The Challenge of Making New York’s 472 Subway Stations Safer
The New York Times
Three million people a day ride trains in a system with more than 400 stations and 6,000 train cars. Officials hope pouring in more resources and officers can keep them safe.
The scale of the New York City subway system is vast.
Some 472 subway stations, depending how they’re counted. Nearly 6,500 train cars. Roughly three million people crisscrossing through, 24 hours every day.
The effort to protect it has sought to be expansive, too.
Officers had already been working an extra 1,200 daily overtime shifts to patrol the system when officials roughly doubled their presence by deploying an additional 1,000 officers. Then another 1,000 National Guardsmen, State Police troopers and transit officers were added this month, and 800 more police officers this week.
But recent subway attacks have been impossible to predict. Some occurred on moving trains and others on platforms far from the center of Manhattan. Some have happened in the still of night and others during busy rush hours.
Public officials have sought to tamp fears about a string of frightening crimes in the transit network by flooding it with wave after wave of police officers, mental health workers and cameras. But after every deployment, another violent event has followed — statistically rare within the huge system, but still terrifying to individual riders.
