeless woman who was set on fire just a few days ago. In the latter case, quite a lot of fake news sites have made up a story for her including the photo of an unrelated woman just to try to flip the script and make this not about the murder of a homeless person by someone who absorbed too much rhetoric portraying the homeless as subhuman but about something else, in the same manner that after an AfD supporter committed a terrorist attack in Magdeburg and killed five people, AfD and supporters have made up conspiracy theories that the police is lying to cover up an Islamist motive.
Drug deaths are almost entirely from street drugs sold by gangs. Prescription drugs have been somewhat cracked down on, and they’re much harder to overdose on since the dose is standardized. A huge cause of overdoses is mixing in fentanyl with heroin so the dosage of opioids is inconsistent.
This graph clearly shows that almost all drug deaths are not from prescription opioids.
https://nida.nih.gov/sites/default/files/images/fig2-2024.jpg
In reality, people are mostly complaining about lower-tier crimes like theft, sexual harassment, and regular harassment which people are more exposed to in NYC rather than homicide. Lower-level crimes are less visible in car-oriented cities. Anecdotally, a lot more people are victims of theft and harassment in NYC than Texas among people I know, even if the homicide rate in Texas is higher.
Also, I feel like transit crime is only somewhat correlated with overall crime in a city. For example, Rio de Janiero might have the highest homicide rate of any 10 million+ population metro area in the world, but the subway system seemed safer than NYC and other American cities. NYC went from 2 to 8 homicides a year (4-5x increase per rider) without a 4-5x increase in overall homicide. My guess is that the most likely explanation is that American social/police/legal system is more tolerant of transit crime/disorder than other countries.
Also, I think people aren’t really complaining about homeless people in general, more the subset that are disorderly/unstable which is higher in the U.S. For example, there were also some homeless people in Dublin, but they all seemed polite and respectful.
”flip the script and make this not about the murder of a homeless person by someone who absorbed too much rhetoric portraying the homeless as subhuman”
I’m sorry but this is more of fake news than the fake news you criticize above. No suspected motive has been officially announced so any speculation that it is due to anti-homeless rhetoric is premature, but from what facts we do know it is also just incorrect. The suspect was housed at a substance abuse center so it is likely they are/were/would be homeless themselves, making the idea that the crime was motivated by homeless hate as absurd as the idea a lesbian who kills another lesbian over a gambling debt was acting due to homophobic rhetoric. The one fact that had been reported – the suspect claiming he didn’t remember anything because he drank a lot – together with the aforementioned treatment center makes it far more likely this was related to psychosis/substance abuse than anything to do with homeless rhetoric. Plain old sociopathy is also a possibility, and still more likely.
Sid, I was about to post a link to that exact graphic when I saw your post. Alon’s claim that drug overdoses have a lot to do with prescription drugs is totally unsupported by the facts, prescription overdoses look to be less than 14% of all of deaths in 2022. What’s more more than half of those deaths also involved a synthetic opioid, which makes it likely a lot of them were also street deaths. See https://nida.nih.gov/sites/default/files/images/fig4-2024.jpg
As you know, your observation that “The stereotypes of crime in parts of the Paris region do not affect urban rail investment plans” is only true of public investment. The private consortium behind the CDG Express wants to isolate air travelers from the banlieue. In my opinion, the project would be more useful and successful if the trains served the regular RER E platforms at Magenta, Haussman, Porte Maillot and La Defense instead of a dedicated platform at Gare de l’Est.
An interesting aspect is how rail investments can affect stereotypes. The LGV Sud-Est success was seen beyond the region as evidence that the train was not an obsolete mode of transportation. Similarly suburban tramway lines that can only be described as successful and the Grand Paris Express with its rather grand stations signal that these areas are not the “lost territories” often portrayed in the media.
Beyond stereotypes, rail investment may affect reality. In Casablanca, a growing city of 5 million, busses struggled to offer a decent service. Frustrated would be passengers who could not access crowded bus after crowded bus could express their anger by throwing rocks. The trams and their elaborate stations equipped with turnstiles are safer and the middle class is not shunning them. In that respect, public transportation is not synonymous with anti-social behavior and crime but has a preventative effect.
While local Democratic administrations do have plenty of room for improvement, policies at that level are very far from being the root cause of US poverty and crime. And the fact that many people like Noah who are on the least conservative half of the country have the same views as him is esentially a guarantee that those root causes will not get addressed anytime soon.
Harsh policing for 500 years to weed out bad genes is not a reasonable way at all (at all!) to describe how Europe did better at avoiding visible poverty and crime in most of its neighborhoods. It is however a convenient thing to say for someone that wants the US to focus on increasing GDP per capita, rather than on bulding a welfare system.
The heading of Alon’s post says it well, “Public Transportation and Crime are not About Each Other.”
Transit is unfairly connected to crime, based on my life in NYC and living for short periods in Munich, Paris & Tokyo. Crime in a NYC subway or bus is more publicized than crime elsewhere in the city or elsewhere, locally, nationally and internationally, primarily because NYC is a media center and media outlets are competing for attention. I suspect that crimes encountered per trip are actually quite low in NYC.
The major source of crime and fear of crime in NYC transit is not a transit problem, it is a collection of social problems, especially the presence of unstable, mentally ill people.
Certainly, it is correct that cultural differences affect the crime rates in different places, but–I agree with Alon–don’t blame transit.
In the seven years I’ve lived here I never had a single encounter that I would describe as scary or dangerous, and I took the subway pretty much every day between summer 2017-march 2020, and at least half a dozen times a week thereafter(due to hybrid and greater comfort with urban cycling). A couple of times an emaciated man would mumble something vaguely threatening to no one in particular, while I and some other passengers were on the same subway car and everyone ignored him and people got off when they got off. There was one other incident where there were only a few people in a car and they were acting a bit sketchy so I got off a few stops earlier than I needed to and citi biked home.
The larger problem I think is that to use the subway and living in New York in general(and SF as well which I’ve visited frequently) and getting things done and going to the places you need to go is that you have to sort of kill the part of yourself that feels empathy for the many many people who desperately need help. Not intellectual empathy, but actual raw emotional empathy we all instinctively feel; because it’s simply not pragmatic to actually help everybody that needs it while living one’s own life. Over the years I saw dozens of people who were passed out, some of whom were possibly ODing on Fent. Not much to do other than just moving on. It’s like that Louis CK bit about picking up his friend who grew up on a farm at the port authority.
Of course, it’s easy for me since I grew up in India and about a third of Intersection I’ve driven through had Beggars(Not sure what the PC term is) dangerously weaving through traffic, pleading for the equivalent of like 20 cents and we kept our windows rolled up because what exactly were we supposed to do? Many of them were missing a limb or an eye or had some other severe disability and many were mothers carrying their baby infants.
“Conservatives” don’t give a shit about crime when it’s committed by rich straight white guys. They just elected one as President.
1) You say that transit would be more publicly acceptable if it ran better, and Noah says transit would be more publicly acceptable if the places it ran to had less crime. I have no idea why you are framing this as some kind of opposition – it seems clear that both your assertion and Noah’s can be, and likely are, simultaneously true.
2) Your paper about Colombia etc seems to be a non sequitur. Skimming it, the effect it seems to describe is that of people fleeing high-crime places for low-crime places. In Columbia and the other cases in the article, the paper reports that crime/violence was high in the countryside and this caused people to flee to cities, densifying them. But the US appears to have the opposite situation: looking at a county level crime map (https://www.adt.com/crime), almost everywhere crime levels are higher in cities (and this effect is even strong enough to overwhelm racial discrepancies – black majority rural counties in the south have relatively low crime rates). Naturally, based on the logic of your paper, this should lead to people fleeing from cities, not to them. Which is exactly Noah’s point.
1. What Noah is saying is false, is the point. Even in rather high-crime parts of the US, opposition to public transit does not mention crime – it calls it a waste of money.
2. New York and San Francisco both have lower murder rates than the US average.
1) That seems to be a different argument from the one in your post. And it’s a questionable one – crime is one of the top reasons cited by almost everyone for why they moved from city to suburb, or didn’t move to the city to begin with. And without people living in cities, there are few people around to take transit and little motivation to build it.
2) I’m not sure why you are cherrypicking these two cities, when so many other cities with higher than average crime rates. But even within those two cities, it appears that the central transit-dependent areas mostly have higher crime rates, while the more “suburban” outer areas mostly have lower crime rates.
1. Ok but “no one rides transit because of crime” -> “transit is a waste of money because so few people ride it” -> “let’s not invest in transit infrastructure” is a valid chain of events, for which Noah is correctly identifying the root cause.
2. As several people have noted, murder isn’t a great metric for evaluating overall crime, because it happens so infrequently (less than one half of one percent of total crime). In 2023 New York City has a violent crime rate of 744.1 per 100k – the US average was 363.8, so NYC was more than double. San Francisco was 696.1 in 2022, and it went up by 3% in 2023. Rape, assault, and robbery were all up in NYC in 2023 as well. In both cities violent crime is more than 100 times more common than homicides, which means people are more likely to see/be a victim of it than murder, and thus base their opinions on it.
2b. The above is magnified by the fact, as you note, that most murder is not random, but affects people known to the killer (a spouse, rival gang member, etc.) But violent crime like assault and robbery much more commonly comes from strangers (about 60% and 50% respectively). Rape/sexual assaults are again more commonly committed by someone the victim knows, the the rate of ~38% by strangers is still far higher than muders (only ~10%). So suggesting people’s opinion of crime is based on personal experience with murder is a very poor theory, it is much more likely they or someone they know will experience assault or robbery.
2c. Eric is correct that looking at just those two cities is flawed, there is much more to the urban US than NY and SF (even if they get most of the print). In California, for instance, Sacramento and LA have higher violent crime rates than SF, while San Jose and San Diego are lower – but of relevance to your post ALL of them have a violent crime rate higher than the US average.
But the people saying “cities are crime ridden cesspits of sin and depravity” don’t live in cities and don’t know anyone who has been a crime victim. They get “…. cesspitsssss…” from right wing media. Along with a “no-go zones” ( for white people ) and whole cities burned to the ground. And that your pets aren’t safe and…
1. It’s not the actual chain, though. Nobody is saying that transit expansion in American cities that are perceived as dangerous, like New York, is a waste of money because nobody rides it because of crime. The places where transit expansion is controversial as a concept – as opposed to widely accepted modulo cost issues – are less liberal cities, where the perceptions of crime, never mind the reality, are different. In the Sunbelt, the argument is less “the trains are sketchy so nobody rides them” and more “the train doesn’t get me to where I want to go and the bus takes three times as long as driving.”
2. The reported crime rate isn’t a great proxy for the crime rate – thefts and assaults aren’t consistently reported, and sexual assaults are so underreported that the reported rates are fake news. Car thefts are universally reported, but are for obvious reasons not a good basis for comparing New York with anything else in the US.
All of this can be resolved with crime surveys, but the quality of crime surveys in Europe leaves a lot to be desired, except that probably the violent crime rate here is comparable to that of the US, except where guns are involved. (This is mentioned in The Burden of Crime in the EU, which is at this point 20 years old.) The NCVS is high-quality, but doesn’t have enough resolution to compare specific cities; it has state-level data as of 2017-9, in which New York is significantly safer than the US average, and a breakdown into urban, suburban, and rural areas, in which in the late 2010s urban and suburban areas had a similar crime rate, both higher than rural areas, whereas in 2022-3 this reverted to urban areas being somewhat more dangerous.
1. How can you be so certain it is not the chain? Americans ride transit at lower rates than Europeans, even when level of infrastructure/service is comparable or close – you yourself have noted this many times. Crime isn’t necessarily the answer (other causes could be urban form or higher gas taxes or just plain cultural differences stemming from the 1950’s when Europe was poor and rebuilding from the war but the US was so rich that even the lower class could afford a car), but it could be. Plenty of people say that transit expansion is a waste of money because of lower ridership/high cost per rider, just because they don’t explicitly identify crime (or more accurately in this case the perception of crime) as the cause of the lower ridership doesn’t mean that there isn’t some cause, or that crime isn’t it.
Also, in many cases people do explicitly associate transit with crime. There is a very distinct crime/class/race element to how transit is perceived in Atlanta, which results in suburban residents calling MARTA “Moving Africans Rapidly Through Atlanta” and has absolutely prevented its expansion to those suburbs. The multi-decade pause of the LA D-line down Wilshire Blvd was a result of Westside residents getting Representative Waxman to block it back in the 80’s and 90’s when the perception of “other parts of LA” in popular culture was of gang shootings, car jackings, the Rodney King riots, etc. In the 2000’s when the urban renaissance was underway and crime had dropped the same Congressman got legislation passed to remove his own ban and now the D-line will begin opening next year.
I’ll note that in the link article Noah Smith also states that people HAVE explicitly told him that crime/disorder is a hinderance to dense, walkable transit cities.
The Atlanta and LA examples again show why constant reference back to NY isn’t helpful. NYC already has the urban form Noah is arguing for and plenty of transit, his article referenced wanting to see changes in SF, Seattle, Houston, etc. If NY is not building transit for reasons other than crime, that doesn’t mean other places are not building it because of concern for crime. You acknowledge transit expansion is controversial is less liberal cities, and that’s exactly the kind of places Noah is talking about. Also, I’m not sure people see NY as especially dangerous. Chicago is the city most commonly brought up in popular culture as overrun by crime because of its higher murder rate and propensity for big shootouts on holiday weekends, more astute observers will note that the highest murder rates are found in midwest or rust belt cities like St Louis, Phila. and Baltimore.
2. “this reverted to urban areas being somewhat more dangerous.” That’s one way to put it. A more accurate way is that in 2022-23 major violent crime was double in urban areas that rural and more than a third higher than suburban areas, property crime (remember Noah was talking about disorder not just crime per se) in urban areas was double suburban and four times the rate of rural areas. Those are big jumps.
“except that probably the violent crime rate here is comparable to that of the US,” Do you have anything to back this up? The murder rate in the US is absolutely higher, about double Europe as a whole and even higher compared to Western Europe, and murders are so widely and consistently reported that you don’t need a crime survey to find the correct rate. Almost every list I’ve ever seen has the US with higher rates of specific crimes (robbery, assault, etc.) higher than almost any European country (with exceptions like Sweden listing all sexual crimes as “rape” leading to the “Sweden has the highest incidence of rape in the world” trope). You are correct that actual crime is higher than reported crime, but do you have any evidence for the argument that Europeans fail to report crime at a much higher rate than Americans?
1. In Georgia, there’s extensive evidence that there’s racism leading to underinvestment in transportation. But it’s not just MARTA, but also the road network – Atlanta has an underbuilt freeway network by the standards of Houston and Dallas, and this comes from the state’s hostility to the city. It’s not quite about crime, because on the NCVS’s state data, Georgia has the second lowest violent crime rate of the 22 largest states.
In Los Angeles, despite considerable NIMBYism, complaints about crime are not central to the self-justification of why not to build more infrastructure or housing. I’m sure the white NIMBYs are also racist, but they don’t say “we can’t build housing because of crime” but rather make a litany of New Left excuses. On subway investment, the problem is if anything the opposite of NIMBYism: local elites in each section of the county want a piece of rail investment as pork spending, and as a result, it’s impossible to focus investment in areas where there’s high ridership potential.
In the Northeast, the main reason people give for leaving central cities for suburbs is not crime but schools. This is a combination of real mismanagement in the urban districts and poor perceptions due to demographics (for example, Lexington, MA apparently doesn’t teach phonics, but remained a desirable district for demographic reasons, whereas at NYCDOE, teacher resistance to phonics was widely publicized).
2. There’s The Burden of Crime in the EU, but as I said, it’s 20 years out of date and I haven’t seen more recent EU-wide surveys. There are national crime surveys that you can compare with the NCVS, but I’m not going to make anyone go read this many countries’ surveys.
Of note, the survey has Sweden with a very high sexual assault rate, by a comparable EU-wide methodology, going back to the 1990s. It’s just really hard for Swedes (or other Nordics – Denmark isn’t any better on this, and Norway is probably the same) to accept the notion that their culture is worse than others, so they make up excuses like that it’s the fault of immigrants.
Comparing things other than murder is also hard because crime is categorised differently. The British include common assault (i.e. one punch or even pushing if the police are involved) under violent crime – but other countries don’t. In the US you have to be in hospital for several days I think?
No real comment on other countries in Europe but my general impression is that our police are less corrupt here in the UK than the US.
It’s not crime per-say but on perception of crime I did find America cites were a lot more racially segregated in the late 2000s than Britain, and that there were a lot more homeless.
@Alon, with regards to immigration. I was reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_Denmark due to their strict immigration controls and Denmark having less of a problem with the far right.
The figures in that Wikipedia article are extremely damning about employment rates and working age benefits used by Danish immigrants.
There are figures on crime too on that page, and unfortunately immigrants do in fact commit more crime, perhaps because they are much less likely to be working.
No, immigrants are arrested and prosecuted at higher rates in the Nordic countries. Whether they commit significantly more crime is unknown, and white Nordics get mad when someone points out to them that their criminal justice systems may possibly be biased. One big sanity check on this is that Sweden’s surveyed sexual assault rate has risen in the last 20 years but by a lot less than you’d expect if the “non-European immigrants commit rape at 10x the rate of people without migration background” line were anywhere close to true.
The benefits line has the problem of not looking at retirement benefits properly; you can also find American thinktanks that try to say illegal immigrants use up resources and never mention that they’re ineligible for Social Security but their employers generally do pay payroll taxes on them.
And re Denmark and the far right, that line is pretty bullshit. Denmark right now has two extreme right parties splitting the vote – the Danish People’s Party (O) and the Denmark Democrats (Æ) – so each of them is doing worse than peers in countries with just one far right party. But collectively, they perform similarly to their Nordic peers. In the EP election in 2024, Æ got 7.4% and O got 6.4%, collectively a bit better than the Sweden Democrats (13.2%) and a lot better than the Finns Party (7.6%). In current polls for the next national election, SD is averaging around 19%, Æ around 10-11% and O around 5-6%, PS 15%, and FrP 22-28%, so Denmark is a bit below Sweden and a bit above Finland. For that matter, AfD here is polling around 19% right now and got 15.9% in the EP election.
The main conclusion from this is that the Wikipedia articles about immigration to X where X is a Nordic country are written by racists. Compare the focus with the immigration to the US article, which goes into much more detail about descriptive statistics rather than rattling off a list of social problems that may or may not be related (like that immigration to Sweden article that mentions Sweden’s rape rates, which, as I pointed out to Onux just now, predate mass immigration to Sweden).
I would have thought it was best to compare between countries with European Parliament groupings.
I.e.
Renew – centre
EPP – centre right
ECR – right wing (where the UK Conservatives sat, the Brothers of Italy and the Denmark Democrats sit)
PfE – hard right (where the Danish People’s Party and France national rally sits)
ESN – far right literal nazis (where AfD sits)
Great essay. A couple of random notes.
Many American suburban transit systems are entirely crime free. Theor primary role is to connect seniors to the library and medical center. They’re terribly funded and run terrible schedules. The safety of them has not yielded better political support.
Glad to see you mention Latin America. Most Latin cities have extremely vibrant public spaces, dense commerce, and highly used transit systems. In most cases, both petty and violent crime rates are much higher than NYC. The crime changes how people behave but people do not stay hiding at home.
One thing unmentioned is that the antisocial behavior you see in US cities is all over suburban ones… On the road. Google Texas road rage and marvel at how many incidents involve guns.
They get door-to-door medical transport, if they request it. The once-an-hour bus wanders into the supermarket, big box store, mall etc because they can’t use medical transport to go buy groceries.
Tangential but what the hell is up with this MichaelAArouet guy? Seems he has a massive hate boner for Germany and spends all his time spreading misleading exaggerated doomerism about the country and Europe.
Western Europe, especially Northern Europe, is the only large(-ish) part of the world that genuinely doesn’t look up to the United States, is where a lot of this comes from.
There is the whole question of whether being homeless, lying on the sidewalk, is a crime. Gov Gavin Newsom is using recent Supreme Court rulings to “change his tune” and remove the homeless from urban areas (note that suburban/rural areas typically have near-zero homeless folks). The homeless congregate in transit hubs and on public transit, which typically doesn’t exist in suburban/rural areas.
I think dining at French Laundry in contravention of an indoor dining ban is a crime, but I evidently have different opinions from most California voters on standards for government behavior.
This was an unfortunate post by Alon which has damaged his credibility.
*their
People will visit the little park at Belleville (for the view over the city, one of prettiest), see the belvedere is covered in graffiti, and conclude the area is a no-go zone. It’s quite silly.
Ditto for the Buttes Chaumont to its north (purely because that one ended up the namesake of a well-known terror cell).
From Berlin, I don’t even get how graffiti is considered an indication of a no-go zone.
Aaand this recently in: Feeling anxious about riding the NYC subway? Here’s a guide for staying safe underground. – Gothamist
“[MTA board member Lisa Daglian] said it’s important to be mindful of what’s going on around you, especially on a narrow platform. While waiting for a train, she said, she likes to find a spot where she can put her back against the wall and she avoids walking on particularly tight stretches.
“If I feel real insecure, I’ll hug a column,” Daglian said.“
This isn’t much of an outlier from the rest of the article, either.
The most violent parts of the US by far are in the rural South, areas with the least public transit, or public anything for that matter.