Why Are Buses And Intracity Rail In The U.S. So Crime Ridden?

The biggest reason for low bus and intracity rail usage in the United States by international standards is that crime in and around transit is high and these means of transportation don't feel safe. It is a long standing issue, and it isn't nearly such a serious problem in countries all of the world. 

Israelis, for example, packed buses in the course of living their every day lives, even when suicide bombers were terrorizing those buses.

A recent Denver Post story quantifies and characterizes the problem in Denver's transit system.

When Denver resident Jana Angelo rides the Regional Transportation District’s buses and trains, she feels trapped and says she sometimes hugs herself for fortitude.

She’s smelled fumes from passengers smoking fentanyl. She’s heard unhinged riders’ rants. Two “really high” men once fought right in front of her, said Angelo, 29.

“I was like, ‘Stop the bus!’ ” she said. “But the driver did not.”

Angelo packs a knife just in case, she said, and wears headphones, avoiding conversation. . . .

Passengers on RTD’s buses and trains were assaulted or threatened at the rate of one per day over the last three years, according to agency records obtained by The Denver Post. RTD drivers also are assaulted regularly — more than 100 times a year on average since 2019, records show — as they work amid crime and antisocial behavior, including riders using illegal drugs and unhoused people who sleep in station elevators and on climate-controlled buses and trains. 

. . .

The agency’s general manager, Debra Johnson, acknowledged the problems and said ensuring safety is critical. She’s discussed rising violence and crime in public transit with her counterparts in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles.

“We’re all adversely impacted by the same elements of society,” Johnson said in an interview, referring to mental health problems, substance use and homelessness. “These are societal issues. Whatever’s happening in a municipality is going to spill over into the transit system. What are we collectively doing to help minimize and mitigate these societal issues?” 

. . .

RTD bus driver Dan Day, 43, recalled how, on a cold day in 2020 during his first year on the job, he saw a man down, bleeding from his head, while another man kicked him at the Decatur Station along Federal Boulevard.

Day took the bleeding man onto the bus and handed him paper towels. As he steered the bus around the station, the attacker approached it, pointing a gun. He climbed on, aiming the barrel at the bleeding man. Day was caught between them, learned it was a dispute about a sister, and brokered a truce.

“I had a sense he wouldn’t shoot,” Day said. “…I was just trying to follow procedure, to call dispatch, let them know what happened.”

RTD supervisors offered him therapeutic counseling. He declined, turning instead to classic stoic philosophers: “My own tools to just cope with scary and difficult situations,” Day said. “Keep yourself in the moment. This is just a moment in time. It is going to pass.” 

. . .

RTD bus drivers and train operators were physically assaulted 463 times between January 2019 and April 2024 — a rate of roughly seven assaults per month, according to the records obtained by The Post through a Colorado Open Records Act request.

In addition, drivers have reported 501 verbal assaults and threats of violence since 2021 — a dozen per month on average, the records show.

Assaults and threats targeting RTD passengers happen more often, according to the records. Since January 2021, 1,375 passengers have experienced physical assaults and verbal threats along bus and rail routes, records show. That’s an average of 34 a month over the past three years.

The troubles appear concentrated along busy streets including Colfax Avenue, Broadway and Federal Boulevard.

RTD’s transit police have been busy. The agency’s tallies show that, during the first half of 2023, transit officers made a monthly average of 36 arrests. They responded to a monthly average of 60 assaults, 486 disturbances, 1,206 drug-related incidents, 389 trespasses and 58 instances of vandalism, according to an agency document.

This year, a homicide on an RTD bus in west Denver heightened concerns. A 13-year-old boy has been charged with murder in the fatal shooting on Jan. 27 of a 60-year-old grandfather whose leg was blocking an RTD bus aisle.

Illegal drug use happens almost daily, drivers and train operators say. 

. . .

Light rail operator Roy Martinez, who previously worked as a bus driver and endured assaults, said he regularly smells illegal drugs on light-rail trains such as the E Line that connects downtown Denver with the south suburbs.

Typically, a rider places a fentanyl pill on a piece of foil and crushes it. Then the rider lights the powder and, hunkering under a hood or blanket, inhales the fumes.

Those fumes rise and spread through the train’s air system, Martinez said, noting he detects odors inside the locked front cabin where he runs the train. There’s no option but to push through to the next stop. “Then you stop the train, open the doors, air it out,” he said.

From the Denver Post.

The story presents a mix of questions and answers, some tucked away behind the scenes.

One obvious issue is that the U.S. has a weak social safety net, and the highest percentage of people who drive their own cars, if their licenses aren't revoked, and don't use transit. Transit is disproportionately left with people who are too disabled to drive, people whose licenses have been revoked, and people who are very poor. Even people without licenses who have money often ride share instead.

So, transit is heavily weighted with very poor people and is not well counter-balanced, most of the time, with middle class and more affluent people. It is also heavily weighted with people who have lost driver's licenses due to illegal conduct and substance abuse.

Big cities in the U.S. with transit systems also tend to have riders who lack social cohesion that can impose order through nearly universally held social norms, in lieu of formal law enforcement.

But another issue is that policy makers and people who talk about policy and involved in politics, like me, struggle to understand why people who act in anti-social ways in and around transit are acting the way that they do.

I can completely understand why someone might become addicted to smoking fentanyl. But I can't fathom at all why someone would feel like this is an activity that makes sense to engage in while riding a bus or a light rail train.

I'm comfortable trusting that Debra Johnson, the general manager of Denver's Regional Transportation District has a better handle on what's going on that I do. She blames mental illness, substance abuse and homelessness.

In other words, mentally ill and homeless drug users tend to use drugs on buses and train cars because that's more comfortable than doing it on the streets, under a bridge, or in an alley.

Public libraries, which are one of the few places you can just hang out without paying money, in a place shielded from the weather, face similar problems, although seemingly, fewer violent assaults.

Anecdotally, at least, the assaults seem to be driven by poor people with a lack of an ability to control anger and impulse, and a lack of access in terms of both personal social skills and formal access to other recourse to resolve situations where they feel aggrieved. 

It isn't that working class and middle class people don't often do some of the same things. But they don't do that at bus stops, on buses, and on light rail trains. Driving a car reduces the amount of potentially triggering interactions you have with other people, although even that doesn't stop road rage incidents.

These situations on transit and in urban neighborhoods are something that urban people can't ignore, which is one of the reasons that urban people tend to be more liberal.

The whole situation is also an apt example of what makes illegal drugs a problem that we have invoked the criminal justice system to address, even if it has done a very poor job of it. Most vices, including illegal drug use, are primarily a problem because they are instrumental in creating a "bad neighborhood." 

If drug users were out of sight in an opium den somewhere, and didn't bother everyone else, we'd care less. And, modern opium dens might even be equipped to deal with overdoses and other forms of drug induced anti-social behavior.