New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio is not nearly as sophisticated as his predecessor. In an effort to prove that, de Blasio recently made it a point to occasionally take the subway around the Big Apple rather than get chauffeured to and from his Gracie Mansion residence on the Upper East Side.
On Monday, the mayor rode the subway and, to the surprise of few, encountered some issues with the line he was waiting to get on. Even more surprising is that in sending his complaints about the experience to his staff via email, he accidentally CC'd a New York Times reporter. Thanks to that mishap, common folk got a glimpse into de Blasio's "2 problems," as the subject line of the message reads, one of which we would all love to have.
"The detail drove away when we went into the subway rather than waiting to confirm we got on a train," de Blasio wrote in the email. "We need a better system."
The whole point of de Blasio riding the subway is to make citizens feel like he is one of them, just an ordinary 9-to-5er. So that complaint of his detail not waiting for him kind of contradicts his whole effort.
"Let's cross-check our info with them when I take the subway," the mayor continued, before telling his staff: "This is a fixable prob."
Then, while de Blasio was waiting on the platform, the express train he was waiting for was running late. It's a painfully common occurrence for every day subway dwellers, but de Blasio insisted to his staff that the mess could've been "avoided."
"We waited 20 mins for an express only to hear there were major delays," the mayor wrote. "This was knowable info. Had we had it, we would have avoided a lot of hassles."
The New York Times received the email from a City Hall government address, which two of their sources confirmed as de Blasio's. His poor experiences occurred just weeks after the city's Tranist Authority imposed a fare hake, increasing the price of one subway ride from $2.50 to $2.75.