Will the MTA’s new platform screen doors alleviate the public’s fear of subway crime?

The newly proposed platform screen doors may prevent deaths-by-pushing, but they may not be enough to bring back the city’s concerned subway riders.

On January 15, 2022, Michelle Go was waiting at the Times Square subway station for a Saturday morning train. As Martial Simon roamed the platform, he spotted Go near a group of other women and quickly approached her with outstretched arms. He pushed her in front of the R train and she was instantly killed.

At least 72% of NYC subway riders, including newly-installed Mayor Eric Adams, have said they no longer feel safe on the subways. New Yorkers have noticed a rise in violent crime in the subway, a statistic confirmed by the New York Times. The city’s collective fear has, as of 2021, convinced 36% of regular riders to avoid using public transportation.

Deaths on the subway tracks are relatively rare in New York City’s subways (62 in 2019 and 63 in 2020 compared to its roughly 640 million yearly riders) –enough to be consistently dismissed by previous city and state leadership. After a series of pushings in 2013, Mayor Bloomberg shot down New Yorkers’ concerns, saying, “It is such a rare occurrence that no matter how tragic it is, it shouldn’t change our lifestyle.” The Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) even released an over-3,000 word report on platform screen doors, concluding that the doors were infeasible thanks to a plethora of design challenges.

On February 21, after years of urging from transit safety advocates, the MTA announced they would be installing platform screen doors in three New York City subway stations as part of a pilot program to test the doors’ feasibility. These doors, which are already widespread in much of Asia and Europe, would act as glass and metal barriers between the subway platforms and tracks, potentially preventing deaths like Webdale’s and Go’s.

Every few years, after high-profile waves of subway murders-by-pushing in NYC, calls for platform screen doors hit the mainstream media. However, like clockwork, the idea is shut down by MTA officials, either for reasons of cost, because of design difficulties, or for no reason at all. However, Go’s recent death has caused heightened anxiety around subway attacks–particularly among Asian Americans, who have witnessed hate crimes skyrocket in recent years. This anxiety has led to unprecedented public support of platform barriers, especially in the form of petitions.

Shortly after Michelle Go’s death, Jimmy Yang, a 23-year-old consultant from Harrison, New Jersey, started a Change.org petition urging the mayor and the NYC Transit Authority President, Craig Cipriano, to install platform screen doors in NYC’s subways. As a consultant working in the city, he frequently took the train to Manhattan and knew its subway systems well.

Yang doesn’t consider himself an activist, but felt helpless after hearing of Go’s murder. “I felt shocked and it was just so senseless. I still don’t understand why this had to happen,” Yang said.

Yang liked to travel before the pandemic, and has visited several Asian cities. In those cities, he remembered seeing almost ubiquitous platform screen doors and recalled seeing the doors in JFK Airport’s AirTrains. When his college friends studied abroad in Europe and mentioned seeing those same doors, Yang realized the U.S. was an outlier when it came to subway design and safety.

Since his petition went live, Yang has accumulated over 3,000 signatures, and the petition was mentioned in several local news outlets. He said he is happy about the MTA’s pilot program and hopes it will have a concrete impact on subway safety.

Though the platform barrier news has alleviated some stress in Asian Americans’ minds, some experts can’t see the new infrastructure having a significant impact on violent crime.

Lucksika Udomsrisumran, 27, is a Thai grad student living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. As someone who takes the subway daily, she had heard about the MTA’s plan to install platform screen doors, but didn’t have much confidence in them.

“I guess this is the best they could do to avoid any fatalities,” Udomsrisumran said as she waited for the 1 train.

Though she understands the motivation behind the doors’ construction, Udomsrisumran has more confidence in other safety measures, such as Mayor Adam’s controversial homeless relocation plan.

“I was on the 1 train and there was this MTA guy walking around and asking homeless people if they had somewhere to go,” she recounted. “The fact that he was walking around the train to see how everything is, that makes it feel safer.”

Transit expert and NYU professor Mitchell Moss agreed that the platform screen doors could only do so much to improve subway safety. For one, the MTA’s project is already severely limited by the subways’ architecture.

“The older [subway] lines have very narrow platforms,” he said, “and having these guard doors on the train would cut down space on the platform dramatically. It’s not going to be possible at every station.”

Moss approved of the platforms as a temporary solution in some high-traffic stations, but was more concerned with the “antisocial behavior” of the (often mentally ill) homeless population residing in the subways.

“The [NYC] subways bring people together in a way that nothing else does,” Moss said. “You get on a plane and they’re patting people down, but there are 150 more people in a subway car than there are on an Airbus plane. So the whole [subway] system is built on trust.”

The COVID-19 pandemic may have broken much of the public’s trust in the subways, but the increased number of subway crimes has only exacerbated that mistrust. Only a small minority of homicides in 2021 (5%) were “random” — where the victim doesn’t know the perpetrator. However, the unpredictability of subway attacks has the city on edge. “When crime occurs on the subway, everyone feels it because everyone rides the subway,” Moss said.

However, Moss observed, the new mayor, governor, and NYCTA president present a unique opportunity for subway reform because of their aligned agendas, which include removing homeless people from subways and heavy utilization of the NYPD. Moss believes that to rebuild the public’s trust in the system, this tough-on-crime attitude is necessary.

“We have a problem with antisocial criminal behavior,” Moss said. “That is not going to be solved just with some platform doors.”