MTA boss Janno Lieber brushes off subway crime as in peoples heads as congestion pricing kicks in despite recent rash of violent incidents

MTA Chair and CEO Janno Lieber brushed off subway crime as “in people’s heads” as congestion pricing launched Monday — forcing more New Yorkers into the plagued public transit system.Lieber skirted around concerns of safety on the subways during a Monday morning interview on “Bloomberg Surveillance,” telling listeners: “Some of these high profile incidents, you know, terrible attacks have gotten in people’s heads and made the whole system feel unsafe.”“The overall stats are positive.Last year we were actually at 12 and a half percent less crime than 2019, the last year before COVID,” Lieber said.When asked about putting up guardrails, similar to mass transit systems in other major cities like London or Tokyo, Lieber said the MTA was focused on fare evasion post-COVID first — but that walls for added safety would come later.“We put a billion dollars in our new capital program since fare evasion and this whole phenomenon has definitely accelerated post-COVID. So we are going to start to replace all these turnstiles, which worked when I was a kid, but clearly are ineffective now for in the area that we’re living in, we got to replace them,” he said.The MTA boss’ comments come after a Big Apple straphanger is lucky to be alive after he was randomly shoved in front of an incoming 1 train on New Year’s Eve, and just weeks after a woman was burned alive on a Brooklyn F train....