Yesterday I wrote about the possible end of the Bay Area Rapid Transit train system (BART). Ridership on BART trains dropped dramatically during the pandemic and hasn’t recovered to even half of pre-pandemic levels. That puts the Bay Area in a financial bind with just two possible outcomes. Either the state of California steps up with hundreds of millions of dollars per year to subsidize the system or BART will have to dramatically scale back operations, shutting down entire lines, closing stops laying off most workers and reducing train service to once an hour.

Today the LA Times published a story which reads like a follow-up. It turns out LA’s metro rail system, which was never terribly popular, has also lost most of its riders. And the Times suggests the reasons aren’t limited to fewer people working in offices downtown. People are avoiding the metro because it has been overrun with homeless drug addicts.

Drug use is rampant in the Metro system. Since January, 22 people have died on Metro buses and trains, mostly from suspected overdoses — more people than all of 2022. Serious crimes soared 24% last year compared with the previous.

“Horror.” That’s how one train operator recently described the scenes he sees daily. He declined to use his name because he was not authorized to talk to the media.

Earlier that day, as he drove the Red Line subway, he saw a man masturbating in his seat and several of what he calls sleepers, people who get high and nod off on the train.

“We don’t even see any businesspeople anymore. We don’t see anybody going to Universal. It’s just people who have no other choice [than] to ride the system, homeless people and drug users.”

The Times points out that some metro stations are in areas that are full of drug and gang activity. For instance, the MacArthur Park/Westlake station had 26 medical emergencies reported in the last three months of 2022. Most of those were overdoses. There were six deaths last year at that one station.

The metro rail put together a group it calls ambassadors, 300 unarmed people in place to help passengers and if necessary report crime. But calling the police doesn’t usually accomplish much.

During the final three months of last year, LAPD arrested 49 people on the Red Line for drug-related offenses. As of mid-February, only one of those arrests resulted in a criminal filing, said LAPD Deputy Chief Donald Graham, who oversees the department’s Transit Bureau.

In short, LA is dealing with the same problems as other major cities on the west coast. No crimes involving the homeless ever seem to get prosecuted because the DAs and city attorneys have decided prosecuting those cases wouldn’t serve social justice. So they just cycle through the system over and over, using up time and resources but rarely facing any consequences.

Despite these people already getting a free pass from the judicial system, the Times quotes a social justice advocate from ACT-LA calling for less policing and “harassment” of addicts. In her view, it’s not the people smoking fentanyl on the trains who are the problem, it’s the police who might occasionally arrest someone for smoking fentanyl on the trains.

Remember that the official take on the homeless in LA, and really anywhere up and down the west coast, is that they are victims of high housing costs. But it’s difficult to imagine the army of fentanyl addicts crowding the metro trains being able to maintain any kind of housing unless its free. Maybe in the long term, if they can get off the drugs, cheaper housing would help them but it’s not going to help them so long as their main goal in life is to get high every day. The story does not end on a happy note.

A Metro worker cleaning the station said she sees this all the time. She was recently assaulted when taking the subway from Union Station. A woman pulled her off the seat by her hair.

“I don’t feel sorry for them,” she said.

I still do feel sorry for them. It does seem to be the case that many of these people are self-medicating because they have traumatic histories they cannot deal with. But even knowing makes me want to see more of them arrested and, if necessary, forced to get help. Because killing the pain by becoming a barely human zombie passed out on the LA metro is not a life I would wish on anyone. People deserve better than to be ignored while they kill themselves in public view day after day.