Governor Cuomo Won’t Ride the Subway, But Cardboard Cut-Out Cuomo Will

The advocates at the Riders Alliance have been campaigning for many months to get Governor Andrew Cuomo to ride the NYC subways. The governor’s office has refused to answer any of their inquiries. So on Thursday, they did the next best thing: They brought along a cardboard cut-out of his likeness to see how straphangers would react.

Subway delays are on the rise, but so far, Cuomo has failed to fund the MTA’s $32 billion five-year capital plan to fix tracks, modernize signals, expand capacity, and upgrade the equipment that moves New York City. It wasn’t hard to find straphangers who want better service to give fake Cuomo a piece of their minds.

  • Brendan A. MacWade

    And this is one reason why Riders Alliance is better than the Straphangers Campaign. The latter organization has gone completely soft in its criticism of Albany.

  • Komanoff

    That is unfair and, frankly, stupid. First, Straphangers has been vocal and aggressive in criticizing Cuomo and the State Legislature. Second, different advocacy groups have different roles to play. RA and Strap work complementarily and collegially, and the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

    The RA action/campaign and Clarence’s video are terrific. Let’s celebrate and encourage. No need to pull anyone down, esp’ly Strap and our greatest transit/transpo advo, Gene R.

  • Pretty sure Gene invented the cardboard cut-out subway advocacy tactic too:

    http://www.nytimes.com/1997/12/11/nyregion/new-fares-bring-transit-gadfly-in-from-the-cold.html

  • Bolwerk

    If they toned down, good. Straphangers has a history of being so aggressive that they ignore facts and reality. Being truculent toward the MTA looks great in papers, which is why Straphangers gets so much PR attention, but it probably just helps make people angry at the wrong people.

    I don’t know who started that two sets of books crock, but Straphangers certainly helped propagate it too. Transit-hating pols have been using it ever since.

  • Anon resident

    Please bring the cutout to Harlem. Nobody has ever seen Assembly Member Farrell or Council Member Dickens on the subway.

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