Broken Subway, Broken Empire

The New Center: A Wednesday Newsletter From Sohrab Ahmari

Like many New Yorkers, I began to keep away from the subway sometime during the pandemic—and stayed away for good. But on Tuesday afternoon, necessity forced me to become a straphanger once more, and the experience instantly reminded me of why I don’t bother with the underground. The system is broken in a profound way. It’s a national and international embarrassment. And its reality should give second thoughts to American triumphalists.

Even before the pandemic, I wasn’t exactly a regular rider. This was because walking to my jobs at News Corp. HQ (Midtown West) from my apartment (Midtown East) took about the same amount of time on foot as it did in the underground. Then Covid crashed on American shores. Having insisted on coming in to the office in the pandemic’s earliest days, I was one of a handful of New York Post employees whose building passes were kept active throughout; I was “grandfathered in” somehow. But after a while, having a ginormous, eerily empty office nearly all to myself lost its allure, and I became a work-from-home guy like most everyone else.

Still, there were other places to go in those months and years. Riding the subway, however, became an unattractive option. As my Post colleagues and the columnists I oversaw at the paper’s op-ed section reported, crime—both serious crime and lifestyle nuisances—was rising underground. The murder rate in the subway system has continued to spike since then, soaring 60 percent year-on-year just this month to come close to a 25-year record. But in those (pandemic) days, the perception of insecurity was even more pronounced, as essential workers would recount being alone and overwhelmed by the seriously mentally ill and other people who should have been confined but instead used the trains as shelter, toilet, and drug den.