EATING THEIR WORDS
We can’t enforce a subway food ban in a city that’s getting soft on crime
MTA Chairman Joe Lhota came up with a bonkers “brainstorm” last week to speed up the failing subways: Ban riders from eating certain “inappropriate” foods on trains and platforms.
Food on tracks causes fires, like the one that crippled the A,C, B,D,Q, N, Wand R lines one day last week, Lhota said. He cited the carnage caused by a Chinese-food eater he saw on the No. 2 line —“inevitably, the rice fell and it was all over the place,” Lhota said.
Let’s take Lhota’s proposed culinary crackdown on its own goofy terms and ask how he would enforce it:
Would he empanel a team of experts to decide what foods are inappropriate to bring into the catacombs and which are not? Chicken tikka masala’s OK, but not chicken rice biryani? Jokes are easy. Fixing the problem isn’t. Providing more trash cans would be one solution. But for five years the MTA has been removing (!) trash cans on the theory that it would encourage riders to hold onto their garbage. (The agency claims it’s ended the “pilot program.”)
Never mind. The only real way to clean up our pestilent subway pit is to do something that isn’t going to happen: crack down on its increasingly bold abusers.
Food and Styrofoam don’t grow naturally out of the roadbed. They get there because people throw them there.
The vast majority of riders behave responsibly, even when trains are overpacked, sweltering and slow. It takes only a tiny minority to ruin things for everyone else. They’re doing precisely that, emboldened by Mayor de Blasio’s relentless nipping away at “broken windows” policing, aided by the City Council and the courts.
While de Blasio admitted he doesn’t “think it’s fair” to force people not to eat on the subway, he also said that track fires are “a real concern” and that the answer is to “educate people and create some more enforcement.” That’s rich from a guy who’s used every trick he could to hamstring the NYPD — from banning stop-and-frisk to trash-talking cops as “racist.” The NYPD is losing authority to enforce anything in the subway short of assault and murder. Recently, both the Manhattan and Brooklyn DAs said they’ll no longer prosecute turnstile jumpers, who will receive toothless “civil tickets” instead. Now, legal-aid groups are pressuring prosecutors in Queens and The Bronx to do the same, arguing that punishing turnstile jumpers unfairly targets NYC’s poor population, many of whom are immigrants who will be deported for the crime. “We need uniformity citywide on this issue from all local DAs, especially in the era of Trump,” Tina Luongo, head of Legal Aid’s criminal practice, told a local paper last week. This crusade follows the City Council’s removal last year of criminal penalties for “minor” offenses, such as public urination, in favor of small fines. Attention, passen- gers: How can MTA workers or the cops “create more enforcement,” when they’re forced to look away from all kinds of seriously disgusting and/or dangerous antisocial, illegal and/or psychotic behavior — begging, urinating, smoking, “acrobatics?”
I can already hear the howls from the status-quo apologists who hear my complaints. They’ll argue that today’s subways are the Swiss Federal Railway compared with what they were like in the 1970s and ’80s.
Sure, back then, cars were graffiticovered, crime was soaring to levels unknown today and breakdowns were actually much more common.
But if Lhota’s “solution” is typical of his approach to today’s alarming decline, we all know where we’re headed.
Next stop: 1980.