Ka’Von Wooden loved trains. The 15-year-old had an encyclopedic knowledge of New York City’s subway system and dreamed of becoming a train operator.
Instead, on a December morning in 2022, Wooden died after he climbed to the roof of a moving J train in Brooklyn and then fell onto the tracks as it headed onto the Williamsburg Bridge.
He is one of more than a dozen New Yorkers, many young boys, who have been killed or badly injured in the past few years while attempting to “subway surf,” a practice that dates back a century, but has been supercharged by social media.
Photo: AP
Authorities have tried to address the problem with public awareness campaigns and by deploying drones to catch thrill-seekers in the act, but for some, a more fundamental question is not being addressed: Why are kids like Wooden are able to climb on top of subway cars in the first place?
“When Ka’Von died ... literally two weeks later, another child died, and another one. That makes no sense,” his mother, Y’Vonda Maxwell, said, adding that transit and law enforcement officials have not done enough. “Why should my child have not been the end?”
Making trains harder to climb, and train surfers more easy to detect with cameras and sensors, could be part of the solution, some experts said.
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), which operates the subway system, has said it is studying the issue, but has yet to propose solutions.
Six people died surfing subway trains in the city last year, up from five in 2023.
Tyesha Elcock, the MTA worker who operated the train Wooden rode the day he died, is among those who think more should be done to prevent deaths.
The first sign of trouble that day was when the train’s emergency brake kicked in, she said.
Elcock discovered Wooden’s body between the train’s seventh and eighth cars. A group of sad-faced teens on the train made it clear what had happened.
“Did y’all leave your friend back there?” she asked them.
She said a simple solution could have saved Wooden’s life: locking the doors at the ends of subway cars. That would cut off access to the narrow gaps between train cars where subway surfers use handholds to hoist themselves onto the roof.
In 2023, Richard Davey, then the head of buses and subways for the MTA, said officials were “weighing” the option of locking doors between cars — which is done only on a handful of 1980s-era trains — but that locking doors “brings its own risk.”
Some New Yorkers have complained that locking the passageways between train cars might prevent them from escaping to another part of the train during an emergency.
Under questioning from New York City Council members and reporters last year, MTA officials ruled out other physical interventions, including building more barriers to prevent access to tracks, or putting covers over the gaps between train cars to prevent would-be surfers from climbing up.
“Listen, you have to be able to do work on top of a train car,” MTA CEO Janno Lieber told a news conference, adding that you cannot “cover it with barbed wire.”
The MTA has asked social media companies to take down videos glamorizing subway surfing. It also promoted public service announcements telling people to “Ride inside, stay alive,” in voices of local teens.
More than 300,000 New York City school children use the subway to get to school each day.
The New York City Police Department (NYPD) reported that arrests of alleged subway surfers rose to 229 last year, up from 135 the year before. Most were boys, with an average age of about 14. The youngest was nine years old.
Branislav Dimitrijevic, an engineering professor at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, said retrofitting trains to prevent roof access would be expensive.
“There’s so many stories in transportation where things can be fixed, but they cost a lot of money, and then you ask the public: ‘Are you willing to [pay] for us to fix this? But your taxes would go up tremendously,’ and people say: ‘No,’” Dimitrijevic said.
Dimitrijevic suggested the MTA might be able to install cameras and use artificial intelligence to detect riders trying to climb a train.
Andrew Albert, a nonvoting member of the MTA board, said he has been asking the agency about the plausibility of physical sensors but has not gotten a response.
The NYPD has patrolled popular subway surfing routes with drones, but the missions cannot be everywhere at once.
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