"Subway Surfing" Is A Very Dangerous Trend

"Subway surfing" is dangerous, deadly and should stop trending. This is the general consensus after a 13-year-old girl is the latest person to lose her life in New York City while "subway surfing." a dangerous challenge attracting young people on social media.

"Subway surfing," involves riding on top of a subway car while its moving. That is right. While the train is moving.

The precarious trend, which has been around for years, has gained popularity again on social platforms, encouraging users to replicate videos heralding it, despite the risky – and illegal – activity’s sometimes-fatal consequences.

There are already six subway surfing fatalities and 181 related arrests have been recorded this year through 27 October, the New York Police Department told CNN. Both tallies are outpacing last year’s five fatalities and 118 arrests, which can yield a charge of reckless endangerment, the department said.

While it wasn’t immediately clear why they did it, the 13-year-old girl and a 12-year-old girl ran atop moving train cars Sunday in Queens, New York. Both lost their balance, with the 13-year-old killed after falling between moving cars, a law enforcement source told CNN. The 12-year-old suffered a head injury, with bleeding on the brain, CNN affiliate WABC reported.

Days earlier, a boy who’d just turned 13 was killed subway surfing in Queens, while another subway surfer "narrowly avoided tragedy after striking his head in the Bronx," the NYPD Chief of Transit said on X. The 13-year-old died while participating in a social media challenge, his mother told WPIX, adding he’d posted to social media prior videos of himself doing the stunt and she’d warned him not to ride on top of trains.

"This dangerous thrill-seeking behavior has life-altering consequences. It’s not worth your life or the anguish you’d bring your family and friends," New York Police said in the X post before concluding with a slogan coined as part of a campaign launched last year to try to deter subway surfing:

"Subway Surfing Kills! Ride Inside, Stay Alive."

New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority has worked with social media sites including YouTube, TikTok and Instagram to remove footage depicting subway surfing to discourage the practice, with more than 10,000 posts taken down, the agency told CNN affiliate WABC in September.

And Meta, Google and TikTok have made space on their platforms to help amplify a new citywide messaging campaign, the city said last 31 October in a news release.

Even so, 14 attorneys general across the United States last month sued TikTok in part over the proliferation of dangerous viral challenges, and some families of teens killed while surfing subway cars also have sued social platforms.

Social media, indeed, has "entirely changed in so many different ways" the conventional adolescent dare, said Dr. Gail Saltz, a clinical associate professor of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College and an associate attending psychiatrist at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital.

"Your communities become huge, potentially," she told CNN, "and it seems like everyone who you choose to follow, or even don’t choose to follow, become part of that peer pressure, that outside influence of the people that you want to be part of or that you want to impress or that you want to get attention from and be socially acknowledged (by) in some way."

The NYPD also is using drone technology to help apprehend subway surfers based on 911 calls from concerned citizens – and deter would-be offenders – though the agency doesn’t prioritize arrests, it told CNN. Rather, police try to show drone-captured videos to young people’s parents in an effort to get them to stop surfing the subway.