Mayor Bloomberg’s Morning Commute
The New York Times metro desk has been staking out “MetroCard” Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s morning commute for the past five weeks. At first, reporter Michael Grynbaum and his colleagues Cassi Feldman and Cristina Maldonado thought they had a big scoop, according to a reporter’s diary on City Room:
We would be following the mayor’s morning commute, and we set out at
first to determine his basic routine. Taking our cue from past reports
that placed him at the 77th Street stop on weekday mornings, The Times
sent reporters Cassi Feldman and Cristina Maldonado (and me) to the
mayor’s Beaux-Arts townhouse and nearby points on the Upper East Side.For the first few days, we thought we had an amazing scoop: The mayor never takes the subway at all!
The waiting Suburbans would pick up their passenger and zip off, but
the reporter at the 77th Street subway never saw Mr. Bloomberg arrive.
Newspaper vendors and M.T.A. employees at the station all said the same
thing: The mayor doesn’t come here.
Upon further investigation, the reporters learned that the Mayor’s commute isn’t exactly typical:
On mornings that he takes the subway from home, Mr. Bloomberg is
picked up at his Upper East Side town house by a pair of king-size
Chevrolet Suburbans. The mayor is driven 22 blocks to the subway
station at 59th Street and Lexington Avenue, where he can board an
express train to City Hall. His drivers zip past his neighborhood
station, a local subway stop a five-minute walk away.That means
Mr. Bloomberg — whose much-discussed subway rides have become an
indelible component of his public image — spends a quarter of his
ostensibly subterranean commute in an S.U.V.
So, what do people think? Is Bloomberg just a huge hypocrite or is there still virtue in a Mayor who could easily drive the whole way to work in the plush comfort of his Chevy Suburban but still chooses to get out and use the subway every so often?
Guess how the anti-congestion pricing lobby, self-styled defenders of the common man, is spinning it?
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