Subway-Fix Déjà Vu

Gov. Cuomo has a predicament: His poll numbers are sinking thanks to the Summer of Hell transit crisis, so he needs to prove he’s on top of things — but he doesn’t actually have anything new to announce.

No problem: He just keeps announcing the same news over and over again until he gets the kind of news coverage he was looking for in the first place.

Case in point: The governor, dressed in work boots and khakis, ventured onto the subway tracks at Columbus Circle to explain to reporters how the subway’s power-distribution system has to be overhauled.

Looking for all the world like Johnny-onthe-job (or maybe Mike Dukakis driving that tank in his oversized helmet), Cuomo disclosed that the Public Service Commission has given Con Edison, which supplies the juice, a list of “significant and immediate actions” it must undertake, threatening “penalties” for noncompliance.

He also vowed to end the finger-pointing between the utility and the MTA over who’s to blame for subway-crippling power losses.

That’s all well and good — but he announced pretty much the same thing more than two weeks ago, on July 27.

Speaking that day at an Association for a Better New York breakfast, he ordered Con Ed to step up its game. It was the same day the PSC first sent that letter containing “significant actions Con Edison should be taking.”

Con Ed, in turn, released its own statement hours later identifying a list of steps it had already begun taking.

Yet even that was déjà vu all over again from a month earlier: On June 29, at an MTA Genius Transit Challenge event, Cuomo lamented the increasingly frequent power outages, cited the “finger-pointing game between Con Edison and the MTA” and then promised heavy fines if the utility was to blame for ongoing problems.

Look, Governor, we know you’re desperately trying to convince harried New Yorkers that you’re on the job — but we heard you the first time.