One spring afternoon, two boys celebrating the last day of sixth grade left their New York neighbourhood in search of an adventure. They arrived at a subway train that was stopping at the Church Avenue station in Brooklyn. The boys, Donald and William, climbed onto the roof of one of the cars and were heading north, with the warm air in their faces.
But their escapade was brief. Near the next station, they were caught off guard by an overpass and were thrown onto the tracks. The impact fractured the skulls of the two boys and Donald died that same day. He was 11 years old. William, 12, was taken to Kings County Hospital, unconscious. The year was 1938, but it could have been any year to date.
Andrew Keh and Ana Ley have researched and published a report in The New York Times on the steady drip of deaths in U.S. cities due to what is referred to as “subway surfing”.
Recent news reports often trace the reckless act of climbing on top of a train car, for example in New York City, and blame sensationalist videos and social media, takenby bystanders and the surfers themselves, for rising in false popularity.
In recent years, for reasons that bother public officials, subway surfing has grown and become increasingly deadly. Six people have died trying it this year. Five died in 2023, after the other five who died between 2018 and 2022. The noise of the senseless tragedy has made city officials and concerned observers wonder if anything can be done to remedy it.
The anguish is not new. In 1996, after the death of a 14-year-old boy, Rudolph W. Giuliani, the then mayor of New York made a sad assessment: “There is no way to protect a child who decides to surf on top of a subway car”.
The MTA, the Metropolitan Transport Authority, does not specifically count subway surfing incidents. It reported that 2,556 people had rode outside of train cars this year through September, but the vast majority of these cases, officials said, occurred between cars, not on top. In 2019, by comparison, there were 490.
The city is using drones to try to catch subway surfers in the act. The programme identified 114 offenders the first year, the youngest of whom, according to current New York Mayor Eric Adams, was 9 years old.
Time will tell if the programme achieves lasting results or falls frustratingly short, like many other city initiatives.
In recent years, officials have introduced a public information campaign called “Ride inside, stay alive” in the subways and schools, and have positioned more police officers around hot-spot stations. Public transport leaders have also tried to persuade social media companies to remove thousands of videos of people surfing the subway, although many are still easy to find.
As the problem has persisted, discussions about deterrence have led to a sense of despair. Leroy Comrie, a state senator whose district includes a section of Queens, wondered aloud at a budget hearing last year if the city could “grease the tops of trains» to keep people from getting on.
New York must deal with some hard truths. Physical alterations to the cars, such as open gangway cars and platform barriers, could deter potential offenders. But the city’s subway system is old and immense, with 472 stations and 665 miles of track, making wholesale structural solutions onerous and unlikely.
Officials have found that the rebellious spirit can be difficult to curb. Some teenagers have adapted to the new surveillance and, for example, changed their clothes to create confusion when drones detect them.
Thus, the prominence of subway surfing tends to be calculated in the most macabre way: loss of life. This year, the ages of the deceased were 11, 13, 13, 13, 14 and 15. They died climbing to the top of trains A, F, G, M, 6 and 7. Their accidents occurred in Brooklyn, the Bronx and Queens.
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