What’s That Sound in the Subway? It’s a Commercial.

Good morning. It’s Tuesday. Today we’ll find out why you may sometimes hear commercials in the subway. We’ll also look at how the Manhattan borough president is filling community boards with members who are pro-housing development.

Credit…Jeenah Moon for The New York Times

Not all of the sometimes-unintelligible announcements in the subway tell you where to find an elevator, where to find the police or what to do when trains are skipping your station. Some of them are commercials, just like on most radio stations.

In fact, one noncommercial radio station paid for some commercials in the subway last week.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which runs the subways, has also broadcast audio commercials for television shows like “Gossip Girl” and the “Sex and the City” sequel “And Just Like That.” Last year, commercials for the movie “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” took that franchise underground to places the fictional archaeologist has never plundered.

The transit agency says the commercials, which can be heard on trains and platforms through the public address systems, are part of an advertising program that brings in $170 million a year. That figure includes revenue from ads on video monitors and posters in stations as well as from the commercials. The M.T.A. would not release a breakdown detailing how much money came from each type of advertising.

The $170 million amounts to less than 1 percent of the M.T.A.’s $19.2 billion budget. Still, The Daily News complained in an editorial last year that the Indiana Jones commercials were “an obnoxious sellout,” adding: “The folks who run the system should keep their grubby hands off the PA system, which must be reserved for useful information — and which, ahem, don’t work nearly well enough in that regard.”