Transit officials are hoping a new ad campaign, a new spokesman and a few subway car modifications will continue to drive down subway surfing deaths.
The MTA relaunched its “Ride Inside, Stay Alive” anti-subway surfing campaign on Wednesday, this time with the support of Queens-born professional BMX bike rider Nigel Sylvester.
Like last year’s initiative, the push involves a series of recorded subway announcements — by Sylvester, as well as by New York City schoolchildren — about the dangers of riding on the outside of a subway train, plus a series of digital posters displayed on subway and platform screens.
“Subway surfing is going to get you injured or killed,” Sylvester says in a subway announcement recorded for the campaign. “It’s pretty simple: Don’t do it.”
“I believe I can relate to these kids,” Sylvester said Wednesday, when asked how a professional thrill seeker can be a role model for safety. “Kids can relate to me, and we can have a meaningful dialogue.”
Subway surfing has been a persistent, deadly problem, with six deaths attributed to the practice last year and five deaths in 2023. Another 25 people were injured while riding outside of trains in those two years.
The overwhelming majority of subway surfers are teenagers.
So far this year, one person — a 13-year-old boy — has died from subway surfing, succumbing to his injuries days after falling off the top of a No. 7 train in Queens.
“As a father of three children, I can’t imagine seeing my child on [top of] a train as that train barrels down the track,” said NYC Transit President Demetrius Crichlow.
“I was a manager here on the [No.] 7 line,” Crichlow continued. “I’ve seen on a first-hand basis what happens to the children when they come into contact with a fixed, immovable object.”
The revamped campaign focuses not just on the dangers of subway surfing, but on the toll that kids’ deaths take on surviving families and friends.
A three-display ad unveiled Wednesday tells the fictionalized story, in comic-book form, of a 12-year-old who falls from a train, and the horrors his death inflicts on his friends, his mother and the EMT who responds to the scene.
The MTA’s chief customer officer, Shanifa Rieara, said the campaign involved 43 such ads that would be rolled out over the next 12 months.
Other announcements focused on the senselessness of a subway surfing death.
“The rush from subway surfing is fleeting — the consequences are real,” Ahana Chandra, a student at Stuyvesant High School, said in her subway announcement. “Six people died subway surfing last year, and for what?”
The ad campaign comes amid a series of other efforts to curb thrill-seeking subway deaths.
The transit agency is in the early stages of testing add-on barriers to train cars in an effort make it harder to climb up to the roof.
Rieara also noted that the MTA’s efforts to get subway-surfing videos taken down from social media continues. So far this year, she said, roughly 1,800 such videos have been removed by platforms like X, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube.
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