As politicians around the city lined up to call for more action to prevent deaths in the subways this month, one question went largely unanswered: is the problem of people being struck by trains getting worse, or just getting noticed for a change?
The answer, data from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority shows, is closer to the latter.
In 2012, 55 people were killed after being hit by subway trains, the highest death toll since 2007. But while MTA officials say they are taking serious steps to prevent deaths, they note that the ridership of the city’s subways has been soaring all that time, to more than 1.6 billion subway trips in 2012 alone.
The Wall Street Journal reviewed data from the MTA, the state Public Transportation Safety Board, and the Federal Transit Administration to calculate the rate at which people who enter the subway have been struck by trains over the past 11 years.
The finding: the “12-9” — MTA code for a train striking a person — is a persistent reality of the subway, but nonetheless a rare one compared to the number of people who move through the system every day.
In 2003, 136 riders made contact with a moving train (what the PTSB calls “collisions with individuals”) for every 1 billion riders carried by the subway. That year, a total of 188 people were hit by a train, and 37 died.
In 2012, the MTA recorded more than 275 million more passenger trips, even as the incidence of 12-9s fell. The rate last year, based on a preliminary estimate of annual ridership, fell to roughly 85 train strikes for every 1 billion rides. That rate also represented a slight decline from 2011.
The same data shows that the rate of death is volatile, easily driven up or down by individual incidents. For instance, more than 40 fewer people were struck by trains in 2011 compared to the recent high watermark of 2003. But 10 more of those people died.
MTA officials compared the risk of being struck by a subway train to that of being hit by lightning in a given year in the United States. The National Weather Service estimates that risk at about 1 in 775,000. The subway system handles roughly 5.4 million riders per day.
One constant: suicide. Records show that a relatively steady proportion of incidents result from suicide attempts, whether successful or not. That cause accounted for 33 of the 141 subway strikes in 2012, the MTA announced this week.
Other causes read like a litany of behaviors the MTA (or perhaps your mother) would tell you to avoid: intoxicated passengers falling into the track bed, people hopping down to retrieve a dropped personal item, or customers rushing on the platform who get clipped by a train entering the station.