NEW YORK — 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, Ka’Von 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 recent years while attempting to “subway surf,” a practice that dates back a century but has been supercharged by social media.
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 Ka’Von 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, told The Associated Press, saying transit and law enforcement officials haven’t 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 say. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which operates the subway system, has said it is studying the issue. But it has yet to come forward with proposals to use technology or physical barriers that might make it harder for people to get on top of trains.
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 Ka’Von rode the day he died, is among those who thinks 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 Ka’Von’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.
Elcock said another operator traveling in the opposite direction saw Ka’Von on the train’s roof and reported it over a radio. Because of patchy radio service, she said, she didn’t get the warning.
But she thinks an even simpler solution could have saved Ka’Von’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.
“Lock it when we’re in service so people can’t climb up and be on top of the train,” Elcock said.
The MTA’s leaders have said that they looking into possible ways to prevent subway surfing, including engineering solutions, but the agency declined to make any of its safety experts available for an interview.
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 now done only on a handful of 1980s-era trains. But he said 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 City Council members and reporters last year, MTA officials ruled out some 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 said at a news conference, adding that you can’t “cover it with barbed wire.”
The MTA has asked social media companies to take down videos glamorizing subway surfing. It’s 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 and from school each day.
The 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 around 14, according to police. The youngest was 9 years old.
Branislav Dimitrijevic, an engineering professor of 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 Alpert, a non-voting member of the MTA board, said he has been asking the agency about the plausibility of physical sensors but hasn’t gotten a response.
The NYPD has patrolled popular subway surfing routes with drones, but the missions can’t be everywhere at once.
Trains in some other cities, such as Hong Kong and Dubai, aren’t easily climbable. They have streamlined bodies, lack handles on the outside and don’t open between cars.
Some rail systems have resorted to extreme tactics to keep people from riding on top of trains. In Indonesia, railway officials once installed hanging metal flails to try and deter passengers from riding atop train cars to avoid overcrowding. They also tried spraying riders with red paint and hitting them with brooms.
The MTA recently purchased a few new subway cars that don’t have the outdoor gaps exploited by subway surfers, but they represent just a sliver of the number currently in service, and won’t be deployed on lines popular for surfing anytime soon.
