Block That Train
Solving problems is not cheating
A couple of weeks ago, an apparent lunatic shoved Michelle Go, a 40-year-old Asian woman, in front of an oncoming train in a New York City subway station. This, perhaps, is one of those things that makes New York City special.
For those who grew up in the city’s old days (good or bad, depending on whether you enjoyed the frisson of possibly getting mugged), this is familiar. Perhaps those who lived through the crime wave exaggerate just how bad it was, but there’s no question that American cities are in a much better place today. The early ’80s even spawned the sci-fi flick Escape from New York, in which the entirety of Manhattan has become a high-security prison in the future year of…1997. (Predictions are tough, as Yogi Berra said, especially when they concern the future.)
For someone my age, who didn’t grow up afraid of public transit, and for whom the word “urban” was more than a byword for “crime,” this is shocking. In the D.C. Metro, this sort of thing virtually never happens; it isn’t even on the radar. D.C. has a considerably higher crime rate overall than New York City, and yet the Big Apple seems to have some of the most spectacular incidents of criminality. Maybe that’s a mistaken impression, but it’s one I’ve picked up over the years.
The city’s tabloids confirm that getting pushed onto the tracks is a concern that New Yorkers actually have, in a way that I don’t think is true of most cities. Last November, the right-wing New York Post ran the article “How to survive being pushed on the NYC subway,” filed, fittingly, under its “Living” category. Not to be outdone, the left-leaning New York Daily News published “What to do if you fall on NYC subway tracks,” filed, perhaps more fittingly, under “New York.”
One oft-proposed solution to this is physical barriers with doors which only open when the train has pulled up and come to a stop. This is pretty standard across the world. Here, for example, is a subway system in a second-tier Chinese city. Both sets of rails are fully protected.
Why can’t we have that in America?
There are good reasons—it’s harder to retrofit old infrastructure than it is to just build it this way from the start, and because America industrialized long ago, much of our infrastructure is now obsolete.
There are bad reasons—costs are astronomical, for reasons that perhaps nobody fully understands. Some blame unions or even government generally, as though France or Japan or China were libertarian paradises. Others blame corruption, or privatization. Some find a way to blame minorities or the underclass. One of the best attempts to work through this question is this Vox piece by Jerusalem Demsas, titled “Why does it cost so much to build things in America?”
And then there’s an ugly reason: an American tendency to see practical (i.e. “technocratic”) solutions to public problems as somehow suspect or illegitimate. I’ve quoted this bit from a book review I did a few times now, but I keep coming back to it because I think it captures something about the American approach to the very idea of collective, public problems. I was writing about the author’s praise of risk-taking in the context of driving, and the idea that exposing yourself to such risk builds character:
The deeper problem—the problem that this folk libertarianism is congenitally incapable of seeing, much less addressing—is that getting from A to B should not require one to put skin in the game. Crossing the street, or driving it, should not entail a meditation on one’s mortality.
[Matthew] Crawford does something that right-leaning intellectuals do often, and almost never notice. They find justifications for hardship or risk, and praise the character that can face them, without distinguishing between natural or inherent risks and manmade ones. They treat policy failures, or problems easily remediated by policy, as opportunities to build character. They betray a touch of self-loathing masquerading as self-reliance. They implicitly view solving problems through policy as cheating one’s way through a life that is supposed to be difficult.
Sometimes when you suggest subway platform barriers, you’ll get derision: the real problem is that Democrats emptied the psychiatric hospitals 50 years ago. You’ll sometimes hear the same folks laughing at Britain for advocating knives without sharp points, as a way of reducing the incidence of stabbings: the real problem is Muslim immigration. Or at measures to reduce easy gun access, when the real problem is divorce or violent video games or evolution. Or maybe that “real” problem is beyond policy or politics, and simply comes down to the inevitability of human depravity.
“Look at these silly, arrogant, hapless technocrats, their dreams of social engineering crushed against the brick wall of human nature,” we’re supposed to think.
But the more pressing thing being crushed is the occasional body flung onto the unprotected platform.
Yes, human depravity is the root cause of a lot of crime and suffering, and that is built into our nature. Yes, human nature is a chronic condition, and much of the carnage of the 20th century came from the denial of that fact.
Yet there’s something profoundly unconservative about this posture of pointing to a real problem, as though it were necessary to solve the problem of evil before solving—in some workable way with the tools we have now—the much more specific, discrete, and pressing problem.
This is distinct from the concept of harm reduction, which, if you’re being cynical, is about making the wrong thing easier to do. Whatever the merits of harm reduction, I’m talking about something else: solving an immediate problem, and being satisfied enough to do so, even if it leaves some metaphysics on the table. There is nothing wrong with closing off a few easy avenues for the expression of human depravity.
Those who argue against such imperfect, practical, and immediate solutions on vague moral or philosophical grounds are making the perfect the enemy of the good, or merely disguising apathy. And what they end up effectively arguing for is a higher body count.
Related Reading:
A Little Pushback on a Lefty Urbanist Style
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