Above ground on Times Square in Manhattan, Mayor Eric Adams honors Sean “Diddy” Combs presenting him with “Keys to the City” despite the rapper’s history of arrests and legal troubles. Diddy will soon go on trial there for sex trafficking and racketeering.  

Meanwhile, below ground New York City appears to continue to tolerate that bad boy sport of hopping over subway turnstiles to avoid paying fares! What’s going on? Is Manhattan becoming a messier MADhattan?

Didn’t Mayor Adams have enough problems on his plate with Federal prosecutors investigating him to be honoring law breakers.  Is it true the mayor conspired with the Turkish government to funnel illegal foreign donations into his campaign?  

Breaking news! Now the mayor has been indicted on federal charges of bribery, conspiracy, fraud and soliciting illegal foreign campaign donations and the news is the Feds have been seeking information about interactions with five other countries, Israel, China, Qatar, South Korea and Uzbekistan. Ouch!

How quickly Mr. Mayor has gone from honoring Ditty to plunging into his own donation’s ditch in becoming the first mayor in modern New York City history to be charged while in office.

Meanwhile below ground more people in New York City are jumping turnstiles, according to the same, ever-inquiring newspaper which I read every day in Florida as I’m a former curious former journalist myself at The Philadelphia Inquirer. 

While not exactly a new phenomenon, turnstile jumping is becoming more unsettling to urban dwellers these days contending with a whole lot more. It’s happening where once upon a time I occasionally rode the subway myself to 30 Rockefeller Plaza when I was VP at NBC in what was then a reasonably orderly Manhattan, provided I didn’t try to ice skate in the huge rink in front of my office.  

From what I’m reading these days, I can’t help thinking underground Manhattan is more like MADhattan reading stories in The New York Times bearing headlines “Not an orderly place.”   

So, I guess it’s a little crazier these days as Trump keeps emphasizing with so many immigrants flocking there than it once was a few decades ago when I relocated there, an immigrant from southern New Jersey. Back then everything was calm and orderly.  Fellow subway riders were mostly well behaved, stonily silent and respectful of one another to the point of even giving an older rider their seat, which today would probably produce applause, or start a riot.  

So, I never felt personally the malaise reporters are describing in stories about the so obvious lawlessness there today caused by a surging and blatant transit fare evasion I’m seeing in photos accompanying articles in the Times. 

I’m a loyal subscriber ever grateful to the paper for publishing speeches I wrote for clients when I was doing PR in The Big Apple.  

A survey last year reported only 49 percent of daytime subway riders said they felt safe, down from 82 percent in 2017.

Evasion roots

In the 1980s when I was living in Manhattan, fare evasion was not uncommon. People would jump turnstiles, or squeeze through the gate together at Shea Stadium to save a buck.  To many it seemed like a normal New York thing to do until came the crackdown.  As part of the city’s crackdown on crime in the 1990s, the subway system became a cleaner and safer place with few people jumping turnstiles in the early 2000s. 

Apparently not anymore

For the past few years, fare beating has become a popular sport again which powerless transit workers watch but do little about.  Even New York City buses are experiencing similar statistics as reportedly people skip paying the fare on nearly half of all bus rides in the city.  According to the M.T.A. about a million riders ignore the system’s most basic rule every weekday. This evasion has become a major financial problem as the transit system depends on fares for revenue. The trend has also created a sense of chaos.  The chief executive of the transit system known as M.T.A. says fare evasion creates a sense of lawlessness.The subways have indeed become less orderly and violent crime, per subway rider, has risen sharply since 2019, as Nicole Gelinas has written in Times Opinion. 

Two big reasons

Covid is part of the explanation. The transit system suspended some fare collection in 2020, which fed a notion that paying was optional. Society’s long pandemic shutdowns contributed to a malaise from which the country is still recovering. But M.T.A. says Covid isn’t the only cause of fare evasion — because it began rising sharply in 2017, not 2020, wrote David Leonhardt in The New York Times, which inspired me to write this blog. 

The Manhattan district attorney in 2017 stopped pursuing most fare evasion cases, and Brooklyn took similar steps, he reported. Still, I miss Manhattan and the excitement of living and working there. But I think next time I’m in the city, I’ll probably take Uber, a cab or just walk to get around in the city.