As the traffic jam toll pain sets in, MTA boss Janno Lieber insults us about subway crime

MTA boss Janno Lieber seems determined to infuriate the entire city.

First, he celebrated Saturday’s start of the much-despised $9 “traffic jam” toll to enter Manhattan below 60th Street at midnight.

On Monday, the first day of commuting under the new toll, he then used a “Bloomberg Surveillance” interview to… . Gaslight against subway crime.

“Some of these high-profile incidents, horrific attacks, have gotten into people’s minds and made the whole system unsafe.”

In people’s minds. Feel.

Is there anything more insulting than “it’s just your imagination”?

He then doubled down on his statement and boasted: “The overall statistics are positive. Last year we actually had 12½% less crime than 2019, the last year before COVID.”

First, ridership is still down more than 12½%, so overall crime per capita is still rising high.

It’s also believed that crime is reported as often today as it was back then, although the difficulty of comparing crime statistics is one reason experts call homicides the gold standard for measuring crime – they always leave a body behind.

And the subways produce one much more bodies these days: 43 in the last few years since COVID struck in March 2020; it took the prior 20 years to sum up so many.

Additionally, the total number in 2024 was higher than the previous two years, so the underground murder rate is not uniform drop.

And it got worse: Lieber next spoke of tax evasion, which is in fact a “hate crime” of subway disruption and danger – but he acted as if spending up to a billion on new turnstiles would be one would make a real difference if tests had shown this to be the case tilt.

The only The answer lies in better policing and serious law enforcement, not in burning money on bogus technocratic solutions (including the millions of dollars wasted on that absurd “personas” study of valedictorians).

At a time when New Yorkers are suffering from the MTA’s toll-grabbing, Lieber first called attention to, and then bragged about, the subway’s main problem: crime dumb MTA spending that clearly won’t help.

A word of advice, Janno: Instead of digging deeper, call out the politicians who actually caused this crisis.