The Metropolitan Transit Authority has come under considerable heat for several horrific incidents in the past weeks that have seen people killed or gravely injured. Another incident saw a man shoved onto subway tracks on New Year’s Eve, suffering serious injuries.

“Some of these high-profile incidents, you know, terrible attacks have gotten in people’s heads and made the whole system feel unsafe,” Janno Lieber, MTA chairman and CEO, told Bloomberg.

“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.

Lieber also spoke about putting up safety measures such as walls in front of subway tracks to prevent people from falling or being pushed onto the tracks, though the MTA is prioritizing fare evasion measures first.

“We put a billion dollars in our new capital program since fare evasion, and this whole phenomenon has definitely accelerated post-COVID,” he said. “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.”

New York has seen violence in its subway system, a vast network of underground tunnels that ferry thousands of New Yorkers around every day, for decades. Felony assaults are up 55% since 2019, and five more people were pushed onto the tracks last year compared to 20 people in 2019.

The violence has continued despite an increased police and National Guard presence. Gov. Kathy Hochul (D-NY) deployed more than 1,000 state police and National Guard units to the subway systems and then touted statistics saying subway crime was down 42% since January 2021.

“In March, I took action to make our subways safer for the millions of people who take the trains each day,” she posted on X. “Since deploying the @NationalGuardNY to support @NYPDnews and @MTA safety efforts and adding cameras to all subway cars, crime is going down, and ridership is going up.”

The city recently implemented congestion pricing, which will charge passenger vehicles and trucks a fee when they enter parts of Manhattan. The fee is expected to pay for a large chunk of the MTA’s funding, which will go toward significant upgrades to the city’s transit system.

The money generated isn’t expected to go toward safety in the system specifically, though it will modernize trains and subway stations.