The MTA Gravy Train

Forget commuters’ daily hassles — when it comes to its own employees, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority is running a giant gravy train.

Last year, the MTA paid nearly $1.6 million in overtime alone to just seven employees — some of whom more than doubled their base salaries.

Three of the employees, all track foremen on the Long Island Rail Road, pulled down a quarter-million each in overtime — out-earning the MTA’s then-CEO, Thomas Prendergast.

All this comes via the Empire Center’s transparency Web site, SeeThroughNY.net.

In all, the MTA shelled out $971 million in overtime, a 4 percent rise over 2015, with no fewer than 177 employees receiving six figures’ worth of OT alone.

Now, if all this seems somewhat familiar, it should be. The situation — mammoth overtime paid to employees, allowing them to double and even triple their base salaries — has been going on for years.

The one saving grace (if you can call it that) for 2016: The increase was less than the 11 percent jump from 2014 to 2015.

So what are commuters getting for all those extra hours on the clock? Precious little, it would seem.

Consider the latest audit from city Comptroller Scott Stringer, who reports that the MTA’s elevators and escalators are in a state of disrepair — no secret to those harried commuters who rely on them.

And the reason, says Stringer, is that the MTA’s New York City Transit division didn’t perform all scheduled preventive maintenance on 80 percent of the escalators and elevators his office sampled.

Moreover, the agency doesn’t even systematically keep track of whether and how quickly any defects it finds are fixed.

What Stringer, a good progressive, didn’t note is that MTA managers’ hands are tied by the power of the agency’s unionized workforce — which is also why it’s so hard to get a handle on overtime.

The MTA can and should do better — but until its political overseers (hello, Gov. Cuomo!) are willing to risk annoying the unions, ever-rising fares will do more to line employees’ pockets than to improve service.