I think it's pretty natural to recognise when people don't look happy, and an awful lot of those people really do look unhappy. Not just bored or withdrawn.

Made me think of Stevie Smith's:

Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.

I suspect (and hope) that "conceptual artist Bill Sullivan" might have slected the pictures and maybe manipulated the shots (eg made sure there was something alarming to confront the commuters as they squeezed through that trap). If that really is a random bunch of people in a situation that hasn't been set up to upset them, I do find that a bit unnerving.

I'm not knocking cities as such. Cities have always been exciting places, and fun places, and the places where some (probably most) of the best things produced by human beings have been produced. But cities can go badly wrong sometimes. A book I've always admired which talks about stuff like that is Jane Jacobs' classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities.