Where’s the MTA Reform?

Congestion pricing, we’ve long argued, will only be feasible if it’s coupled with genuine spending reform at the MTA. Now Gov. Cuomo’s advisory panel has released its formal recommendations — and to say they fall short is putting it mildly.

To be fair, wonks think the plan is welldesigned when it comes to cutting congestion in Manhattan. And politicians from Cuomo on down are treating it as only a starting point. But is this really where the discussion should begin?

Nothing in the plan seriously addresses the mismanagement (including overstaffing and bloated union contracts) that waste billions, as typified by the $3.5 billion-amile cost to bring the LIRR into Grand Central.

Nor does it specify how the $1.5 billion a year — from hefty surcharges on cars, trucks and for-hire vehicles to drive in congested areas of Manhattan — will actually be spent to improve city subways and buses.

Which risks the whole thing becoming a simple revenue grab — from the pockets of New Yorkers already overburdened with taxes, surcharges and repeated fare hikes.

Why take more money from beleaguered New Yorkers to keep subsidizing an agency that has yet to rein in its own costs and rampant waste? If you fund it, they will spend it — but on what? How much of the windfall will the Transport Workers Union demand in its next contract?

Yes, the advisory commission says the MTA must fix itself at the start of the process. And MTA chief Joe Lhota is promising reform, notably when two major task forces (on procurement and major contracts) report in the spring.

But serious change requires the political will to stare down the special interests. And so far the MTA’s political overseers seem focused solely on money — raising it, without considering how to stop spending too much of it on the wrong things.

For example: Mayor de Blasio, who has opposed congestion pricing in the past, now sees potential — provided all the dough goes to city transit.

Congestion pricing may well be, as Cuomo says, “an idea whose time has come.” But it’s a bad deal for New Yorkers unless it’s implemented along with a lot of other ideas whose time is long, long overdue.