Jay Kaur, 20, a nursing student who took an Uber on Monday morning with her sick 45-year-old mother from their home in Queens to Hicksville, Long Island to see a doctor, said she was disgusted with politicians and had chosen to tune them all out.
“I don’t follow anything,” she said. “I’m so upset.”
Travis Campbell, an M.T.A. conductor who was coming into the city from Wantagh, Long Island via a slower car-to-subway route, said Ms. Hochul should have a role in settling the standoff over wages that has sent L.I.R.R. workers to the picket lines.
But he questioned the Buffalo-born governor’s commitment to mediating a downstate dispute.
“She’s not a Long Islander, she’s upstate,” Mr. Campbell, 47, said. “She never really had to take the Long Island Rail Road, so she probably doesn’t know the urgency of how much we need it.”
Ms. Hochul has pushed the unions to keep negotiating. She also blamed President Trump for increasing the odds of a strike: The federal agency that oversees such labor disputes, the National Mediation Board, last year released the unions from mediation, a decision that cleared the path for a walkout.
Mr. Trump, in response, has blamed the governor and reiterated his support for Mr. Blakeman.
Sarafina Chitika, a spokeswoman for Ms. Hochul’s campaign, said that Mr. Blakeman was “rooting for dysfunction and higher costs so he can score political points with Donald Trump.”
He spent years “making Long Islanders’ lives more expensive,” she said. “New Yorkers can’t afford his leadership, and neither can his own constituents.”
Sean Piccoli, Nate Schweber and Grace Ashford contributed reporting.