It only took two and a half years, but the Metropolitan Transportation Authority is finally taking our advice and auctioning off the Hudson Yards on the West Side. It’s about time. When we first visited the issue in an editorial of March 24, 2004, we wrote that “by far the best outcome would be for the state to sell the rail road and its land to the highest bidder and let the new owner negotiate a private real estate deal.” The intervening period, pockmarked by failed stadium plans, a fruitless Olympic bid, and a listless faux auction, has only proven the point.

The decisions reported this week mean that New Yorkers will find out how much the site is actually worth. The western half of the yards has been appraised at between $900 million and $1.3 billion. Two years ago, the Jets were willing to fork over less than $100 million. Then the MTA attracted a $600 million bid from Cablevision. In July the number dropped back to the $300 million the city was willing to pay. Estimates for the air rights on the eastern half of the site have certainly been increasing apace. Back in July, the city was prepared to pay $200 million for 3.42 million square feet. Under the new deal, that amount will buy only 2.25 million square feet, meaning that in two months the value of a square foot has shot up 50%.

Not that the MTA and the city are going to auction out of the goodness of their hearts. We suspect a tongue-lashing from Attorney General Spitzer and Assemblyman Richard Brodsky, who chairs the committee with oversight of public authorities like the MTA, had something to do with this newfound zeal for allowing market forces to work. Nor is it entirely clear yet that the auction will truly unleash the value of the site. The earlier non-auction was hampered by the unwillingness of Mayor Bloomberg and his economic development deputy, Daniel Doctoroff, to re-zone the site for anything other than a stadium.

What the city will or won’t ultimately allow to be built there is still too vague for comfort, which could depress bids. This auction deal offers some improvement over the status quo, since removing the site from the purview of the MTA would protect any potential development there from the capriciousness of the speaker of the Assembly, Sheldon Silver, whose seat on the Public Authorities Control Board gives him an effective veto over any development on MTA land. The alternative envisioned by the new plan, however, is the City Council and the Uniform Land Use Review Procedure, which sounds appealing only when compared to the PACB.

The MTA wants to raise $1 billion by selling real estate. An auction of the West Side yards might not bring that much. But the auction will almost certainly fetch more than the paltry $300 million the city was ready to pay barely two months ago. That’s good for the MTA, for taxpayers, and for straphangers. And it’s only two and a half years late.