Bill, train boss go ‘Forward’

This could be the start of a beautiful friendship.

Mayor de Blasio finally met with Andy Byford, the man who runs his city's subway system, on Tuesday — and they agreed to more meetings on transit funding, every three months, plus a new working group with staff to hash out the details.

Byford walked out of an hourlong, one-onone meeting with de Blasio to say that he pressed him on funding his Fast Forward plan to modernize the subway system — an effort that de Blasio had opposed.

Byford (photo), who started work in January, said he got his point across — the Fast Forward plan will be costly and needs multiple sources of funding.

“I will certainly be pressing the funding case with the mayor on each and every one of those quarterly meetings that we have — and for that matter, on a going forward basis, as regularly as I can get access to his diary,” Byford said. “He was left in no uncertain terms as to how strongly I feel about this funding piece.”

The two discussed congestion pricing in Manhattan, which is the main policy under consideration in Albany to fund Byford's long-term plan, which has no official price tag but could cost $37 billion over 10 years, according to one back-room estimate.

De Blasio has opposed congestion pricing, and has instead pitched a tax on wealthy New Yorkers. De Blasio originally pitched his transit tax as a way to fund the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's $836 million repair blitz program, called the Subway Action Plan. Cuomo and state lawmakers in this year's budget forced New York to pay half of the tab.