‘The risk is the lure': subway surfing in New York City continues to claim young lives

The Guardian

5 hours ago

Jaida Rivera's 11-year son, Cayden, was supposed to be in school at Brooklyn's Fort Greene preparatory academy on the morning of 16 September last year. Staff saw him in the cafeteria after his grandmother dropped him off at 7.45am.
But 30 minutes later he was marked as absent. Cayden had somehow slipped out, boarded a G subway train traveling south and was riding on top of one of its carriages when he fell on to the tracks at the Fourth Avenue-Ninth Street station just after 10.00am. He was pronounced dead at the scene.
The boy was the youngest of six to die subway surfing in New York City last year – a highly dangerous practice of balancing on top of the swift-moving subway trains as they rattle through the city. It is typically attempted in Brooklyn and Queens, where New York's subways often run aboveground, and typically in warmer months when schools are in session – suggesting that it has become a dangerous type of after-school activity often spurred by social media cachet.
New York has long warned against the stunts. But to little avail. Police data shows that arrests for subway surfing were up 70% from the prior year, and the average age of those apprehended was 14. Arrests of young people for subway surfing have spiked 46% this year, with police statistics showing 164 children arrested so far, up from 112 during the same period last year.
So far two have died. Last week, a 14-year-old, described as a repeat offender, was critically injured when he fell from a 5 line train in the Bronx. But the 7 line, between Manhattan and Queens, is the most popular, according to the NYPD's transit chief, Joseph Gulotta, in part because surfing the 7 mimics the closing frames of 2017's Spider-Man: Homecoming.
Earlier this month, New York's governor, Kathy Hochul, launched a new 'Ride Inside, Stay Alive' campaign aimed at high school students and featuring pro BMX athlete Nigel Sylvester to warn about the dangers of subway surfing.
Train surfing dates back more than a century: local newspaper archives mention people getting maimed or killed riding on top of trains as early as 1904 – the year the subway opened. The 'risk is the lure', a 1991 New York Times story deduced.
So it's not uniquely a internet 'challenge' phenomenon. Committed subway surfers speak in familiar terms. 'I could quit anytime I want,' a 14-year-old subway surfer named Efaru told the Times last year, adding that it was 'not an addiction' but acknowledged: 'Running on top feels like you're in a real-life movie.'
The 2025 anti-surfing campaign includes announcements in subways and drones in the sky. 'New York will continue to do everything we can to keep our young people safe on the subways,' Hochul said. But city and state administrators know they're up against a powerful if unwitting promoter – namely the peer value of subway surfing videos on TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram and other social media platforms.
In 2023, when five people died from subway surfing – a striking increase over five who died between 2018 and 2022 – New York City's mayor, Eric Adams, held a social media summit during which he said 'unfettered access is hurting our children – encouraging them to steal cars, ride on top of subways'.
Soon after, the main social media platforms removed about 3,000 subway surfing videos. So far this year, more than 1,800 videos have been taken down.
After the death of a teenage girl who was subway surfing last year, Adams said: 'The allure of social media fame has lured too many young people on top of trains, and the consequences have been deadly.' He said that social media companies whose 'algorithms promote this deadly content haven't done nearly enough to put an end to it'.
Last week, Cayden's distraught mom, Jaida, 26, was in her attorneys office in lower Manhattan. The outside world, she said, was triggering. 'I don't do much but sit in my room or in the bathtub. I find quiet there,' she added.
She had sometimes confiscated her son's phone, she said, but 'the first thing that would be on TikTok when he opened it would be surfing'.
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Last year, the state passed a law to prohibit the provision of addictive feeds to minors. But Rikki Davidoff, Rivera's attorney, says the efforts by social media companies has proved ineffective at curbing the spread of subway surfing videos.
'Your algorithm is your algorithm, right?' she says. 'It's still easy for a four-year-old to search subway surfing as it is for a 12-year-old. But one is far more impressionable for the other.'
There are renewed efforts to hold New York's city authorities accountable. Davidoff plans to sue the city, the board of education and the MTA, but there are a number of hurdles, including an 1847 law that limits compensation in wrongful death cases to financial losses – losses that wouldn't be applicable to a minor, almost by definition.
A bill that would open up the law to grief and anguish claims like Rivera's has been blocked three times by Hochul. Known as the 'grieving families' bill, it recently passed the New York legislature again, and again sits on the governor's desk. The governor calls the bill 'well-intentioned', but says it would lead to higher health insurance premiums and other costs.
'There are a lot of powerful interests on the other side of this,' says Sabrina Rezzy, spokesperson for the New York State Trial Lawyers Association. 'But 47 other states managed this without doctors fleeing the state and premiums skyrocketing.
'We're looking for our state government to stand up the rights of children,' Rezzy adds. 'We see the most vulnerable individuals affected most by the 1847 law, as you would expect.'
Rivera's attorney has called on train operators to radio each other to slow down when they see surfers, and Rivera points to a failure by the public school system to crack down on truancy and failures by the MTA to make it harder to climb on top of trains.
'I don't think they're really done anything, to be honest,' she says before breaking off, sobbing.