Gov. Kathy Hochul has taken blistering criticism for postponing congestion pricing, a long-planned $15 toll on drivers entering lower Manhattan meant to reduce traffic — and collect $15 tolls.

Most of the drama may be playing out in New York City, but pay attention, upstate: you stand to lose — or win — in this fight.

The main reason for congestion pricing was money. The MTA, the agency that oversees New York City’s subways, buses and commuter rail, has the highest construction costs of any transit agency on the planet.

That’s something state lawmakers and governors have, at least publicly, done their best to ignore. Congestion pricing would allow the MTA to do $15 billion in otherwise unaffordable repairs and upgrades while sparing Albany pols from answering why the MTA spends four, five, or six times what it should by global standards.

State taxpayers already subsidize MTA construction, and without congestion pricing, it’s likely they’ll be asked to chip in even more. And that’s likely to happen if people accept the premise that the MTA’s high costs are unfixable.

Here’s the thing: the MTA isn’t special. Many of the same state laws that make subway and rail construction so expensive also affect upstate municipalities. That means lifting burdens affecting the MTA can help bring down property taxes throughout the state.

The biggest opportunity is the state’s so-called “prevailing wage” requirement, which requires companies working on public projects to match union pay and benefit levels even through most construction workers don’t belong to a union. State lawmakers for years have allowed the state Labor Department to deliberately miscalculate the wage as a favor to the shrinking and struggling construction unions who support many of them at election time.

In Erie County, the just-hiked prevailing wage requires paying laborers almost $59 per hour, and still more to carpenters and other trades. A 2017 analysis by the Empire Center estimated prevailing wage alone was pushing up building construction costs for Buffalo-area municipalities and schools by 20 percent.

For the MTA, the arrangement is even more costly: it means paying laborers $99 per hour.

Reforming how prevailing wage gets calculated — to better reflect what’s actually “prevailing” in each trade and region — would likely save the MTA billions of dollars on its next five-year construction effort. It would also make renovations and repairs in Western New York less expensive.

The best way to shield upstate from having to pay more for the MTA’s inefficiencies is for Hochul and state lawmakers to tackle them head-on. Albany can, for once, let New York taxpayers be unintended beneficiaries instead of collateral damage.