For 20 years the safety of US mass transit systems remained about the same. In the pandemic year of 2020 the injury rate went up by half and the death rate more than doubled.
The change in 2020 is explicable as related in some way to COVID. But why have death and injury rates stayed so high since? The number of transit journeys has fallen in half during this time, but the absolute number of deaths has increased by a quarter.¹ This makes no sense. What's going on?
¹The absolute number of injuries has gone down, but not as much as the number of journeys. Thus the rate has increased.
I'd guess it's a spill over from increased gun violence.
alas, I don't see types of "assault" broken down...
https://www.bts.gov/content/reports-violent-crime-property-crime-and-arrests-transit-mode
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Seems most likely due to to the overall number of trips going down substantially, and the passengers that stopped using the system were generally in a lower risk group.
That was my first thought, too. Ability to work from home correplates with level of education. The most careful people are also those who have returned most slowly to transit use. In essence the socieoeconomic status of American transit riders is lower, perhaps sharply so, compared to 2019.
What would be the mechanism by which some people are at a higher risk from using public transit than other people? By definition, they aren't driving. Transit systems that I am familiar with do not have seat belts or other safety devices that some people might opt not to use. If the bus/train is less crowded, fewer riders will be standing in the aisles, putting themselves at greater risk.
What would be the mechanism by which some people are at a higher risk from using public transit than other people?
Poorer people are more likely to be in poor health. So they're more likely to suffer strokes or heart attacks while on the bus. They're more likely in general to be victims of crime. They're more likely to be suffering serious substance abuse issues (so a higher incidence of overdoses).
If you reduce the income levels of transit users, the resulting ridership mix is going to be less healthy and more vulnerable to physically harmful occurrences of all kinds.
For riders of transit, the greatext risks come from being drunk/high (OD, falling in front of the vehicle, etc.) Then there are the people involved in criminal activities (gang member targeted by rivals, drug deal gone bad, etc.)
Office workers commuting to work very rarely fall into those categories.
Then you have the people hurt/killed who aren't on transit themselves. Per trip deaths are radically different when the motorcyclist hits an empty bus vs a full bus even though it is one death in both cases.
As someone who has been on transit when an accident occurs, I can say that the bus or train is so massive, the transit riders on the vehicle rarely suffer much damage. For bus/train passengers to die in an accident, it is usually a freeway crash, driving off a cliff, train derailment, or hitting another huge vehicle (train, other bus, etc). Those are rare events compared to a car plowing into a bus, or a pedestrian getting hit by a train.
Also my thought. It's selection bias.
Are the answers in the footnotes to the linked graph?
It looked like incidents had fallen, but serious deaths/injuries risen? If so, seems like all crime lately, people aren't reporting, cops aren't responding or reporting, so only the serious (un-ignorable) incidents that leave dead people, giant pools of bodily fluids get recorded.
(Like "crime" being down the past few years, while "murder" went up).
What about trains and trams and buses hitting or being hit by drunk/crazy drivers? (Drivers have been acting crazy the past few years).
What about opioid overdoses that happen on trains and buses and stations, wonder if they are counted?
The number of riders went down but not the number of trips. There is probably risk base based on trips alone.
That makes sense if (as I suspect) most of the deaths and injuries are buses hitting cars, bikes, or pedestrians. An almost empty bus hitting a bike is a lot more deaths or injuries per trip than a full one hitting the same bike.
The number of riders went down but not the number of trips.
The number of trips didn't decline? What are you basing this on?
But why has the absolute number of fatalities increased?
Ridership is up.
It would be very interesting to see how the number of trips is being measured. Is it purely done by fares collected or are they looking at some other metric?
Maybe it's not a big enough phenomenon to have an effect here, but my sense is that the pandemic upended a lot of social rules, especially by making it clear that law enforcement generally didn't give a shit about enforcing most of those rules. You see it on the roads with people driving more like maniacs, and you see it on mass transit with more widespread fare evasion. If fare evasion is leading to much more significant undercounting of ridership than there was pre-2020, it's possible for incidents/"trip" to appear to dramatically increase even though transit isn't really any more dangerous than before - it's just that the denominator is inaccurately low and we aren't measuring the true number of trips taken.
I haven't been on mass transit in a very long time. Those poor bastards.
LA Times suggests fentanyl is an issue on the LA metro. I really have no idea
LA Times suggests fentanyl is an issue on the LA metro.
Definitely not just a problem in LA.
My wife believes, and I tend to agree, more than we think is a result of post-COVID and long COVID brain fog. For a good couple of months post-COVID, most folk have some level of brain fog/distraction… the kind of thing that makes you forget to look both ways before crossing, for example.
The numerator remained basically the same* while the denominator fell dramatically. (Transit agencies have been experiencing dramatic losses - upwards of 30-90% loss in ridership - and thus are slashing service too.)
*Suicides remained the same or slightly increased as Covid increased social isolation and made it difficult to receive mental health treatment. Violent crimes remained the same or slightly increased as fewer witnesses were around to inhibit wannabe criminals from attacking a victim. And accidents remained the same as buses continued to hit pedestrians at about the same rate and trains continued to jump the tracks at about the same rate.
they changed the methodology in 2022...
The effect on total incidents that Kevin is concerned about is due to the lower number of trips. The actual number of incidents looks about as expected - a drop in the pandemic and recovery afterwards. Thus the most obvious explanation is a change in how the trips are counted. This may be permanent as it did not disappear as ridership went up.
The raw number of incidents behaved about the same in all types of transportation and the number of trips went down the same way in all types of transportation, so any explanation involving phenomena in some particular type is implausible.
I have to wonder if somebody made a gross error in handling the data.
The secular increase in deaths in the raw data is something else. Deaths are hard to miscount.
"I have to wonder if somebody made a gross error in handling the data.
The secular increase in deaths in the raw data is something else. Deaths are hard to miscount."
just don't tell that to Gov DeSantis who hid untold deaths caused by Covid