Tuesday’s Headlines: Sean Duffy is Anti-Safety Edition

Come for the analysis of last week’s dustup between Rep. Jerry Nadler and U.S Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, but stay for Justin Fox’s expert analysis on why the car-brained federal government is just dead wrong on the actual risks faced by commuters.

Nadler, as you recall from last week, ripped into Duffy for lying about how dangerous the subway is. But, writing for Bloomberg, Fox points out that even if the subways are as unsafe as Duffy believes they are, he’s still on the wrong side of the safety debate because being in a car is always going to be less safe than being on the subway.

“It is awful and unacceptable that 10 people were murdered in the subway system in 2024. Convert that to the standard way of measuring mortality risk, deaths per 100,000 population, and the risk for someone who rode the subway 500 times in 2024 is 0.4 in 100,000. … The risk of being murdered underground is … orders of magnitude less than the risk of dying from a traffic accident [sic] elsewhere in the U.S,” Fox wrote. “Cars are deadly, and any transportation policy that encourages their use over public transportation is pretty much by definition anti-safety.”

Of course, that’s not how Duffy sees it. Though he has made some light chirping about creating a safer transportation system, Duffy has devoted virtually all of his considerable bluster towards depicting the subway as a dangerous place. And, as Kea Wilson has pointed out repeatedly on Streetsblog USA, Duffy holds the car as a sacred American value, something he’d place just after the Second Amendment, I’d say.

And he has consistently lied about congestion pricing, casting it as an attack on poor drivers when, in fact, the people paying the toll to drive into the most-transit-rich area of the city are, on average, richer than their transit-using neighbors.

Speaking of unsafe streets that are crying out for fewer cars and better road design, we got a second-day story out of the weekend carnage on Canal Street. (Does Sean Duffy honestly believe Canal Street is safer than the subway? He likely does.)

In other news from what turned out to be a slow day for the mainstream press:

• Why is Mayor Adams working with Citizen to make New York City seem less safe than it is? Hell Gate wants to know.
• Another reckless hit-and-run driver sowed fear and chaos in the Bronx (NY Post)
• More pain is coming for G train riders. (NY Post)
• A driver of a Jeep runs a stop sign without so much as slowing down … and Tom Wrobleski — the Reaper of the Rock — blames the cyclist who was nearly killed. (SI Advance)
• On the other hand, it’s nice to see the Orthodox press not find a way to blame a cyclist when someone runs a red light and causes a bus crash. (BoroPark24)