On the blue subway line to Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, there were two men in my car smoking joints. Sitting in a nest of filthy bags, there was a woman whose eyes were dilated and blank. There was also a man barking into the void, shirtless, washing himself with a flour tortilla, which would disintegrate, littering the subway floor, before he took out another and began the same process. This didn’t shock me, or anyone else around me, since I’d seen some variation of this dystopian scene on every Chicago metro line I’d ever ridden, every pedestrian walkway I’d passed through—and almost every community I’ve been to in the United States, save for those gated by wealth.
The numbers confirm it: Federal Transit Administration data puts Chicago Transit Authority’s (CTA) passenger assault rate at roughly 20 per 100 million miles traveled in 2024—more than double every other major system in the country.
