The video quickly went viral in June: a group of people dashing across the roof of a moving New York City J train. Captured from far off, the train can be seen about to cross the Williamsburg Bridge, with its 40-meter drop to the East River — yet the daredevils, dressed in black, leap from car to car.
A similar stunt resulted in a far more horrifying clip days less than two weeks later, when a 15-year-old boy suffered a severe head injury while riding on top of a 7 train in Queens. Footage showed first responders hoisting the profusely bleeding teen off the roof and laying him on the floor with part of his skull separated.
On Monday, another 15-year-old boy in Queens tried to climb on to the roof of an R train with three friends, only to have his arm severed when he fell on to the tracks and the train ran him over, according to reports.
Photo: Bloomberg
New Yorkers call it “subway surfing”: a stunt riders have attempted and died from since the transit system’s earliest days, but which has returned as a disturbing trend over the last year among young men and teenage boys who often post the clips online.
According to statistics provided by the Metropolitan Transit Authority, there have already been 627 incidents of people riding outside of trains between January and July — up from 96 incidents during the same period last year.
ADDICTING RUSH
Ken, a Brooklyn resident, told the Guardian he was on an M train last week departing Manhattan’s Delancey-Essex station when a group of about eight boys wearing backpacks, some of whom looked as young as 12, boarded and began “hyping each other up.” Then they used the railings between the subway cars to climb on to the roof as the train chugged over the Williamsburg Bridge.
“Full speed going over the Williamsburg Bridge, we could hear footsteps on top. At times they were running,” he said. “I was quite concerned, obviously: if someone slips and falls, it’s game over.”
Ken said it was “sad seeing their careless attitude toward life, succumbing to peer pressure and doing these incredibly dumb actions.”
A New Yorker in his late 30s called D-Side said he had started subway surfing with his friends as a teenager, after he missed his uptown 6 train one day and decided to grab on to the back. The experience was “a rush like anything else” and even addicting.
“It’s a good feeling, even though it’s completely meaningless. Why does someone skydive? Why does someone use drugs? They like what it makes them feel. And then they keep chasing that over and over again.”
Then tragedy struck D-Side’s best friend, Alex Nasad, a graffiti artist who went by Drone. He was killed in 2002 while he was train surfing an uptown 1 train and apparently hit a support beam. “I think he was just shit-faced drunk. It was like: ‘Oh shit, look, I could go get a rush.’”
D-Side swore off train surfing after Nasad’s death. “A lot of people I know who I told this to are dead right now. So I don’t have clear-cut answers to how we stop people from doing this.”
The act of train surfing dates back more than a century in New York City. Local newspaper archives mention people getting maimed or killed riding on top of trains as early as 1904 — the year the subway opened — when two boys, 13 and 14, were struck by a low bridge while riding on top of a Grand Central-bound railcar, killing one of them and injuring the other.
One thing seems constant throughout the decades: the victims are young, male, and impulsive. As a 1991 story in the New York Times about subway surfing put it, the “risk is the lure.”
DEADLY CONESQUENCES
In 2016, a 25-year-old Instagram star was killed while trying to subway surf in Brooklyn, while apparently intoxicated. A Bronx subway surfer in his 30s was killed in 2017 after falling off and getting run over. In 2018, a 24-year-old man was electrocuted after standing on top of a commuter train following a Yankees game. In 2019, a 14-year-old boy named Eric Rivera was killed while surfing a 7 train.
“I can’t believe that you would risk your life to do that,” his mother told local outlet The City at the time. “What’s the joy of it, what’s the fun of it? I don’t see it.”
Last October, a 32-year-old man was killed while subway surfing when he fell on to the tracks and was run over by the J train.
There may be few more familiar with the stunt’s consequences than the doctors who treat its victims. A physician at a major trauma hospital in New York who asked to remain anonymous recalled treating a train surfer who had gruesome head injuries. Other physicians at the hospital were “pretty judgy” about the victim, the physician said. “The usual response is, ‘Wow, what a stupid thing to do.’”
“That’s what emergency care is for, I guess,” the physician added. “People live their crazy lives and we’ll always be here to witness it.”
The MTA’s chief safety and security officer, Patrick Warren, said in an emailed statement: “Riding outside of subway cars is reckless and extremely dangerous. This behavior can result in awful consequences, as it likely has for the young man who was severely injured on Monday.”
The MTA’s fine for riding outside of the train is US$75. New York’s train surfing casualties mirror a growing global trend of injuries and deaths from social media-related stunts, as app algorithms reward users for producing extreme content, sometimes as part of viral “challenges.”
D-Side believes the return of train surfing is “100 percent” correlated to social media usage, which has intensified people’s craving for attention. “It’s a hive mind. People chase clout. They care about other people’s opinions. They care about being somebody making a name for themselves. It breeds people wanting things right now.”
Today he’s a father who no longer chases adrenaline. “The thrill I seek now is just watching my kids grow,” he said. “Honestly, I feel lucky to be here.”
“Why does Taiwan identity decline?”a group of researchers lead by University of Nevada political scientist Austin Wang (王宏恩) asked in a recent paper. After all, it is not difficult to explain the rise in Taiwanese identity after the early 1990s. But no model predicted its decline during the 2016-2018 period, they say. After testing various alternative explanations, Wang et al argue that the fall-off in Taiwanese identity during that period is related to voter hedging based on the performance of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). Since the DPP is perceived as the guardian of Taiwan identity, when it performs well,
The Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) on May 18 held a rally in Taichung to mark the anniversary of President William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration on May 20. The title of the rally could be loosely translated to “May 18 recall fraudulent goods” (518退貨ㄌㄨㄚˋ！). Unlike in English, where the terms are the same, “recall” (退貨) in this context refers to product recalls due to damaged, defective or fraudulent merchandise, not the political recalls (罷免) currently dominating the headlines. I attended the rally to determine if the impression was correct that the TPP under party Chairman Huang Kuo-Chang (黃國昌) had little of a
At Computex 2025, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) urged the government to subsidize AI. “All schools in Taiwan must integrate AI into their curricula,” he declared. A few months earlier, he said, “If I were a student today, I’d immediately start using tools like ChatGPT, Gemini Pro and Grok to learn, write and accelerate my thinking.” Huang sees the AI-bullet train leaving the station. And as one of its drivers, he’s worried about youth not getting on board — bad for their careers, and bad for his workforce. As a semiconductor supply-chain powerhouse and AI hub wannabe, Taiwan is seeing
Jade Mountain (玉山) — Taiwan’s highest peak — is the ultimate goal for those attempting a through-hike of the Mountains to Sea National Greenway (山海圳國家綠道), and that’s precisely where we’re headed in this final installment of a quartet of articles covering the Greenway. Picking up the trail at the Tsou tribal villages of Dabang and Tefuye, it’s worth stocking up on provisions before setting off, since — aside from the scant offerings available on the mountain’s Dongpu Lodge (東埔山莊) and Paiyun Lodge’s (排雲山莊) meal service — there’s nowhere to get food from here on out. TEFUYE HISTORIC TRAIL The journey recommences with
RSS