What effect that did have is that the train and bus is more empty, but all the bus stops and train stations are clogged with people literally camping out. There is nowhere to sit and wait, because the stop owner either removed the seating or someone is sleeping/camping on the benches already. Every stop is full of skeezy people who have nowhere to go and aren't boarding the bus.
So perhaps the perception of clean/reliable/safe has increased aboard the bus, but it has plummeted at the locations where it really counts: the stops and stations where I spend the most time. I feel notably unsafe when waiting for a bus and there's nothing to be done about there, and there's no recourse because nobody's in charge there (the city will point the finger at transit and transit will point the finger back at the city. LEOs won't touch it because it's not a priority.)
Crime is certainly up, but still you're looking at 1 in a million or less odds to be victim of violent crime on the subway.
And anti-social behavior will problem actually go down as a proportion when there are more people on the subway.
> And anti-social behavior will problem actually go down as a proportion when there are more people on the subway.
I think this also hints at something urbanists aren't very good at reckoning with, which is that people do not experience disorder as a per capita phenomenon. If a drug dealer lives on your block, then that's going to have a big impact on quality of life whether there are 500 people on your block or 50, even though, again, the per capita rates in those two scenarios are quite different.
People have a proximity theory of crime, not a per capita one. That's why appeals to per capita differences in crime rates often fall flat.
This downplays how often you will watch it happen or nearly happen though. It’s unsettling to have a drunk fight break out near you even if you aren’t a “victim”.
I used to ride the Caltrain late at night frequently and I witnessed violence and belligerent behavior >20 times over the period of maybe 400 rides. Only 2 of those resulted in police intervention and only 1 may have been reported as having a “victim”.
All this to say that counting odds of being an official victim of violent crime drastically downplays how much you will see said crime.
You can't just punish people into taking the bus. The years I commuted by bus were terrible. It took 90 mins of bus to replace 40 mins of driving. The buses were extremely crowded (forced standing for 60 mins is unpleasant) and at times dangerous (particularly coming home late at night).
Now, when people advocate for public transit carrots, those carrots have to compete with a century of driving carrots and the momentum that this status quo has.
I lived in northern virginia for a while, literally 100 feet away from a stop on one of the best public transit systems in the US. inside DC sure, the metro was about as fast as an uber, or even faster for some routes / times of day. but starting from across the river, it often took twice as long by metro. I honestly don't see how they could make transit better than uber without running trains so often as to negate the efficiency advantage of bulk transport.
as an engineer, it kinda seems like people are expecting the latency of a synchronous request/reply service, but combined with the throughput of a batch job. surprise! you can't (usually) have both.
imo both point-to-point and mass transit have their place. but people are always going to prefer point-to-point when it's economic for them. congestion pricing seems like a reasonable way to preserve the low latency characteristics of point-to-point, while nudging people to use the batch job when it's sufficient for their needs.