The next mayor must get guns off the subway

Philadelphia’s subways are facing existential peril.

People who can choose another mode of transportation are abandoning SEPTA’s Broad Street Line and the El, and the PATCO Speedline, for fear of being shot. This is not something that can be ignored by anyone who thinks they should be mayor.

Average daily ridership on SEPTA’s two subway lines is down to 110,106 from 239,528 in 2019. Many factors have contributed to this decline: COVID-19 and post-COVID shifts in commuting patterns, the use of subway cars as shelters by homeless and people in addiction, the presence of food waste, drug paraphernalia, the odor of marijuana smoke, and the general impoverishment of the cars and stations themselves. The human tragedy of Kensington’s opioid market makes itself present on our already substandard subways day and night.

But nothing ranks with the primal fear of someone opening fire on the subway — a claustrophobic space — without the possibility of escape. For many Philadelphians, this nightmare feels all too possible.

In Philadelphia, SEPTA’s subways, trains, trolleys, and buses — and its stations — add up to a vast public space, at its best profoundly democratic, communal, and social. SEPTA, it may sound rather idealistic to say, can mean freedom, and not just for kids who gain their first taste of independence riding transit. A subway is liberation from car payments, insurance bills, and parking tickets, but not if it doesn’t make you feel safe. As we have seen in schools nationwide and rec centers in Philly, a gun has the capacity to destroy the basic trust needed for the performance of public space.

In recent weeks, a man was shot and critically injured in the PATCO-Broad Street Line concourse early in the morning, a boy was shot in the head late at night outside the 52nd Street El station, a man and a woman were shot in the evening inside the Snyder station of the Broad Street Line, and midday, a man was gunned down inside the Walnut-Locust station.

SEPTA’s response, in case someone should pull out a gun — as far as I can tell — is to instruct riders to use the call boxes to alert police. After last week’s shooting of the boy at 52nd Street, SEPTA spokesman Andrew Busch could have said the agency recognized the danger. He could have indicated that SEPTA, the Mayor’s Office, and the Philadelphia Police Department were urgently prepared to take new measures to ensure this wouldn’t happen again. Instead, as The Inquirer reported, he referred journalists’ questions to the Philadelphia police. This tells me SEPTA is playing a dangerous game of avoidance. It’s a game we’re all about to lose.

It doesn’t have to be this way. In New York City, after a mass shooting on a subway car in Brooklyn one year ago, city and transit officials announced policy changes meant to relieve rider anxiety, reduce the incidence of crime, and avoid another gun-related catastrophe. Since then, there’s been a significant increase in police and trained staff in stations and on subway cars, and a more than 21% drop in crime. Ridership is back up.

Is there some reason we’re not able to produce a similar response in Philadelphia? If the current mayor is incapable of leading, I’d like to know what the mayoral candidates think they can and should do. I’d start by vastly increasing the number of police assigned to the busiest stations, and hire and train hundreds of people as frontline problem-solvers on the cars and on the platforms, well beyond what the transit agency announced in October.

Guns are everywhere in Philadelphia; they’re certainly traveling on SEPTA and PATCO right now. It’s imperative we find a way to get them off of public transit. If not, we can forget any dreams of a free and democratic city.

Nathaniel Popkin’s latest book is “To Reach the Spring: From Complicity to Consciousness in the Age of Eco-Crisis.” He was a cofounder of the Hidden City Daily.