Image courtesy Paul Weber

Metro will soon be rolling out a series of safety-related billboards and posters featuring silhouetted human figures on the verge of getting pasted by oncoming buses, slippery platforms, and other transit hazards. The ads are a bit scary, though not quite as nightmarish as the Street Smart campaign that features a cyclist with a giant tire tread over her face.

The figures in the Metro ad campaign are accompanied by warnings about not running on the platforms or holding open railcar doors. But Paul Weber, a graphic artist, re-edited them to include everyday transit gripes.

“Holding the doors open could end up costing you an arm and a leg,” the real ad reads. But in Weber’s version, it’s something completely different:

“Want to get back into D.C. past midnight? Fuck You, get a $40 cab.”

And that ad depicting a woman racing on the platform in heels? That’s been repurposed to that most common of Metro problems. “Escalator broken? No Problem. We’ll fix it in 2-3 years.”

In an email, Weber says he was moved to create the joke ads because of the real campaign’s stark approach. “I saw the orignal ads and they just seemed extremely serious and slightly terrifying,” he writes. “I find most things this serious funny, so I just wanted to make a quick joke and push them out so people could chuckle along with me.”

There’s also the inherent humor in that Metro’s ads are easily mockable. “And to be honest most advertisements the average commuter sees on a train or bus are bad anyways so there isn’t much visual difference between these parodies and an ad somebody actually meant to make,” Weber says.