The Allure—and the Policing—of Subway Surfing
Mayor Eric Adams’s administration has wrapped an expansion of invasive surveillance in the apolitical packaging of saving teen-agers from their addled selves.
More pedestrians than not pause at a street memorial under an elevated section of the J and Z lines in North Brooklyn. This behavior is unusual. New York City is full of remorseless individualists who nonetheless stick to some codes very rigidly. When you encounter a memorial during your commute, the paying of respect is the quickening of your walk, the feigning of a blank mind, the averting of your gaze. And yet these pedestrians are forgetting themselves; they are slowing to a complete halt at this one altar because it is a display of something uniquely upsetting: the grief of adolescents. Nested in the recess of a steel column, there are bodega flowers, there are votive candles, and there is a white poster board, covered in messages written in bubble-script letters—like notes left in yearbooks at graduation—addressed to the deceased, two middle schoolers, Ebba Morina and Zemfira (Zema) Mukhtarov.
Another tribute exists, a video. A mourner on social media films from the absolute height of the Williamsburg Bridge, at dusk. From this God’s-eye view, the Manhattan-bound J train, crossing the bridge below, is a hard metal streak. The video is enacting the viewpoint of the city itself on October 4th, the night that Ebba and Zema, dressed in dark, anonymizing colors, hoisted their small bodies onto the roof of a subway car, where they were later found, lifeless, at the Marcy Avenue station. The video, filmed by someone who must have scaled one of the bridge’s three-hundred-and-ten-foot towers, is basically a eulogy created in the grip of the mind-set that caused the young girls’ deaths. The eulogist, much like Ebba and Zema once did, uploads videos to social media of their probes into the no-go zones of New York City’s physical infrastructure—the undercity—and so they might express a proprietary understanding of the tragedy, a desire to undermine the prevailing narratives of teen-age stupidity or recklessness.
Ebba and Zema were the fourth and fifth people to die this year while riding on the outside of a train. Most of the victims have been children. This phenomenon, known as subway surfing, has recently been on the rise, prompting the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to refresh its deterrence campaign—“Ride Inside, Stay Alive”—by getting celebrities such as the rapper Cardi B and the professional BMX rider Nigel Sylvester to record announcements that play inside of subway stations and certain trains. (“Stop subway surfing!” Cardi says. “Ride safe, keep it cute, and keep it moving.”)
“Ride Inside, Stay Alive” was launched in the spring of 2023, in response to an uptick in surfing deaths. Mayor Eric Adams held a press conference underneath an overpass on the 7 train in Queens, a line that is almost entirely elevated, until the East River. That line, along with the J, M, and Z, had been identified by the M.T.A. and New York Police Department as an “overwhelming location” for surfing. The authorities themselves use the verbiage of “surfing,” withering the slang. Like the Rudy Giuliani mayoralty, but sort of impotent in ruthlessness, the Adams administration has loved to identify a scourge, an opportunity to conjure existential threats of social breakdown that the mayor’s office can then claim to heal. At the time, outer-borough New Yorkers were fuming at Adams, who had abdicated his promise to be a “bus mayor.” (Buses have actually gotten slower during his administration.) Here was a transit crisis he hadn’t occasioned, one that could be fixed. Here was a transit crisis that could be blamed on children.
Are thrill-seeking kids like birds, deterred by metaphorical spikes on the roof? In late October, the M.T.A. did install barriers—vertical pads made of hard rubber—in between cars on some trains operating on the 7 line, restricting climbing routes. These experiments in design cannot obscure the fact that the problem has mostly been handed off to the police. This year, the N.Y.P.D. has arrested more than a hundred and twenty people on suspicion of riding outside a subway car. Just two days after Ebba and Zema died, the N.Y.P.D. released a thirteen-second clip, on Instagram, of a thwarted surfing attempt: in the video, two people peel themselves off the exterior of a parked train car, rushing inside quickly, as if spooked. The police produced the footage via drone; it is part of the “Drone as First Responder” program, brought about by the police commissioner, Jessica Tisch. (One of Tisch’s early gigs for the city was inaugurating the N.Y.P.D.’s office of information technology.) The drones are meant to be a “force-multiplier,” in the public-safety deputy Kaz Daughtry’s words, augmenting the already-increased police presence on the subways. They also make this presence more disembodied, more ambient.
Adams calls the arrests of surfers “saves” or “rescues.” He is right that the arrests potentially save lives. But it is also true that his administration is wrapping invasive surveillance in the apolitical packaging of saving teen-agers from their addled selves. The question of safety on the subway—a question that brings to light ugly and duplicitous programs of purported civic cleanup, of the expansionism of Ed Koch and the hostilities of Giuliani—had been framed by two explosions of violence in the wake of the pandemic: the Sunset Park shooting, and the killing of Jordan Neely. The violence that the surfer does, meanwhile, is to themselves. It is criminalized, typically as reckless endangerment, but isn’t categorized in the minds of normal people as a social crime. The drones provide Tisch’s larger surveillance operations—which include the herding of more than a thousand underaged, overwhelmingly Black and Latino New Yorkers into gangs within a “Criminal Group Database”—the sheen of the benign. (She is also pressing for a repeal of “Raise the Age,” the state law that keeps kids under eighteen out of adult court.)
Demetrius Crichlow, the president of N.Y.C. Transit, is a third-generation transit worker. Last year, after nearly three decades working at the M.T.A., he got the post running the subways and buses, making him second in authority only to Janno Lieber, the head of the M.T.A., who took over the top position after Andy Byford, the begged-for savior of our drowning subways, left angrily under former Governor Andrew Cuomo. Crichlow contrasts Adams’s pathological swagger with an air of paternal angst. After the deaths of Ebba and Zema, Crichlow warned, “Getting on top of a subway isn’t ‘surfing’—it’s suicide.” And what else is it?
In my teen-age years, I spent two to three hours a day on the subway. It was a borderline space, literally transitory, just short of a place. I remember feeling, in the subway, that we teen-agers had an extortionate sway over adults, who shrank out of annoyance as we spread ourselves in the cars but shrank, nonetheless. We were free to be bad in the subway because it was an authority desert between home and school. There was an unspoken exhibitionism to the way we slouched as close to the platform’s edge as possible while waiting for the train, forcing ourselves not to flinch when the express car careened into the station. What was popular back then wasn’t so much riding on the roof as riding in between cars. I couldn’t do it; a cousin of mine had died, one January morning, after being struck by an E train in Queens. But, with a mix of jealousy and attraction, I watched my friends be jerked from side to side, feigning stone-face. And we were nothing. I knew kids who could travel miles through the subway tunnels, their knowledge of the system so complete.
Eyewitnesses on the J recall seeing a group of kids with Ebba and Zema before their fatal ride, presumably hyping the girls up. For a few days after their deaths, their social-media accounts were still accessible. It was excruciating to watch the videos they had left, a sort of living trail to their annihilation. A P.O.V. video shows the cavity of a tunnel receding at high speed, meaning that the girl filming must have been hanging off the exterior of the last car of a moving train. A girl lies on tracks in another one; someone must have been down there with her to get the shot. A lot of the innards of decrepit and abandoned buildings, a lot of captures of the nighttime, filmed atop scaled bridges, all filmed shakily. This is a double adrenaline rush: the danger of the act itself, and then the gratification of uploading proof. Recently, New York City added a suit to the dozens that have already been lodged by local governments against social-media companies such as Meta, which owns Instagram, and Bytedance, the owner of TikTok. The city claims that social media has launched a youth mental-health crisis, and that the undifferentiation of algorithmic logic has brought surfing videos to the fore. (Social-media companies have, in years past, collaborated with the city by flagging videos.) In filing the suit, the city was following the lead of Norma Nazario, who, in 2024, sued TikTok and Meta for the wrongful death of her fifteen-year-old son, Zackery, who died surfing, claiming that algorithms encouraged her son to become addicted to the act. Meta and TikTok have petitioned to have the suit dropped; the courts have thrown these petitions out.
Any person with a passing understanding of New York City subway culture knows that riding outside the train predates social media. It was long an activity associated with outer-borough kids, Black kids, brown kids, their deaths already budgeted. In 1996, when a fourteen-year-old riding on top of a 2 train hit a signal light and fell onto the tracks to his death, Giuliani, in his broken-windows prime, offered the assessment that the boy’s parents bore some responsibility for his death. Now the cruelty that defines our attitudes toward children has a receptacle in social media. We blame the digital platforms, and deride these kids as idiot stuntmen, addicts—even as the savviest adults among us exhibit a similar dependence on platforms to tell them who to be.
The TikTok P.O.V. rides of kids on a moving train do go viral for a time, even if they’re ultimately taken down. Still, the videos suggest more than pure peacocking or thrill-seeking; they stand apart from other instances of internet exhibitionism. The uptick in surfing seems to directly parallel the emergence of a more wounded New York City after our brutal quarantine: there were nine hundred and twenty-eight reports of people riding outside of train cars in 2022, compared with four hundred and ninety in 2019. This is one of the plethora of crises that the Adams administration will leave on its desk for Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani to handle. Mamdani has signalled that he plans to keep Tisch, the reviver of fears about so-called youth crime, as his police commissioner. But it stands to reason that, given Mamdani’s plans to offload certain community-safety issues from the police, deterrence will look different in his administration. Surfing is an outlier tragedy. We cannot assign blame fully to systemic flaw. This character of aberrance is what makes accidental surfing deaths seem inevitable—or, rather, inexorable, built into the subway’s force.
Modern-day surfing coincides with a surge in posting about urbex, short for urban exploration of abandoned spaces, which, in New York City, exposes the city’s forever schism: accelerated corporatizing, raging dereliction. There is an actual zeal to immerse oneself in the forgotten extremities of the city. Y’Vonda Maxwell, the mother of Ka’Von Wooden, who died falling from a J train in 2023, told the Times that trains were all “he ate, thought about, talked about.” In 2022, Kosse Laureano fell to his death off a 7 train at Hudson Yards. His friend Alexander Antelman made a video he called “Underworld: A Memorial to Kosse Laureano (2004-2022),” a collage of Laureano’s beautiful and terrifying shots of trains in generally unseen motion. This isn’t just an obsession with danger but with the subway itself—its abandoned track structures, its abandoned ramps, its abandoned shells. Surfers are interested in abandonment. Or, as one told Curbed last year, “It’s a form of expression. It’s a form of art.” His conviction is maddening, but not beyond understanding—it’s the conviction of a child who wishes to commandeer the city before he’s swallowed by it. ♦
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