NEW YORK — The death of a 15-year-old subway surfer trying to ride a train across the Williamsburg Bridge is the latest in a long line of fatalities among daredevils illegally riding the rails atop train cars.
The MTA says it doesn’t keep statistics on how many subway surfing busts it makes. But agency data show a sharp spike in incidents of people riding outside train cars — nearly double prepandemic numbers.
A whopping 928 people were found riding outside subway cars last year, more than four times as many incidents as in the previous two years. In 2019, the last full year of data before the pandemic tanked subway ridership, 490 people were caught riding outside a train car.
