What the hail?

Gov. Cuomo ordered the city’s Taxi and Limousine Commission to do the impossible, so panel Chairman David Yassky has responded by doing the ridiculous. He has proposed forcing ambulettes — trucklike vehicles that transport nonemergency patients to medical services — to double as streethail livery cabs.

This has to do with City Hall’s misbegotten plan to let livery cars pick up street-hail passengers in the boroughs and northern Manhattan. Sold by Mayor Bloomberg as a way to equalize taxi service across the city, the proposal drew significant political support. But from the start, the question was: Why does the mayor want to overhaul transportation services that, really, no one thought needed overhauling?

Yellow medallion cabs cruise the heavily trafficked parts of Manhattan, where street-hail business makes sense. Liveries make a living by radio dispatch in all the areas where drivers can’t make a living on street hails. Although the liveries also pick up 150,000 curbside passengers a day, the liveries and the yellows pretty much had their territories and business models worked out.

Then came the mayor, with plans for installing meters and GPS tracking in the liveries.

Then came advocates for the handicapped, with calls for making the new livery cars wheelchairaccessible, just as they want for yellow cabs.

Then came the yellow cabs, with cries that Bloomberg would violate their legal monopoly on street hails across the city, even in neighborhoods they never visit.

Then came Bloomberg, with plans to sell 1,500 medallions to raise as much $1 billion for the city.

Then came Cuomo, with a compromise built on the undoable.

The city is limited to selling a maximum of 400 yellow taxi medallions until Yassky puts 1,200 wheelchair-accessible liveries on the street.

That means he has to find 1,200 livery drivers who are willing to invest tens of thousands of dollars to buy wheelchair-accessible vehicles rather than simply keep the far less expensive sedans they now drive.

As livery drivers have no reason to spend a ton of money, Yassky has no hope of meeting Cuomo’s demand — except by doing the absurd.

With a straight face, he proposes forcing the 176 companies that operate 2,430 ambulettes in the city to repurpose the vehicles as ambulette-livery cars, complete with roof lights and taxi meters.

One moment, they would bring a patient to dialysis or chemotherapy, at a rate of $58 for a round trip of 10 miles or less. The next moment, they would pull over to carry a shopper home from the supermarket, at a rate of $2 a mile.

Give us a break. This doesn’t pass the laugh test. Yassky and Cuomo must both get serious.