ALARMING SURF ON TURF
Teens’ bus-roof rides
It’s the latest wave of transit stupidity.
Adrenaline junkies are now surfing atop Big Apple buses barreling down major thoroughfares — a new twist on the deadly transit trend of surfing subway cars.
One audacious roof rider captured their illegal trip on an M15 articulated bus, the streetscape blurring past as the steel behemoth hurtled down Second Avenue in Manhattan’s Murray Hill neighborhood, video shared on Instagram this week showed.
Another vertigo-inducing clip posted on X in February showed a hoodie-clad youth crouching down on the roof of a different articulated bus — before hopping on to a different section of the vehicle and ducking beneath an electric cable line.
‘Could ruin lives’
“If there’s something ridiculous, foolhardy and dangerous, teens will figure out how to do it,” straphanger Pamelda Candusso Hirsch, 71, griped to The Post. “They could forever ruin so many lives.”
Mustapha Sawaneh, who has driven MTA buses along crosstown routes for six years, warned that the brazen surfers taking their stunts from the subways to the streets face more “unpredictable” and dangerous terrain.
“If a cab cuts in front of you, you have to slam on the breaks. If someone steps out on the street, you have to swerve the bus,” said Sawaneh, 26. “If you’re [subway] surfing you can see a train curve ahead, what’s coming up [but] when you’re bus surfing you don’t know what’s going to happen.”
Several bus drivers suspected the reckless riders were somehow scampering aboard their vehicles while they were parked during their 10-minute breaks, or even at a 30-second stop at a red light.
Deadly fad
“Operators are going to need to check before we head out,” said veteran driver Jason Williams, 40, referring to the tops of their buses.
Williams warned that it’s impossible to tell from the driver’s seat whether their bus has a roof-level stowaway “unless someone tells you, and then it might be too late.”
New York City and state officials have attempted to crack down on the scourge of transit surfers, which they say has become more common among teens who are trying to copy what they see on TikTok and Instagram.
In September, the Adams administration and the MTA deployed a public service campaign with ads and announcements warning about the dangers of subway surfing.
At least two people have been killed riding outside of trains this year, including 14-year-old Alam Reyes, who died after he was thrown from the top of a southbound F train in Brooklyn. Last year, at least five teens were killed while subway surfing.