Yep. Stupid and teens go together like white and rice. Always have and always will. Ref @deltogre just above I bet Og & Grog used to dare each other to pull the stegosaurus’s tail. Thagomizer and all.
Ref the cited article I realize the NY Daily News is a tabloid. but I thought it was interesting they kept using the term “cops” to refer to the police. Not wrong, but pretty familiar / informal for a news outlet.
16 dead in the last 3 years
Natural selection at work.
Exactly.
Social Darwinism is pseudoscience.
It’s false to say it has saved more than 200 people. Instead it arrested 200 people. The substantial majority of subway surfers don’t die doing it.
Good thing nobody mentioned or implied Social Darwinism, then, isn’t it?
Further …
If knowledge of the drones is or becomes widespread, then X number of additional would-be surfers will be deterred. The publicity over the 200 hundred arrestees may prevent 1000 other kids from trying it.
Different point:
When I was a dumb kid, there were any number of risky things we all did. But a common theme was that once was generally not enough. If we did it and it wasn’t beyond terrifying, we’d do it again. And again.
The thing which eventually stopped most of our risky activities was somebody getting hurt doing it. Fortunately my circle of influence never suffered any life-long maimings or deaths. But we came close a time or three.
Some fraction of train surfers are one-and-done. Another fraction will be in the “keep doing it until a new fad comes along or we grow out of it”. And the final fraction will be “keep doing it until we get hurt” in a game where the minimum hurt is real severe, with fatal injuries the norm.
Every kid in that last group whose multi-ride train surfing career is stunted by the drones is a save too.
I expect drones are only going to fly in daylight. So to avoid them train surfers might switch to night. This is going to be riskier because it’s much harder to see the obstacles you need to duck under.
I can tell you that I have done things so terrifyingly risky that I did not repeat the experience a second time.
On the other hand, speaking of adrenaline junkies, it is not confined to teens. I cannot say what the average age of wingsuit BASE jumpers or free-solo cliff climbers is, but people continue to do so even though the life expectancy is not high.
Yeah. I too have had the “Once was almost more than I could stand; no way in hell am I doing that again!” experience.
For me personally, I was never so much an adrenaline junkie as just a kid who didn’t always appreciate the full range and magnitude of risk(s) about to be taken.
I think the true junkies are some manner of arrested development as to risk taste, coupled with a very cavalier attitude towards the probability of being killed. I have often wondered what goes through the mind of an aggressive risk taker who’s just now realizing their latest adventure will be their last and they have a few seconds left to consider their fate before its over. Is it regret, or elation, or just surprise?
I was researching events in my area around that time and found a story where a school kid was waving to his teacher who was on an interurban. He must have been standing on a parallel set of tracks. The teacher probably took that image to her grave. It was hard for me to just read it.
My Dad grew up in 1930s/40s Chicago. Grabbing the rear bumper of passing cars and “skating” along the snowy / icy streets in your leather-soled street shoes was commonplace. With another car 15-20 feet behind.
Between that, WWII, Korea, etc., when I count up the odds against my existence it’s a sobering calculation.
Two more deaths yesterday.
Such a damned shame, such a waste of young lives that could have moved on from stupid teen stuff to a worthwhile life.
Thank you, I couldn’t remember the term we used. Skitching!
It has zero to do with social media. The names are spread more rapidly and wider because of social media. But as many other Dopers have said in this thread, kids will be kids and people of all ages have been riding outside of train cars almost since trains were invented.
I’ve lived in NYC since 1981 and spent a lot of those years riding the #7 train that goes between Hudson Yards and Flushing, Queens. Kids have been riding that line, not exclusively but for some odd reason it’s a hot choice, since well before I got to NYC.
That’d be decades before social media.
And we can and should set aside the tired trope, “Oh…boys will be boys” Yesterday 2 girls died surfing the J Train in Brooklyn.
Zero? From the article you linked:
Norma Nazario, whose 15-year-old son Zackery died in 2023, filed a wrongful death lawsuit against ByteDance, TikTok and Meta in 2024.
She told NBC News NOW that her son was introduced to “subway surfing” on social media. Zackery died after his head struck a beam while he rode atop a train that was traveling over the Williamsburg Bridge.
The lawsuit says that the social media companies “intentionally design and develop their products to encourage, enable, and push material to teens and children that Defendants know to be problematic and highly detrimental to their minor users’ mental and physical health.”
A litigant can claim anything looking for someone deep-pocketed to blame.
That proves nothing, other than someone with something to gain claims to believe something.
You guys really think social media has “zero” influence on young people doing stupid stuff?