In case you don’t check the front page of the New York Post every morning to see the latest on the city’s most heinous crimes (ahem, not that we do) the big story today is about a passenger who was stabbed to death yesterday while riding a Bronx-bound D train, at around two in the morning. The accompanying story is jarring: An altercation between a 36-year-old homeless man and a 37-year-old exterminator resulted in the former’s being stabbed in the jugular and the hand, and then bleeding to death on the train.
The Post coverage is particularly gripping, since it focuses on the experience of the other passengers trapped in the car with a man who had just stabbed another man in the neck. Witnesses started pounding on train doors and one pulled the emergency cord in a panicked attempt to escape. It’s an image that sticks with anyone who takes public transportation: You’re trapped underground in a steel cage with strangers, and there’s nowhere to hide or retreat if someone goes postal.
The story hits the root of a key deterrent for potential mass-transit riders: The other people riding it. Cramming the population of a city like New York into a maze of underground cars creates a forced melting pot that’s a perfect breeding ground for class and race divisions. It calls to mind the famous image of Sherman McCoy in Bonfire of the Vanities describing the lengths he takes to avoid contact with the undesirable masses…by taking cabs. (One can just imagine what the class relations are like on Dubai’s new rail system.)
But ingrained fear of strangers or no, public transit is the most important option for transporting an urban population. The number of people in cities is simply too large, and expanding too rapidly, to rely on cars. Plus there are the emissions and fuel costs that make mass transit a necessity — not to mention the fact that exponentially more people die in car accidents than as prisoners of train-riding psychopaths.
Still, we’re willing to bet that today’s Post headline had at least one would-be subway-rider say, “You know what? I think I’ll drive to work.”
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