There is extreme denialism here about the problems of public transit in the United States. Crime goes unpunished. Homeless addicts run amok.

Large groups of people are simply not safe, as police are not empowered to remove problem people.

That happens because the transit isn't used by enough normal people. The need for security personnel doesn't go up with more normal people, when you have the levels Europe has the crackheads etc gets removed from the trains.

You basically ensures your transit system will remain shitty forever, but that is easily fixable. The more good actors that use it the cheaper fixing it gets per person, you can have people who clean and security remove such bad actors at low cost since so small fraction are causing bad events or pissing where they shouldn't. Good people overwhelmingly outnumber bad people in the real world.

you can reduce the per capita rates of incidents by adding normal people, but even in a city like NYC where most households don't own a car, the subway still has an unacceptable amount of non-violent incidents like the aforementioned one (yeah yeah yeah i know the likelihood of dying on public transit is less per mile than driving)