Maybe it's time for Gov. Cuomo to think a bit more inside the box.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk, whom the governor said he turned to for subway signaling advice (for some reason), spent the weekend doing what he loves more than anything: firing off a series of (possibly pot-influenced) tweets that show he has no business advising anyone on anything.
It started on Friday night, as Musk tweeted that he had a great idea for moving people around: "Build super safe, Earthquake [sic]-proof tunnels under cities to solve traffic."
So, the subway then. Musk's posting went over so badly that even had the New York City Transit Twitter account sent a cream pie in his ocular direction.
Musk went on to clarify that the tunnels he was inventing would only be for emissions-free electric cars, which started sounding like the subway, but worse — and is really just an ad for Musk's Hyperloop, a proposal that NYC transit writer emeritus Aaron Gordon now spends his days debunking.
The electric car flim-flam man also tweeted that the widely accepted theory of induced demand — namely that more traffic lanes encourages more driving and then, therefore more congestion — is "irrational."
Musk later suggested that everyone making fun of him must have been a bot and also deleted a poorly thought out insult when he called his critics "Subway Stalinists" (prompting even more jokes).
The weekend tweetstorm did little to enhance Musk's battered reputation. And it threatened to sully Gov. Cuomo, who started 2019 by telling reporters that he had called Musk for some "outside the box" thinking about fixing the subway and also discussed with him the possibility of "flying cars."
Then again, Musk's refusal to believe in induced demand will probably keep him in Cuomo's good graces. Earlier this year, the governor denied reports of more traffic on the new Kosciuszko Bridge by putting on an exaggerated Italian accent to explain why "there’s gotta be a better a-traffic a-flow" when you add more lanes to a bridge or highway.
The governor's office did not respond on Monday to an email seeking whether Cuomo still holds Musk in high regard.
