Q: What happened to the NYC 2012 stickers posted on subway cars, buses, and bus stops? Who is in charge of removing them?

A. Because New York failed to win the Olympics, those stickers and advertisements plastered at a cost of about $20 million to every subway, bus, and cab in town will come down – at least by 2012. Taking them down will be the job of the agency that manages the advertising space where the feel-good Olympics ads with copy lines like “humanity will shine” and “peace is the dream” were posted. Since the public relations campaign also extended to the city’s 32,059 bus stops, about 1,200 phone kiosks, bumpers on cabs, and 75 advertisements at city airports – the agencies involved are numerous, including New York City Transit, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, and the city’s Department of Transportation.

Viacom Outdoor had been contracted to manage the ads. The company is supposed to finish taking them down this week. New York City Transit officials, meanwhile, had no timetable to gauge how long the job would take. A spokesman for New York City Transit, James Anyansi, said the stickers bearing the Olympic rings and plastered to each of the system’s 4,600 buses and 6,400 subway cars would be taken off during routine maintenance and cleaning. “It’s going to be a painstaking task to take them down,” Mr. Anyansi said. “They will take them down as they get cleaned.” The job, he estimated, would take no longer than a couple of months. The city owns 20% of the space on busstop shelters, some of which was donated to New York’s Olympic Committee, NYC 2012.The office regularly donates portions of that ad space to city agencies, nonprofits, and other causes, a spokeswoman for the mayor’s marketing office, Kimberly Spell, said. The remaining ad space at bus stops goes to paying advertisers. Ms. Spell said the Olympics advertisements were paid for by NYC 2012 and came at no cost to taxpayers. “Ad busting” spoofs of the campaign created by opponents of the city’s Olympics bid featuring one-line rebuttals such as “every billionaire will get home field advantage” have already been removed from the bus stops where they were posted.