A cagey Bronx subway rider looking to avoid being pushed onto the tracks as the city's transit crime spirals out control shared her radical strategy for keeping her feet safely on the platform: tethering herself firmly to a pole with a bike lock until her train arrives.
'People want to push people into trains, it's bad out here - that ain't gonna happen to me,' Wanda Vela told TikTok viewers on Monday in the now viral video as she wrapped a bike lock around a pole on the platform and her midsection, securing it with a key.
'I got my own chain and this what I do - I wait for the train like this and if the train don't come, I stay right here. Ain't nobody pushing me.'
She said she only unlocks the chain once her train pulls into the platform: 'That's it. Then I'm going on the train - boom,' she said in the video as she unlocks the chain.
Vela's advice may seem tongue-in-cheek but the video hit close to home for many straphangers fearing for their safety, garnering 2 million views.
'I got my own chain and this what I do - I wait for the train like this and if the train don't come, I stay right here. Ain't nobody pushing me,' Wanda Vela said as she demonstrated her radical safeguard against subway shovers as transit crime spikes in New York City
'I hold onto the pole anytime the train is coming,' one user commented. 'She's not exaggerating the dangers.'
'I know some people take this as a joke... but if you take the train, this is a REAL fear,' another wrote.
Things are, indeed, 'bad out here,' according to crime statistics.
New York City has seen a surge in violent assaults on the subway, with a 45 percent increase in the past 28 days as compared to last year.
Just this week, a 141 percent increase was reported for transit crime.
On Monday, the day Vela posted her morbid life hack to social media, a 23-year-old woman was choked, punched and robbed of her purse at the 34th
