Nobody goes to New York City anymore. It’s too crowded.

The subway has problems but remains an incredibly popular means of transit.

On Thursday, December 12, there were 4,527,607 million rides recorded in the New York City subway system, setting a new daily high since the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition, there were 1.4 million rides on buses, 269,000 on the LIRR (which connects Long Island to Manhattan) and 236,000 thousand on Metro-North (connecting the northern suburbs with the city).

But just focus on that subway number for a second. The top all-time days for airline travel in the US have involved about 3 million people passing through TSA security. On an average day in New York so far this year, there have been 3.3 million subway rides. So even post-pandemic, there are more rides on the subway on a typical day in New York than on a record day in the entire American air transit system.

This newsletter is not a hot take; as a now nearly 15-year resident of New York City, I just wanted to provide some perspective. I am sympathetic, to an extent, toward conservative complaints about the condition of America’s largest cities, where Democrats lost a conspicuous amount of ground in November’s election relative to 2020, especially in NYC. There is a lot that one might gripe about, from the high cost of living to crime to illegal immigration to extended school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic to decaying older infrastructure (and/or very expensive new infrastructure).

Of these categories, crime is almost certainly the most fraught since there is a long history of people’s subjective estimates not lining up with official crime statistics. There are various causes for this.¹ On the one hand, crime data can be incomplete if there’s underpolicing or underreporting, especially for minor offenses — though this is usually not considered as much of an issue for homicides (people notice dead bodies). And there was a murder spike in 2020 that the left was often too willing to shrug off during its “defund the police” phase.

But violent crime rates have considerably reverted to the mean since then. And crime can be subject to sensationalism and tabloid-style headlines, particularly in a city like New York with 8+ million people and a hyper-competitive local media market. Three recent events have especially put New York City crime in the news: the alleged murder of UnitedHealthCare CEO Brian Thompson on a busy Manhattan street in broad daylight by Luigi Mangione, and the trial of Daniel Penny, who was recently acquitted of criminally negligent homicide in “the chokehold death of Jordan Neely on a New York City subway car in 2023.” And then a woman was very disturbingly set on fire on the F train this weekend.²

What I object to, though, is the notion that New York is some sort of violent urban hellscape, particularly when the accusation comes from people who don’t live or spend much time here. Let’s keep the rest of this newsletter specific to NYC; I don’t mean to speak to what other cities are experiencing.³

I live on a frankly not-particularly-nice block in a very central part of Manhattan, there are some issues that I don’t mean to pass off as mere nuisances; this summer, for instance, I saw a man passed out right outside my apartment in the middle of an apparent drug overdose. But the base rate of violent crime is relatively low. New York has notably low homicide rates.

That includes the subway, where violent incidents have increased but are very low in absolute numbers: 5 homicides in 2023 out of 1.15 billion recorded rides: your risk of being murdered on the subway in a given year in New York is of roughly the same magnitude as being struck by lightning.

An Elon Musk tweet from yesterday is typical of the hellscape narrative:

Musk’s tweet, pointing toward gridlocked traffic in New York, reminds me of the famous quote by the late, great Yogi Berra: “Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.” Nobody seems to deny that New York is bustling these days: restaurant reservations are as hard to secure as ever, real estate prices in the city are steady after adjusting for inflation, and we actually have a lot of new infrastructure from the West Side redevelopment to the shockingly nice new LaGuardia Airport. Even our sports teams are looking better after what was sort of a lost decade.

Are people afraid to take the subway in New York — or even to walk? I’m sure that some people are. I have the advantage of being a middle-aged white guy who’s lived in big cities his whole adult life and who generally isn’t going to be bothered. However, the broader data suggests that these effects are minor, and it’s unclear whether they are caused by fear of crime. The number of subway rides as measured by the MTA remains below the pre-pandemic baseline, but has steadily recovered, especially in recent months:

Subway traffic plunged to less than 10 percent of its pre-pandemic baselines in April 2020, then recovered in a fairly linear fashion throughout 2021 and 2022. Since then, growth has been slower, but there has been a notable uptick recently, with recent days having rebounded to about 80 percent of the baseline. Given the timing, this likely in part reflects new programs devoted to fare enforcement — which the city took a lax attitude toward after the pandemic, especially on buses. (That might also imply that the real post-pandemic ridership numbers have been higher than reported all along.)

It may take a long time for subway ridership to recover to 100 percent, though, if it ever does. That’s because it reflects two other trends: migration out from the city to the suburbs, and increased tolerance for work-from-home. Ridership data based on the day of the week is revealing:

Weekend ridership has recovered more fully than weekday ridership, reflecting primarily recreation, shopping, etc. rather than commutes to work. Midweek ridership has also notably recovered relative to Mondays and Fridays, days employees with flex schedules are more likely to be working from home.⁴ About 20 percent of workers still work remotely or have hybrid schedules, and although this is concentrated among wealthy white-collar workers, the subway is a relative equalizer in New York: rich people take it too because it’s often the fastest way to get from Point A to Point B.

Is commuter traffic by car higher, as Musk implies? Yes, but only slightly. Bridge and tunnel crossings rebounded to about 100 percent of their pre-pandemic baselines by early 2022, and have remained relatively steady since then — though with an uptick to as high as 106 percent in recent weeks. Even a 6 percent increase could have a noticeable impact given how gridlocked New York is to begin with.

However, trips by commuter rail — the LIRR and Metro-North — have also rebounded in recent months. So basically, you have three different overlapping trends:

1. Overall demand for transit into and around New York City has been high in the second half of this year by all measures, reflecting the ongoing recovery of the city (and perhaps declining tolerance for work-from-home and greater fare enforcement).

2. There’s been a shift in population from the city to the suburbs — so, for instance, LIRR and Metro-North ridership have recovered more fully than the subway, which is limited to the five boroughs, and

3. There’s also still some substitution of auto trips for public transit, but it’s not a huge effect. Commuter rail trips have averaged 84 percent of their pre-pandemic baselines so far in 2024, versus 101 percent for bridge-and-tunnel crossings.

Still, the subway remains the default means of transit in city. Bridge-and-tunnel crossings have averaged about 935,000 per day so far in December — as compared to almost 3.8 million subway rides. There are problems with the subway, both with crime and with the reliability of service, but New Yorkers are a pragmatic lot that will assess the situation based on their daily experiences rather than sensational tweets or headlines.

1. Crime data is not my area of expertise, but we ran enough crime stories during my days editing FiveThirtyEight that I learned the basics.

2. Undoubtedly poor judgment on my part not to include this third incident in the initial draft; I wasn’t sure to what extent the story had become national news as compared to Mangione and Penny stories. But it’s obviously relevant to this subject.

3. Certainly, I was shocked, for instance, at the decrepit conditions in Downtown San Francisco when I visited there during stretches of 2022 and 2023. Though it was confined to a relatively small radius and the situation seems to have improved on more recent visits.

4. Or “working from home”, especially in the summer when they’re taking a de facto three-day weekend.