Byford’s Dilemma

Mayor de Blasio wants all New Yorkers to know how strongly he feels about the city’s struggling subway system — but he can’t even bring himself to talk to the man hired to rescue it. “Bit weird,” British-born Andy Byford, head of New York City Transit since January, told The New Yorker, referring to the mayor’s failure to reach out even once. “Maybe I should ring him up.”

Staten Island, as Borough President James Oddo notes, doesn’t “even have a subway or that many buses. Or essentially a mass-transit system.” Yet Oddo says he’s had “numerous conversations” with Byford.

To be fair, the article also said Byford claimed he hadn’t spoken with Gov. Cuomo for months, either — and the gov has a lot more authority over the subways than the mayor. That may be why Byford now has walked that back about Cuomo.

In its own bid for damage control, meanwhile, City Hall announced hours after the piece ran online that Byford and de Blasio will sit down next week.

None of this should surprise: De Blasio these days is focused exclusively on boosting his national progressive profile, not on New Yorkers’ needs — and he’s certainly not interested in hearing Byford’s likely appeal for help in funding repairs to the city’s ailing but vital transit system.

No, when it comes to the subways, the mayor just wants to pin all the blame on Cuomo — whose own attention to New York City transit, as the New Yorker piece gently put it, “has been intermittent.”

Meaning the gov was long most eager to take part in “good news” photo ops, without much concern for signs of coming trouble — and when the crisis hit last year, he did his best to deny the plain fact that he’s ultimately responsible.

Even now, Cuomo’s overwhelming priority is winning re-election — and he’ll get no help on that front from being pinned down on how to address the subways’ needs.

Especially not on whether or how to find the $37 billion or more for Byford’s 10-year “Fast Forward” vision to move the system all the way into the 21st century.

“Can Andy Byford Save the Subways?” asks The New Yorker. Maybe — but he’ll plainly have to pull it off without much support from the “leaders” whose help he needs the most.