Just when I thought that the needless risks that some people take for thrills could not get any crazier, along comes news of something called ‘subway surfing’. This is a phenomenon spurred by social media, where people climb onto to the roofs of subway cars and stand while the cars move. As you can imagine, this can, and does, sometimes end in tragedy when they fall off.
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.
People do not realize how strong the centrifugal forces are when the vehicle makes a turn at even moderate speeds, causing you to be thrown sideways relative to the carriage. This is what causes even vehicles to flip over when taking a curve. Furthermore, the tops of subways are smooth and curved, making it easier to slide off.
A lot of such dangerous practices are due to people on the internet issuing ‘challenges’ to do various stunts that some people decide to accept which they then post on Tik Tok and other social media sites to earn the admiration of their peers. Such challenges such as the ‘Kool Aid Man’ have become rarer recently, thank goodness. This is where you emulate the ad in which a pitcher of Kool Aid crashes through a wall. Young people do it and break fences and injure their bodies.
We cannot entirely blame the internet for this because reports of people doing this go back more than a century, although the internet has boosted the idea by enabling the surfers to widely broadcast their actions.
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.”
Standing on tops of moving trains have long been a feature of action films, inspiring people like Efaru.
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.
It has become a cliche in action films to find some way of having people get on top of trains during a chase scene, and almost always at some point they realize that they are approaching a tunnel and have to lie flat. The stunts are becoming ever more elaborate over time, thanks to green screen and CGI technology enabling very dangerous-looking things being done safely for the camera. This may have added to danger since some of the things that are done may not even be possible..
Little children sometimes imitate adult behavior because they have not developed the capability to understand humorous exaggeration as not being realistic. So, for example, some of them copy Sesame Street’s Cookie Monster’s habit of shoving handfuls of cookies into his mouth. Another case were the funny clips of composer Don Music hitting his head on the keyboard in frustration when he could not think of the right lyrics. Here is an example.
I watched these with my children and found them hilarious but it appears that the character had to be removed from the show because children were banging their heads on the keyboard. Luckily my children never did that.
As children get older, one would hope that risk awareness would kick in more but it since the prefrontal cortex that controls decision making is not fully developed until the age of about 25, young people will tend to underestimate how dangerous some actions are.
I’ve watched two movies in the past two days which feature this: Jewel of the Nile and The Wolverine. The latter features a bullet train in Japan. Let’s hope no one is that foolish….
Back in my day we had motorcycles…
I’m sorry, but if you don’t have the common sense to avoid climbing on top of a subway car before getting thrown off, then you’re on the fast track for a Darwin Award and no one’s going to stop you from claiming it somehow.
It’s like watching a nature documentary. You have to be careful about investing too much concern in the well-being of a daredevil.
If we were talking about adults, #3 might be half-way reasonable -- but we’re not, we’re talking about children, who by definition don’t have “common sense”, because common sense is something you have to learn as you grow up. It is the job of society to keep them alive long enough for them to do so.
Children aren’t considered eligible for a Darwin Award (by those who take the whole thing a bit to seriously), as the primary fault likely lies with the adults in their lives rather than the children themselves. Teenagers are iffier. 14 Technically falls within the 13-19 range, but quite a lot of 13-15 year olds are still functionally children on some levels, so the usual cutoff is 16. A basic knowledge of physics at a young age, plus more safe-ish (and supervised) activities for kids (and adults) who really want to feel like daredevils, would help prevent that sort of stupidity. Not that it would ever go away completely, unteachable people and daredevil types who “need” actual serious danger will always exist, but it would help a lot.
…By “unteachable” people I mean those who pick up enough to be at least minimally functional in society, but get a lot of random nonsensical ideas which they steadfastly cling to no matter how much it harms themselves and/or others around them, and after a certain point they barely learn anything at all. It’s tempting to just let them get a Darwin Award, but unlike extreme daredevils they sometimes take out other people in addition to or instead of themselves. I’m really not sure what to do about people like that.
@4 and @5, agree with the supervision, especially for children. My son was a daredevil as a child, and I had to find safe ways for him to spend that energy until his brain development kicked in. E.g. rock climbing at a rock-climbing gym, with a harness and a padded floor and an adult paying attention at all times. Martial arts classes with a good instructor to work on control and reasoning skills. Gymnastics classes at a trampoline center with a trained instructor. A videogame (this was 1990s) that consisted of two player characters competing against each other by doing parkour over parked cars and off tall building roofs with constant parental repetition that this was just a game and taking chances in a game was better than taking chances in real life. Despite all that, there were still injuries from falling out of trees and jumping off bikes in the street and sticks in the eye and a near-drowning. But we kept him alive until his brain matured enough to assess danger to himself.
All of this took time and money--something not available to every parent.
What about people who think that large animals like Bison and Grizzlies are cute and that it would be a good idea to cozy up for a selfie? Actually, I do like the looks of those creatures, but that is why they invented the telephoto lens.
In Sweden purchase of alcohol is not permitted until you turn 21 despite the voting age being 18. The reason is, things like impulse control lag behind the intellectual development.
BTW criminal networks deliberately recruit teenagers as they have less common sense.
I guess Indians are going “meh” -- https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/indian-passengers-stand-and-hang-onto-a-train-as-it-departs-news-photo/464348932?adppopup=true (not a subway though)
@8 birger…
When I was little, in the US you had to be 21 to vote but generally only had to be 18 to purchase alcohol. That turned around in the 70s and 80s, and now you only have to be 18 to vote but 21 to purchase alcohol. An argument can be made that if you’re not responsible enough to drink, then you’re not responsible enough to vote. In contrast, a strong argument for the 26th Amendment (1971) that allowed the 18 year old vote was that young people were getting drafted for the war in Vietnam but could not vote, and that seemed completely unfair. One solution would have been to raise the draft age to 21, but that was never going to happen seeing that18 year olds are so much more pliable than 21 year olds.
A major reason for the rise in the drinking age was that young people were getting killed in car accidents due to intoxication. It was thought that allowing young people to “have the keys” at the same time they could “buy a bottle”, was too much- they needed time to acclimate to driving. One possibility would be to remove the drinking age altogether. No 12 year old is going to be allowed to drive a car, and maybe it would be better if they learned the perils of drinking by puking behind the middle school instead of behind the wheel. Of course, it would also help if the society didn’t place such emphasis on drinking. We could start by curtailing the use of the phrase “alcohol and drugs”, as if the former isn’t the latter.
The statistics on things like drunk driving would suggest a lot of adults aren’t responsible enough to drink alcohol
Obviously we want to prevent this sort of this, but in a society with ten or hundreds of millions of people someone will find a way to do something foolish