People Should Really Stop Walking Off the Red Line Platform

Today marks the third time in a month we've seen spit-out-your-coffee video footage of a person walking off a Red Line MBTA platform and falling onto the tracks as peacefully as Peter Pan might walk the plank. (The difference, of course, being that Peter Pan can fly away and these people just get hurt.) WCVB reports that a 44-year-old woman walked straight off the platform at Andrew station this weekend. She was helped up by onlookers and sustained a “minor leg injury.”

WCVB opens their story with the ominous note that this woman “has become the latest person to walk off the platform of an MBTA station.” Just the latest you say? Sure. Why, just last week, one stop away at Broadway, a woman tumbled into the pit. Witnesses say that “prior to the incident, she appeared to be stumbling around the platform. She moved closer to the yellow line, then fell into the pit,” according to Universal Hub.

And last month,  further on down the line at Kendall, a woman visiting from Minnesota was walking backwards and, predictably, walked right off the platform.

None of these people made contact with the third rail or sustained lethal injury, that we know of. All of them make for some painful surveillance footage. Careful out there, people.

Update: It gets worse! BostInno notes that if you wind the clock even further back, there are at least two more incidents in the past six months. In one from August, a woman carrying her child (yeesh) at Kendall thought she could cross directly to a train departing from the opposite platform. (It's at about 40 seconds.)

And in June, a man from Florida at Central similarly tried to reach the train at the opposite platform (at about 1:10.)

Yikes.