quality of life crimes and were only to look for violent crimes. Among other problems the following were included: Meehan had claimed to be able to, along with 2,300 police officers, "provide sufficient protection to straphangers", but Sliwa had brought a group together to act upon crime, so that between March 1979 and March 1980, felonies per day dropped from 261 to 154. However, overall crime grew by 70% between 1979 and 1980. On the IRT Pelham Line in 1980, a sharp rise in window-smashing on subway cars caused $2 million in damages; it spread to other lines during the course of the year. When the broken windows were discovered in trains that were still in service, they needed to be taken out of service, causing additional delays; in August 1980 alone, 775 vandalism-related delays were reported. Vandalism of subway cars, including windows, continued through the mid-1980s; between January 27 and February 2, 1985, 1,129 pieces of glass were replaced on subway cars on the , , , , and K trains. Often, bus transfers, sold on the street for 50 cents, were also sold illegally, mainly at subway-to-bus transfer hubs. Mayor Koch even proposed to put a subway court in the Times Square subway station to speed up arraignments, as there were so many subway-related crimes by then. Meanwhile, high-ranking senior City Hall and transit officials considered raising the fare from 60 to 65 cents to fund additional transit police officers, who began to ride the subway during late nights (between 8 p.m. and 4 a.m.) owing to a sharp increase in crime in 1982. Operation High Visibility commenced in June 1985, had this program extended to 6 a.m., and a police officer was to be present on every train in the system during that time. On January 20, 1982, MTA Chairman Richard Ravitch told the business group Association for a Better New York that he would not let his teenage sons ride the subway at night, and that even he, as the subway chairman, was nervous riding the trains. The MTA began to discuss how the ridership issue could be fixed, but by October 1982, mostly due to fears about transit crime, poor subway performance, and some economic factors, ridership on the subway was at extremely low levels matching 1917 ridership. Within less than ten years, the MTA had lost around 300 million passengers, mainly because of fears