All aboard the terror train.
Nearly 90% of New York City’s public-facing subway and bus workers said they were assaulted or harassed by unruly, unhinged and violent passengers during the pandemic, according to a shocking new study.
Women MTA workers particularly faced the brunt of rider rage, with 70% telling researchers they were physically assaulted while on the job, the New York University study published Wednesday found.
The wave of transit violence didn’t come as a surprise to MTA worker Mohammad Quader, who still suffers on-the-job panic attacks after a December 2022 attack in which a loony hooligan bludgeoned him in the head with a hammer-like tool.
“It’s happening almost every day,” Quader told The Post. “Most of them are unreported.
“Some people report, some people stay quiet.”
The study was conducted by the NYU Silver School of Social Work in collaboration with the Transport Workers Union Local 100 and covered nearly 1,300 workers who opted to fill out a survey about their experiences between 2020 and 2023.
Of MTA workers surveyed, 89% reported victimization — a catchall including physical or sexual assault, harassment, intimidation and theft. The study noted it’s a much higher rate than that in other professions such as health care, where 58% of workers reported experiencing assault or harassment.
Nearly half of MTA workers surveyed reported they were physically assaulted, the study states.
“Physical assault was significantly more common among women in the bus division compared to female subway workers, male bus workers, and male subway workers,” the study states.
The findings — which researchers noted could be inflated owing to the volunteer responses — broadly dovetail with other data showing a COVID-19-era spike in assaults against subway and bus workers, largely by perps with histories of mental illness.
Over the pandemic, a career criminal with 41 prior busts pummeled a subway cleaner, a drunken investment banker slugged a veteran MTA worker in a station’s “crew room” and a fare-beater pulled a gun on a bus driver, authorities said, among many other violent incidents.
Quader said his own “traumatic situation” — in which an unhinged man, Alexe St. Fleur, snuck into an L line dispatch room and brutally walloped him from behind — left him with deep mental wounds that require ongoing therapy and four medications.
When he tried to return to work, he said he experienced panic attacks and flashback memories from the attack. He’s now off the job until he can recuperate.
“If I feel better, I would like to resume work,” he said.
“Still I’m fighting with my mind and trying to get back to work.”
St. Fleur, 37, pleaded guilty to attempted murder and is serving a seven-year prison sentence, records show.
The psychic scars borne by transit workers during the pandemic prompted the study, said Robyn Gershon, an NYU clinical professor of epidemiology who was one of its co-authors.
She pinned the harassment MTA workers was part of a breakdown in the social contract during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“COVID was almost like letting the cat out of the bag, all bets were off,” she said. “People could act with impunity in all sorts of ways.”
MTA officials claimed the incidents are far less frequent as the study suggest.
Documented incidents of assaults and harassment for the first seven months of each year going back to 2021 add up to roughly 5,400 employees, or 11% of city transit’s workforce, transit officials argued in a in a letter sent Tuesday to NYU’s president.
The letter doesn’t dispute MTA workers face assault and harassment, and notes the agency’s leadership in 2022 pushed for any attack on transit workers to be reclassified as a felony.
But the MTA vehemently disputed the findings, arguing it’s “no study at all.”
“It’s actually a poll, conducted in close coordination with the Transport Workers Union, that uses flawed methodology to attack the NYPD and stir panic that the vast majority of transit workers in New York City are being harassed or assaulted on the job,” wrote Demetrius Crichlow, the interim president of New York City Transit. “That’s simply not true.”
