No training wheels

New York doesn’t know Andy Byford from a hole in the ground. But the new president of NYC Transit had better get to know us, and the groaning city subways we rely upon, damn fast. Byford comes to the hope-to-hell-it’s-a-rescue by way of London, Sydney and Toronto, where he’s credited with orchestrating a turnaround.

But nothing he’s ever done comes close to running the 24-hour, 472-station, 6,000-bus behemoth that makes 8 million trips daily in the five boroughs. Nothing comes close to overseeing the lumbering, wheezing, hidebound $8 billion-a-year, 50,000-head bureaucracy that is supposed to keep New York moving and now too often doesn’t.

We hope, nay pray, that the trust that Chairman Joe Lhota and the MTA board has placed in Byford is well-founded.

Job one for the new guy is also job three, four and 100: Get the trains running more reliably.

Doing that demands innovative ideas borrowed from other places, sure, but also a granular understanding of just how New York’s nuts and bolts and tracks got so rusty, and how to fix them.

The city owns every station, every inch of track and every subway car and bus. But the state runs the show, and controls the purse strings. And both have disinvested over the years. Mr. Byford, lean on, call on, and cajole both governor and mayor. Tell them that you need more cash — ideally by tolling the East River bridges.

Tell them, and Lhota, that to stretch dollars as far as they’ll go, you need sane work rules like one person to run a train, instead of two. Tell them that we must get the ancient signals upgraded, and not over the course of decades.

But the core of this job isn’t talk or advocacy. It’s management. Get to work, and show results quick. Otherwise, stand clear of the closing doors.