If you live in a big city, you’re probably used to strange sights during your daily commute. Especially if you use public transportation. It takes a lot to surprise a city-goer. Unexpected encounters on the subway are just par for the course of city life. But if you thought nothing could phase you, just wait until you hear what’s hiding in the seats on some buses and subways around the country. If you’d rather stay in the dark about these gross potential travel dangers, you should probably stop reading now. Because this information will make you want to run FAR away.
According to The Los Angeles Times, the bus and subway seats you sit on every day may be home to things like bed bugs, lice, ants, blood, feces, liquids (like…urine), discarded food, and oh so much bacteria. We’re totally grossed out just thinking about it.
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Why? How? Well, many cities, like Boston and Los Angeles, still have fabric seats on their public transportation. Even if the seats are cleaned every day — and dry cleaned every so often — given how many people ride public transportation, it’s nearly impossible to keep them properly cleaned. Even if you’re the first person to sit down on a freshly cleaned seat, how sanitary is it, really? Answer: hardly.
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“Fabric is like a housing development for germs. It allows them to fester and breed,” Bob Spadafora, a Los Angeles Metro senior executive officer, told The Los Angeles Times. “There’s a reason the bench at the local park isn’t made out of fabric. Vinyl doesn’t have crevasses that harbor organisms. There’s nothing for the germs to be stuck to. It’s like concrete. You wash it down, it’s gone.”
So the next time you hop onto the subway or the bus, you might want to think twice before sitting on any seats that are covered in fabric.
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Rather than risk attracting bed bugs or sitting in an unexpected pool of unidentified liquid, it’s probably best to just stand. We’d rather stand for 15 minutes than go home with lice, thank you very much. But don’t even get us started on how dirty the subway poles are.