The tragic killing of Jordan Neely—and the tragic situation that everyone on that MTA subway car found themselves in on May 1—has only darkened New York City’s outlook for overcoming pandemic setbacks.

Neely’s death instantly became a cause for young progressives. They want “justice for Jordan” and they want to see Daniel Penny tried for murder, but they are not offering new solutions to the problems that caused this descent for all of us.

Neely’s Harlem funeral was headlined by Al Sharpton, with a stunning ivory and gold casket laid out at the altar above a gold crushed-velvet skirt. The New York Times zoomed in on a huge spray of red roses and white carnations. All the money spent on this event could certainly have helped this man when he was live. But this ritual wasn’t about this man as he lived, because back then he was just another “homeless guy” to people who don’t have to ride the subway to work.

We call out injustice on signs and we stand in front of entrances to institutional authority, but it always turns out to be an opportunity for various people to accrue social capital—like a French or Russian president lying a wreath at the tomb of the unknown soldier. What is the value of social justice activism that doesn’t care about the public welfare or mutual aid?

In reviewing Jonathan Eig’s King: A Life in the New Yorker, Kelefa Sanneh notes that Martin Luther King’s “sense of how things would play on newspaper front pages and television screens, this exacting attention to appearances, marked King as a distinctly contemporary activist—a master of the viral moment.” King’s strategy of manipulating emotional images is not new, but it was more than anything a strategy—a concrete plan for legislative change.

But of course the enormous win of civil rights laws and the Voting Rights Act could not change the drivers of white racism. When the Black Power Movement declared King’s “respectability politics” a failure, the nature of protesting changed. It became all about grabbing attention with nonnegotiable demands—an activism of crossing lines with no plans at the other end, just barriers crashed through with widespread aftershocks. (This, ironically, has become the model for the far right from Reagan to Newt Gingrich to the debt ceiling hostage takers to the January 6th insurrectionists.)

Protest with no policy objectives—like Occupy Wall Street—is nothing more than performative self-aggrandizement. When it comes to complex social problems, it often feels that all that the twenty-first century has given us is identity politics or frictionless fixes from self-avowed disruptors. Twenty-three years in, many have realized that fixing the huge scale of poverty-caused social problems is hard, and have consequently moved on to wellness.

The one thing every New York City stakeholder needs is for more people to ride the subway. It was a setback in January 2020 when Andy Bysford quit the MTA. Our primary subway problems were chronic delays and constant maintenance disruptions. When COVID caused subway ridership to plummet, however, you could see almost immediately how the marginalized who spend their lives on the MTA felt emboldened. Thresholds were crossed on every line at every time of day. Fare evasion became rampant.

You need to help people with mental health and addiction problems and people who don’t have a place to live. But you can’t lose the “mass” constituted by working- and middle-class commuters or you don’t have a city. The critical factor is a discretionary ridership that tips the critical mass into “reasonably safe”—middle class by New York standards and, yes, mostly white. When you have more riders, there is less space for confrontation.

Early this year it looked like we were inching back. Taking an idea from the transportation theorist Alon Levy and a 2021 report by the New York City Comptroller’s office, the Riders Alliance promoted “six-minute service”: Between 5 a.m. and 9 p.m. on weekdays, and between 8 a.m. and 10 p.m. on weekends, all subway routes and the top 100 bus routes in the city should run every six minutes at worst.

Six-minute service in addition to free, more frequent buses has been championed by City Council Member Jamaal Bowman, State Senate Deputy Leader Michael Gianaris, and Assembly Member Zohran Mamdani. They have argued that these provisions would particularly benefit the Black New Yorkers living in Brooklyn and the Bronx who rely on public transportation the most. All of the victims of the three fatal stabbings on New York City public transit in October 2022 were Bronx or Brooklyn residents.

Although the MTA hasn’t acted on six-minute service, the New York State budget agreement signed in April will provide the authority more than $1.1 billion through an increase in the Payroll Mobility Tax. And for the first time since the start of the pandemic, the MTA’s subway ridership hit 4 million paid trips on April 20.

But the Neely tragedy has added another kind of stress to this massive social problem, and my fear is that the discretionary ridership is again in question, especially after a more recent subway attack that left a Queens woman paralyzed.

Our splintered progressive politics hurts everyone in New York City except the well off. Yes, we need justice rendered for however many minutes Jordan Neely was constrained in a chokehold. But after the drama leaves the news cycle, we need to care about more people across the demographic spectrum riding the subway every day to make it safer and more efficient for the Black people who have no other transportation option outside the MTA.

We need to care about what that six-minute promise can achieve for every New Yorker. Otherwise, we’ll just have more bitter ironies like the 48-minute service at Mount Neboh Baptist Church. §