Cuomo’s time to lead

Gov. Cuomo runs the subways. We’ve said it a million times. He runs the subways, and he knows it. So what on or under Earth was he doing Tuesday blaming assemblymen and senators for years of disinvestment in the MTA? “They have been driving the train,” he said of legislators. “Nobody else.”

Stand clear of the weak excuses. Cuomo is positioned and poised to exercise genuine leadership at a critical moment for the transit system.

Over many years, shortsighted decisions by him and his many predecessors brought the trains and tracks to our chronic delays and breakdowns.

Cuomo, prime mover of the state budget, failed to push transit funding as a top priority, and he was there when Albany raided more than $400 million from the farebox over the years.

But that was then. Lately, he’s been doing better. Much better. Six months ago, Cuomo said he would take the controls. We commended him.

We commend him more still as he prepares to boldly push for the single best idea to tackle terrible street traffic and generate revenue for the trains: congestion pricing by tolling the bridges.

Mayor de Blasio is the coward here. So’s almost every member of the Assembly and Senate.

They preach progressivism, then fail to embrace the best, most progressive policy to get the trains on track by having drivers chip in.

Likely Cuomo’s outburst is just expression of executive frustration at those games.

He’s watching people like Queens state Sen. Michael Gianaris score cheap points by demanding long-term MTA funding in this year’s state budget, likely doing de Blasio’s bidding.

That sure is a galling posture coming from a legislator who has nothing to lose, has demonstrated no political courage and is ducking on bridge tolls. In the safety of the minority, Gianaris, like de Blasio, wants to fund the trains with a millionaire’s tax, which was dead on arrival even before the passage of a massive, New York-punishing tax cut through the U.S. Congress.

Now it’s deader. As detailed by the Partnership for New York City, new limits on tax deductibility will increase the burden for the wealthy here while lowering their load in low-tax states. Watch them flee and watch our tax base crater.

The right way forward is to follow the lead of the Move NY plan, tolling the East River bridges and charging drivers to enter Manhattan’s core.

Cuomo, who gets that, has a panel hammering out details, ready for its closeup in two weeks, in the governor’s State of the State speech.

He looks ready to spend real political capital to get it done. If so, we’ll be behind him all the way.

But getting to passage — winning over 76 fearful Democrats in the Assembly plus the GOP Senate — will take a heavy helping of gubernatorial leadership and arm-twisting, not fingerpointing.

Cuomo is the big man in Albany. To win this fight, he’d better start acting like it.