this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2025
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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.

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[–] freeman@feddit.org 45 points 1 week ago (7 children)

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.

[–] stabby_cicada@slrpnk.net 14 points 1 week ago (2 children)

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.

[–] freeman@feddit.org 8 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Yea, I underestimated the car dependency once again. Being "so poor they have to take public transit" is a crazy sentence to me. Our highest executive politicians, the Bundesräte (the left/green moreso than the right ones) regularly ride on public transport, in the more expensive 1. Class, and they expect not to be disturbed.

I mean its a swiss thing as well. Roger Federer and Justin Biber can just stroll through a city and only rarely get bothered by people for selfies.

[–] Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 1 week ago

same thing with people in the US largely considering downtown to be where poor people live (aside from like, NYC), because basically the only affordable housing is the old apartment buildings that remain.

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