On a NYC subway train at 5AM, my guess is about 1/3 of the passengers are drunk, 1/3 are crazy, and 1/3 are drunk and crazy.
The guy violated most of the basic New York personal safety rules from dressing like a doofus to riding a subway after midnight.
After midnight, I'd recommend calling a cab, even if you're Charlie Bronson's ghost.
Those qualifiers are killers. Anyplace where you have to adhere strictly to "the rules" to be secure in your person is by nature not "safe".
Let's talk about "safe". I once had a job on a survey crew in Baltimore. My ONLY responsibility was to make sure that none of the equipment got stolen, which could be a tall order on long traverses. I learned that you needed steel-shank boots for all the needles scattered about; you couldn't park the truck on the street or the windows would be broken (and no matter where you parked it the radio antenna was gone in five minutes-they make great crack pipes or so I'm told); you couldn't emplace the Total Station where it was visible from the street or it would vanish or be smashed the instant you turned your back; and anything left overnight was as good as gone. We had to re-establish control every single morning because the stakes and hubs would be missing or moved. But we had it easy compared to the construction crew. They had to pay a four-figure "ransom" at least once to get a massive pan grader to reappear. The contruction shack was manned 24/7 to protect it (unattended immovable objects had a tendency to burn at night) and the crew chief had an M16 mounted just out-of-sight behind the door. But for all this, everyone on the site insisted that the neighborhood was "safe", and the local gangbangers, toughs and yutes were "great folks". To my knowledge, no one was ever hurt beyond a black eye or two, but if that place was safe, I'd hate to see dangerous.
That's like saying the water's pretty clean for a cesspool. To each their own.