Whose Attitudes Toward Transit Are Most Affected by Rising Subway Crimes in New York City?

This paper aims to understand the public attitude toward crimes in the subway system using social media data. In particular, we focus on the users who tweeted about New York City (NYC)‘s subway crimes in the past two years. The association between the sentiment of the tweets and the demo-graphics of the users is analyzed to better help us understand which population are most affected by the rising subway crimes. We analyze textual contents of Tweets and perform sentiment analysis with a transformer-based tool to gain insight into public attitudes and concerns regarding crimes in the NYC subway system. Negative sentiments, which arise from crimes in subway system, indicate a sense of fear among the public and can consequently result in a decrease in subway ridership. We also accompany such analysis by regression between Twitter users' sentiment and their demographics to better understand whose attitudes toward taking public transit are most affected by these crimes. Such understanding could identify the population who has the most severe concerns about transit safety, and how these concerns affect their willingness to take subway. We find that age, gender and ethnicity are important factors influencing people's sentiments toward crimes. Compared to others, women have more concerns about their safety while riding public transportation in NYC. Such analysis would help better understand the association between rising crimes and people's attitudes toward taking public transit, so as to assist transit planners and policymakers to urgently create a safer environment to recover low transit affected substantially by the pandemic.