Photo by thisisbossi
In the event you feel the urge to ride around Metrorail on Sunday without any trousers, the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority has a bit of advice: Don’t sit down. Despite Metro’s reputation as one of the cleanest intracity rail systems in the United States, participants in the annual No Pants Subway Ride may want to stay standing.
Of course, if you’re even considering participating in the sixth iteration of this lame stunt for people who still think flash mobs are a thing, you deserve to stand in public and be mocked. For the sixth year in a row, the aimless clowns at Improv Everywhere, a collective of fools who long to return to their unfunny salad days of performing in college sketch troupes to half-empty campus coffeeshops, are organizing pants-shunning crowds to board transit systems around the world.
And D.C. is hardly immune to this global nuisance. Bottomless Metro rides in years past have resulted in DCist photo galleries of 20-something Washingtonians thinking they’re the baddest people around because they are shocking you with their lack of pants in a scene that will almost certainly be memorialized later by the likes of PoPville and, well, DCist.
Except after five years, it’s not shocking. It’s just dumb. And it’s unsanitary. And nobody riding the train wants to see your underwear, no matter how funny. This is public transit, not a BuzzFeed Rewind gallery of Spider-man Underoos.
Although it’s perfectly legal to ride around Metro wearing just your underwear—note, though, that the ride’s organizers suggest donning constrictive undergarments like a Speedo or double-bagging yourself as a precautionary measure—one should not necessarily sit down on station benches or train seats without the security of actual pants. Then again, some pants-free riders might sit down anyway, to the possible detriment of normal people.
“We are sitting down on seats that other passengers on Metro will use,” the No Pants Subway Ride’s organizers advise on the event’s Facebook page.”Please be considerate.”
Metro spokesman Dan Stessel says he observed last year’s event and found that despite the participants’ artificial infantilism, they were mindful of personal and public hygiene.
“I was out on the system during last year’s No Pants Ride and can tell you that most participants (wisely) did not sit down,” he writes in an email. However, Stessel does not say if he actually participated.
UPDATE, 4:45 p.m.: “Uh, no,” Stessel writes in a follow-up email. Which is, to say, that sans-pants Metro rides may have the winking blessing of the transit agency’s spokesman, but he’ll be keeping his pants on.
