A report out of Los Angeles regarding the city’s crime rates on its public transportation services is being flagged by a local watchdog in Nashville as a glimpse of what Music City’s future may look like if Mayor Freddie O’Connell’s multi-billion-dollar transit plan is implemented.
O’Connell’s transit plan, “Choose How You Move: An All-Access Pass to Sidewalks, Signals, Service, and Safety,” would be funded by a half-cent increase in the city’s sales tax to construct miles of new sidewalks, bus stops, transit centers, parking facilities, and upgraded traffic signals around Nashville.
While the mayor’s plan originally was priced at $3.1 billion in initial costs and $111 million in recurring costs, a recent audit conducted by the independent accounting firm KraftCPAs showed that the plan would swell to $6.93 billion over the 15-year life of the project.
The mayor’s plan includes making it “more affordable for our most vulnerable populations to take a transit trip” through a “fare subsidy program.”
While the mayor’s proposal says reduced fares for transit rides would “help everyone get on board transit,” Ben Cunningham, the founder of the Nashville Tea Party, says otherwise.
“The problem with free fares is it attracts even more of the criminal element. New York is getting away from free fares because the vagrants and the homeless people would come in, and you couldn’t stop them because the fares were free, and they would camp out on the trains all night long, and crime just went through the roof again. That’s what we’re going to see in Nashville,” Cunningham said on Tuesday’s edition of The Michael Patrick Leahy Show.
“It is a crime scene on wheels and nobody except the homeless folks and the drug users are going to be in there… You think crime’s a problem now, baby, you ain’t seen nothing. People will be even more apprehensive about riding,” Cunningham added.
Cunningham’s argument comes as a report by KTLA 5, a local station out of Los Angeles, California, details how more than 93 percent of the violent crimes perpetrated on the city’s public transit system in a year’s time span were “believed to be committed by people who did not pay a valid fare and were using the transit system illegally.”
“Though public officials have not yet detailed exactly how they hope to combat crime on [the transit system], it’s possible that stronger fare enforcement could be part of the plan,” the local outlet reports.
As in Nashville and other metro areas across the country, Los Angeles’ public transit system has been long plagued with violent crime, as multiple passengers, drivers, and people at transit stations have been robbed, stabbed, and shot, KTLA 5 notes.
– – –
Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Kaitlin on X / Twitter.
