Mayor Bloomberg has been pulling out all the stops to win passage in Albany of a tax on traffic that, for all his protestations, would wind up putting more tax money into the hands of a government agency — the Metropolitan Transportation Authority — that just isn’t credible at the moment. The subways don’t run in a heavy rain, they don’t run on the weekends in Lower Manhattan, and they aren’t clean. Money isn’t the problem: The MTA has squandered billions on everything from, ironically, a car and driver for its executive, to fancy headquarters and ill-conceived construction projects downtown.

We’re as frustrated by traffic as anyone, but it has a way of regulating itself. Taking more dollars from drivers and pouring them into the transit system without fundamental reforms such as privatization is a formula that deserves to fail in Albany.