If your subway ride wasn’t annoying enough today — between delays, packed cars, “Showtime!” dancers and homeless people who plague the system — get ready for ads blaring at you on the platform while you wait for your train.
Even as so many service announcements over those same public-address systems are completely incomprehensible.
If you thought a fare hike would mean a calmer commute, you must have forgotten what city you live or work in. In the MTA’s New York, you pay more to ride and then to suffer more, with the coming “privilege” of inescapable advertising.
The agency promises that the ads will be pitched at a gentle 75 decibels — hearing loss only kicks in at a sustained 80 to 90 decibels — but in 2021 The Post measured a pilot platform ad at a deafening 99 decibels, which is basically like having a straight-piped motorcycle rev nearby, or standing next to a construction site.
Before the MTA bigs choose to sell riders’ ears to the highest bidder, couldn’t they at least get their equipment in working order?
Per the NYC Transit “20 Year Needs Assessment,” an astounding 52% of station public-address systems are in “poor/marginal condition.”
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But don’t worry: The agency wants to “award projects to upgrade PA systems” in 244 stations . . . by 2030.
It’s bad enough trying to decipher garbled service updates blasting through speakers that are being unhinged by their own vibrations; now we get to strain our ears only to realize it’s another ad for “Wicked” or the Knicks.
Well, whaddya want for three bucks, dignity?