Get him a cape!

New York City Transit boss Andy Byford boasted on Thursday that he personally stopped a subway fare beater.

“The other day I happened to be going through a turnstile at a station and right next to me in the turnstile, right next to me, someone climbed over the turnstile,” Byford said during an MTA board meeting on Thursday. “So I turned and in a non-confrontational manner I showed him my pass and said ‘Sir, you need to go and buy a ticket.’ And he did.”

Byford told the story during a conversation about fare evasion, which MTA officials say has been on the rise. Some MTA board members want the agency to take steps to squash fare beating so it can raise revenues rather than raising the rates for paying passengers.

“It’s not a declining ridership problem, it’s a fare evasion problem,” said Larry Schwartz, an MTA board member and adviser to Gov. Andrew Cuomo. . “The paying riders shouldn’t have to shoulder more of the burden.”

Still, Byford doesn’t think bus drivers should risk their safety to confront riders who skip out on fares.

“We can’t ask employees to do that, to say you must enforce a fare to the point of putting yourself in physical danger,” he said.

But a life-size Byford mockup might do the trick, says acting MTA Chairman Freddy Ferrer.

“We might even consider a cardboard cut-out of Andy Byford standing front of a turnstile with his arms crossed,” said Ferrer.