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.
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.)