The Metropolitan Transportation Authority is out of cash and scrambling this week for a government bailout. The unelected transit bureaucracy already burned through $15 billion in Covid cash from Uncle Sam. Now it wants more, or else an 11 percent fare hike, along with service cuts, will be needed, the New York Post reports. The MTA expects a rescue from either its riders or the taxpayers — while it ignores its own bloated budget.

This is no way to run a railroad. The point was marked the other day in the Sun by historian Gregory Bresiger. He explains that before the government took over, the subways “were run by private companies bent on making a profit” — and run well. They were profitable until the Depression, and government limits on needed fare increases, turned the tide. Contrast that, he notes, with the catastrophe “the government has made of our subways.” 

The MTA can’t seem to put its fiscal house in order. The agency could have taken the opportunity presented by the Covid pandemic to trim costs and rationalize its archaic labor policies — like having two employees on every subway train. Cities like Tokyo, Paris, London, and Washington D.C. make do with but one. The excess cost to the MTA is some $300 million a year, according to a Manhattan Institute analyst, Connor Harris.

Instead the MTA placates its labor unions and expects riders — or the taxpayers — to pick up the tab. The MTA is also losing out on $500 million a year to fare-beaters because it’s afraid of being called racist if it enforces the law on turnstile jumpers. The agency instead set up a “fairness” panel to solve the problem “while ensuring that particular groups are not disproportionately impacted.” If they are, is that necessarily racism?

Meantime, the MTA now passes the hat at Albany, enlisting Democratic lawmakers to plead for $600 million in extra money for 2023 and another $1 billion for each of the next two years, as the Post reports. The MTA’s unions, too, are piping up for more tax dollars — warning that “government must step up,” as union boss Tony Utano puts it — so transit employees can get raises when contracts expire in May. In short, a taxpayer shakedown. 

That’s not to mention the “congestion pricing” scheme the MTA wants to foist on drivers. Billed as an eco-friendly way to reduce traffic, it would impose up to $23 in tolls on drivers entering lower Manhattan. The real purpose of the plan is to add $1 billion a year to the MTA’s coffers. The agency also reportedly plans to borrow against the expected revenue, adding more debt to an agency that is already drowning in red ink  — to the tune of some $40 billion.

The MTA chairman, Janno Lieber, is stoking class warfare to drum up support for the congestion pricing toll scheme. “It is a rich man’s game,” he told PIX11 News on Sunday, “to come into Manhattan’s central business district and park.” He adds: “we need to use that to get some money for transit.” This is the arrogance of officials in positions of power beyond the voters’ reach. It’s a money grab, no matter how the MTA tries to dress it up. 

With the MTA unable to get itself back on track, why not give the private sector another chance? It reminds us of a parley we had with Mayor Bloomberg in 2002, when we asked him about “letting a private company build, operate, and own the Second Avenue subway line.” Hizzoner, perplexed, exclaimed “What are you smoking?” Twenty years on, that subway line is unfinished and the logic of transit privatization looks clearer than ever.