When it comes to urban problem-solving, no American city is as closely watched as the largest one, New York. As it struggles to recover from the pandemic, or rebuilds from a deadly superstorm, or copes with problems like homelessness, crime and a housing shortage, other cities are looking at and learning from its successes and stumbles. That's why it's so important that the effort to make the New York subway system safer is successful, as Nicole Gelinas writes in a deeply reported guest essay for Times Opinion. While no other American city has a subway system even close to the size of New York's, other cities also want to lure riders back to their trains, buses and streetcars, and that's hard to do if people are fearful of public transit. And most cities share New York's desperate need to reduce the related crises of homelessness and mental illness. Gelinas, an expert on urban transit with a forthcoming book on the subject, spent several nights on underground train platforms with mental-health workers and police officers as they test a new strategy to assess people in deep distress and provide them with shelters and care. So far the new approach, which involves using trained medical professionals, has shown promise, but it won't work on its own. As Gelinas shows, it needs to be combined with better traditional law enforcement to reduce fare-beating and assaults, along with firm prosecution to reduce recidivism. One key is to reduce the sense of disorder that often pervades the transit system. As Janno Lieber, the chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, told Gelinas: "If someone smokes where they're not supposed to smoke aboveground, that might be annoying." But "when you're in a subway car, and someone lights up a joint, you say, 'What else might that person do?'" If New York can figure out a way to encourage everyone to follow the rules in shared, crowded and vital public spaces like the subway, other cities might benefit from that knowledge, too. Here's what we're focusing on today:
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Wednesday, August 14, 2024
Opinion Today: If you can make it (safer) here, you can make it anywhere
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