Fate seems to have somehow intervened to remind the members of the board of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority that it is not a good idea for them to sell MTA-owned rail yards on Manhattan’s West Side for $300 million less than the site is worth. It has done so with a spate of subway malfunctions and breakdowns that have left hundreds of thousands of riders inconvenienced and have also underscored for anyone paying attention that this is not a moment at which the MTA can afford to leave $300 million or anything close to it on the table. It’s a moment instead at which the strap-hanging public will want Governor Pataki’s appointees to maximize every cent of revenue that is possibly attainable from the sale of the development rights on the site.

It’s a pressing question, with the MTA board poised to meet Thursday to review competing bids for the site from the owners of the New York Jets and the owners of Madison Square Garden. Our Jill Gardiner today quotes a spokesman for the Regional Plan Association, Jeremy Soffin, as saying, “We don’t feel like the MTA has to choose a winner from these two bids if it turns out that neither of the bids give the MTA market value for the property.” A Democratic candidate for mayor, Fernando Ferrer, called on the MTA to “cancel the bid, start again, and do it right.” Rep. Anthony Weiner, another figure with mayoral ambitions, went so far as to say the MTA is “legally required to reject both bids if the price isn’t right.”

The MTA and Mayor Bloomberg initially intended to award the site to the Jets without any bidding process at all, a scheme that increasingly looks to be irresponsible from a fiduciary point of view. The introduction of such a bidding process caused the Jets to increase their bid for the site to between $280 million and $720 million from $100 million. That’s another $180 million to $620 million to fix up that rickety subway – money that Mr. Bloomberg would have forfeited in his chase after the stadium.

So a competitive bidding process has already paid off for the riders once. Why not try it again, this time with the necessary zoning changes in place so that developers can unlock the site’s fullest economic value? An MTA appraisal has valued the site at $900 million, and the Village Voice quotes a former MTA chairman, Richard Ravitch, as having testified in Albany that the site is worth about $1 billion.

The mayor has cultivated an image as a straphanger, letting it be known that he commutes from his Upper East Side home to City Hall each morning via the Lexington Avenue subway line. And he deserves credit as someone who understands, more than many of this project’s reflexive opponents on the left, that growth and development are the way out of the city’s fiscal bind.

But there’s a competing image to that of the down-to-earth, subway-riding, growth-oriented mayor – that of the mayor’s daughter on horseback, competing in the Olympics. “I have no greater dream than to see my daughter win a gold medal on Staten Island, in New York City,” this week’s New Yorker magazine quotes Mr. Bloomberg as saying. “It would be the ultimate capstone of my life.” We give Mr. Bloomberg credit, too, for being a devoted father, and for letting his family be what it is, rather than making his daughter take up some sport that polls better in the outer boroughs, like, say, wrestling. The way the transit system has been running lately, though, and if the MTA goes ahead selling valuable assets at below-market prices, the mayor’s daughter isn’t going to be the only one who finds horseback a faster and more reliable way than subway trains to get around the city.