BOSTON — Nashira Muniz was sending a text message on her cellphone the other day when the phone rang. “I just texted you!” she said to the caller. Nothing unusual about that, except Ms. Muniz, 25, was deep underground, riding the subway.
She then checked on her child at home, made a banking transaction, received a few Facebook notices and arranged to meet another friend — all from the subterranean depths.
Last month, Boston completed installation of cellphone service — at least for T-Mobile subscribers — along all 11 miles of the Orange line, the first of its four subway lines to have end-to-end coverage. But the service has highlighted a problem, and it is not the expected one of fellow passengers yakking loudly.
The bigger problem, transit officials said, is cellphone theft, a growing concern throughout the country. Thefts occur even in subway systems that do not have cellular coverage because passengers display their phones as they read or listen to music and hope to catch the occasional signal that leaks through a street grate or when the train goes above ground.
The rise in thefts could correlate to the spread of high-end smart phones, transit officials said. Ordinary phones have little resale value, especially because victims usually turn off their service once the phone is stolen. But some phones can be reactivated by replacing the personal identity card.
Still, as underground coverage expands, transit officials are concerned that even more phones will be on display, tempting thieves.
The snatching of phones in Boston’s subway system, known as the T, jumped 70 percent in the first three months of this year compared with the first three months of last year (46 stolen phones compared with 27). In 2009, the number of thefts in the Metro system in Washington rose 65 percent (to 894 from 581) over 2008, a spokesman said, and most of those were cellphones.
Of the 14 underground subway systems in urban areas in the United States, many by now provide some cellular coverage. A glaring exception is the New York City subway system, by far the country’s largest, where the lack of underground service often leaves passengers standing in stairwells to finish a call before heading down to the trains.
(The planned wiring of New York’s underground stations, but not the tunnels, which was announced in 2007, has not materialized; a spokesman for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority said the plan was “under review.”)
Boston, which has the nation’s oldest subway system, has had cellphone coverage at four downtown stations since 2007. The entire system is to have coverage by the end of next year and will include more providers, including AT&T, which is to begin testing its service on the Orange line next week.
When transit officials announced the wiring of the Orange line last month, they simultaneously announced a public education program urging passengers to be alert to thieves.
“Do you own a cellphone?” a male voice blares over the public address system in some T stations. “Of course you do.” The voice goes on to instruct passengers to “protect your phone from curious onlookers.” Placards warn: “Show how smart you are: don’t show off your smart phone.”
The police say most thefts occur when passengers are sitting or standing in the subway near the door and paying more attention to their phones than to their surroundings. The thief snatches the phone and darts out of the train just as the doors shut.
“It’s taken right from the hand,” said Deputy Chief Joseph O’Connor of the transit police. “People looking to steal them will take advantage of the relaxed customer.”
Philadelphia has also stepped up its fight against cellphone thefts, as part of a larger program to curb juvenile crime. When school lets out, around 3:15 p.m., the police force in the subways is doubled, said Jerri Williams, a spokeswoman for Philadelphia’s regional transit system. Thefts on the subways, 80 percent of which involve cellphones, she said, are down this year.
On a recent afternoon here, after school was out and rush hour had started, it seemed that at least half of the passengers in several cars were staring into their phones, many of them sending text messages and reading e-mail messages.
A few said they worried about their phones being stolen, but more were like Josh Ernstoff, 30, a business analyst, who shrugged: “Cellphones are a dime a dozen. If I lose it, I’ll turn it off and get another one.”
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