Can We Design Our Way Out of the Subway-Surfing Crisis?

Photo: David Dee Delgado/Getty Images

Six times so far this year, someone has climbed out on top of a moving subway train and died. That’s one more than in 2023; the stats underlying those totals signal a danger that is here to stay. Authorities have caught 180 kids subway-surfing so far this year. The average age is 14. Some are as young as 9. The numbers dropped in the summer but surged when school returned, and it’s most frequent after the last bell of the day rings. The crosstown No. 7 line is bearing the brunt of the crisis because it runs almost entirely above ground until it approaches the East River to enter Manhattan: The view of Long Island City and the skyline beyond makes for compelling, shareable videos. At a November 18 hearing, the MTA told City Council lawmakers that it’s asked social-media companies to pull down an estimated 10,000 videos. The NYPD has taken to sending up drones over elevated sections of track, trying to spot kids as they climb up onto trains. The injuries are awful. One of the worst photos I saw in my years working at the New York Post was of a shoe next to a bloodstained patch of asphalt beneath the elevated tracks at the Avenue N station on the F line in Brooklyn. A 14-year-old — the median subway surfer — had climbed on top of a train, then fell and was hit by another train that couldn’t stop in time.

Certainly, getting the videos down is part of the solution to this deadly problem, but we have at our disposal another way to design our way out of the problem. All but a few of New York’s subway trains have self-enclosed cars, with (usually) unlocked doors on each end. Last year, the MTA began testing two ten-car trains with what are known as open gangways, in which the ten cars are accordioned together in groups of five, 300 feet long, open end-to-end like a long snaky hallway. (You have perhaps ridden one by now, on the C line.) You can’t slip out for an illicit smoke or a furtive pee or thrill-ride between cars, because there is no “between cars” anymore. This setup is already common in Toronto and many major European cities, like London and Paris, and it’s a more efficient design that can carry more passengers. It is also much easier for cops to patrol, and straphangers have an easier time keeping an eye on their surroundings or getting away from a problem. And there is one other bonus that relates to the subway’s newest problem: Because you can’t step out between cars while the train is moving, it is damn near impossible to climb out and up.

The R211T prototype trains have five-car sections with no internal doors — which in turn makes them much harder to surf. Photo: Yuki Iwamura/Bloomberg/Getty Images

Whether we will soon get a lot more of these open-gangway trains is an unsettled question. Buying more of them has run into resistance from parts of the MTA bureaucracy, which is extremely averse to change. After all, one sure way to ensure the railroad runs tomorrow is to run it the same way that it ran today, which works because it’s the same way the railroad the day and year and century before. An engineering consulting firm, Jacobs, that was hired by the MTA to help evaluate the open-gangway cars delivered a report, approximately 100 pages long, that detailed every potential risk, sources told me. Parts of the bureaucracy seized on a line in the report, which two people inside the agency described as an incidental finding of the assessment, that said that smoke would travel farther through the train in case of a fire. Never mind that these trains have interiors that are designed to be flame resistant, never mind that they have overbuilt air-circulation systems and other safeguards, and never mind that Toronto, London, and Paris — where fire and smoke also exist — use the same setup without problem. “That’s a risk. But running the subway is a risk,” said one person familiar with the MTA’s internal discussions. “The risks are so low that it didn’t have a ton of value.” Still, a rule was imposed on the trains that they could only be used on lines where the spacing between all stops is less than four minutes, restricting them to the R and the C. Other parts of the agency seized on the fact that the manufacturer, Kawasaki, has attempted to negotiate a $7 million premium per train ($700,000 per car) for the feature, roughly a 20 percent upcharge on the traditional designs. That would mean either a bigger budget or fewer new trains.

This should be the end of the line for the old saw “a train is a train is a train.” The MTA is planning to spend $5.8 billion on new subway cars over the next five years, pending Albany’s approvals. The design-forward open-gangway trains can not only better position the MTA for decades to come, providing more space to carry more riders; they can help the system recover ridership lost to the pandemic over safety concerns — and, as an extra bonus, they can save lives by making it virtually impossible to subway-surf.