“I Could Not Leave My Cab”: What Transport Workers Say When They Describe the Moment It Turned Physical First-hand accounts from crew who have lived through the incidents behind the statistics Kiyya Rivera had worked as a New York City subway conductor for nearly four years before anything like it happened to her. On a […]
First-hand accounts from crew who have lived through the incidents behind the statistics
Kiyya Rivera had worked as a New York City subway conductor for nearly four years before anything like it happened to her. On a rush-hour morning, an angry passenger shoved his forearm into her, pushing her back into her cab. What made it worse, she later told CBS New York, was that he didn’t leave. He stood at the door of her cab, watching her, even after she had pulled the emergency brake and stopped the train.
“I literally could not leave my cab, because he stood right there,” Rivera said. She did not know, in that moment, whether the confrontation was over. An off-duty police officer was later charged in connection with the assault. Rivera had stopped the train early enough that it was still partly inside the station – close enough for officers to reach her before the situation could develop further. She was fortunate in that specific, narrow sense. Not every crew member who describes a similar moment has a platform within reach.
This is not a story about a single subway line, or a single country. It is a story about what a growing number of transport workers in the air, on the tracks, and increasingly documented in public reporting from three continents – say happens in the seconds after a routine interaction turns confrontational, and how little control they often have over what happens next.
In Northern Ireland, a train conductor was grabbed by a man after she challenged a group of unruly passengers on a Londonderry-to-Belfast service. She was verbally abused, then grabbed again by a different member of the same group – as passengers were leaving the train at the station. Police, in their public statement on the case, described her as left extremely shaken and upset by the encounter. It is a phrase that recurs, in one form or another, across dozens of similar police and company statements: an employee doing a routine part of her job – checking tickets, asking passengers to behave – followed by a physical escalation she had no way to see coming and no realistic way to prevent once it began.
What stands out in account after account, whether the setting is a subway cab, a regional train vestibule, or an aircraft aisle, is not the rarity of these moments but their shape. They begin as an ordinary enforcement interaction a fare check, a seatbelt reminder, a request to lower a voice and escalate within seconds into a physical confrontation the crew member did not choose and, in the moment, has no way to end except by absorbing it, retreating, or reaching whatever alarm or exit is nearest.
Cabin crew describe a version of the same dynamic, with one added constraint: there is no platform to reach, no station to pull into. In May 2026, a United Airlines flight into Newark declared an emergency mid-landing after a passenger attacked a flight attendant and attempted to force his way toward the cockpit. The pilot’s radio transmission, captured by air traffic control recordings, was blunt: a crew member had been attacked, and the aircraft needed police waiting at the gate. The flight landed without further incident and the passenger was taken into custody, but for the six-person crew, the confrontation had already happened at 35,000 feet, with nowhere to retreat to and no backup beyond each other.
It is a scenario cabin crew are trained to expect in outline, if not in the specifics of any single incident. Journalist Natalie Compton, reporting on the emotional and physical demands of the job, has noted that flight attendants receive self-defense and de-escalation instruction as part of standard training, alongside access to more advanced courses developed in coordination with federal air marshals. One flight attendant who took the more advanced training, offered voluntarily through the US Transportation Security Administration, described a specific restraint technique she had learned grabbing an attacker’s hand and using it to bring them to the ground in a single, understated line to a television reporter: “I thought that was useful.”
That sentence carries more weight than its brevity suggests. It is the voice of someone who does not describe the training as dramatic or decisive, only as one more tool worth having the same register in which most crew describe the incidents themselves: matter-of-fact, procedural, without embellishment, because embellishment is not what the moment called for. What it called for was knowing what to do next.
Maritime crew occupy the far end of this same problem. A conductor can reach a station in minutes. A flight attendant can expect police at the gate within an hour, at most. A crew member on a multi-day ocean crossing has neither. The International Maritime Organization’s STCW Convention requires every seafarer aboard an ISPS Code-compliant vessel to complete Security Awareness training – but that training is built around recognizing a threat and reporting it up the ship’s chain of command, not around what a crew member does in the minutes before that chain of command can respond. On a vessel that may be several days from the nearest port, those minutes are the entire incident.
None of this is presented here to suggest that these jobs are more dangerous than they were designed to be, or that every shift ends in confrontation – the overwhelming majority do not. What the accounts have in common is narrower and more specific: in each case, the crew member describes a window of time – sometimes seconds, sometimes minutes, during which they were the only person available to respond, before any outside help, whether police, security, or a colleague, could physically reach them.
That is the detail that training providers, unions, and increasingly operators themselves have begun treating as the actual point of intervention. Not the prevention of every incident – which no training programme, however well designed, can promise — but the handling of the interval between the moment something goes wrong and the moment outside help arrives.
It would be dishonest, and irresponsible, to suggest that any course, certification, or physical technique can guarantee that a crew member will never be grabbed, struck, or cornered again. People arrive at these jobs with wildly different levels of physical preparedness, prior training, and instinct under stress, and no programme can equalize that entirely. Some confrontations happen too fast, in spaces too confined, for any technique to fully prevent contact.
What separates a controlled outcome from an uncontrolled one, in the accounts collected here and in the broader pattern behind them, is rarely the presence or absence of danger – it is what the person in that narrow window of time is able to do with the seconds they have. A conductor who knows how to create distance and reach an alarm. A flight attendant who has practiced, even once, the specific mechanics of breaking a grip. A crew member who has simply rehearsed, mentally and physically, the difference between freezing and moving.
None of that guarantees an outcome. But the alternative standing still, absorbing what happens, and waiting for help that may be minutes, or in the case of a ship at sea, days away – is not a neutral choice either. It is simply the default that happens when no one has trained for anything else. The workers whose accounts appear here were not, for the most part, given a real alternative to that default before the moment arrived. The question the transport industry is now being forced to confront, incident by incident, is whether that will still be true for the next person it happens to.
This article draws on public reporting by CBS New York, the BBC, CNN, and other named sources cited throughout, along with statements from police, transport operators, and workers themselves as published in the original reporting. Names and identifying details follow those already made public in the cited coverage; individuals who were not named in the original reporting are not named here.
Eleven Minutes: What Police Timelines Reveal About the Gap Between an Attack and a Response What documented cases show about the interval when only the people already on scene can change the outcome At 7:39 p.m. on the evening of November 1, 2025, Cambridgeshire police received the first emergency call reporting a stabbing aboard a London-bound express
“I Could Not Leave My Cab”: What Transport Workers Say When They Describe the Moment It Turned Physical First-hand accounts from crew who have lived through the incidents behind the statistics Kiyya Rivera had worked as a New York City subway conductor for nearly four years before anything like it happened to her. On a rush-hour morning,
The Unseen Front Line: Why Violence Against Transport Crews Is Becoming a Boardroom Problem A look at the data behind a trend the travel industry can no longer treat as a public-relations issue On a regional express train pulling out of Landstuhl station in southwestern Germany on the evening of February 2, 2026, a 36-year-old conductor asked