NYC Now Looks Like Third World Countries As Youths Train Surf For Free Rides

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 this year – up from 96 incidents during the same period last year.

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 the 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.

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%” 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.”