The iron law of urban politics: Not every elected official who rides transit will be a good elected official. But every good elected city official will ride transit.
Wow, as a swiss resident this comes across rude. Dont get me wrong, its nice to see politicians in discourse with the people but the guy just kinda said: “Hello, I have a question and now I have another quite hard to answer political question.”
I’d have said: “May I ask you something politics related?” And then accepted a No if the politician wants to have a quite ride.
Behaving like this is going to encourage private travel in a car.
I get where you’re coming from, and also, being a politician in the United States means being a public figure, and if you ride public transit you expect people to recognize you and talk to you. It’s part of outreach. It’s a populist thing.
Joe Biden rode Amtrak to work for 40 years - and from what I understand, now that he’s not president, he’s riding Amtrak to his office again (albeit guarded by his handlers in case he sundowns). People stop to talk to him, take selfies with him, whatever. It’s not (necessarily) rude.
The thing about the United States is, unfortunately, no politician is so poor they have to take public transit. So any pol on the bus expects people to recognize them and start a conversation. If they didn’t want that, they wouldn’t take the bus.
This isn’t Switzerland, this is America, and we’re at WAR with our politicians. If we see them in public, we will DEMAND answers, and they WILL provide them. If they don’t like it, then either stop acting like a hypocritical shithead, or stop taking performative trips on public transport to demonstrate how woke you are. If you are an American politician, you should be confronted publicly, and if you don’t like it, stop supporting policies that you can’t defend, or stay hidden. But if you go out in public, you better be prepared to defend yourself.