This post is in response to a reader's comment on yesterday's Portland MAX article.
The United States has long associated public transportation with a transport method of the poor. A major concern about building a new rail line is the crime that mass transit could potentially bring to neighborhoods. Many argue that light rails and subways give inner-city thugs, gangs, and offenders an easy way to reach other areas, therefore spreading their offenses to neighborhoods served by the train.
Last year, a Portland man was beaten with a baseball bat at a light rail station in Gresham and a teenager was stabbed at a nearby station. Gresham sees that 84% of gang related crimes occur within a quarter mile of the MAX light rail tracks. But, 16.6% of Gresham's residents are below the poverty level (which is a higher percentage than Seattle, San Francisco, and the city of Portland), according to the U.S. Census Bureau, so socio-economic factors could be the main reason for crime, not the trains. Contrarily to Gresham, Beaverton (on the same line as Gresham), which opened its four MAX stations in 1998, has seen an overall crime decrease in the last decade, undermining the argument that trains lead to an increase in crime. This doesn't mean that trains are crime-free (note that highways also provide a fast escape for lawbreakers); the point of this post is to show that there are several other more important factors needed to be considered before jumping to the conclusion that mass transit leads to an increase in criminal offenses.
Preventing crime from entering a transit system is possible. The MAX remains widely accessible with its lack of faregates and scarcity fare inspectors, who usually 'filter' out those who do not pay fares. TriMet plans to add more security cameras and security guards in stations and trains in order to achieve the agency's goal of being the country's safest transit system.
