How Bloomberg and de Blasio made traffic even worse

By Post Editorial Board

December 4, 2016

Saturday’s Post report on the roots of the city’s traffic woes doesn’t prove that Mayor Bill de Blasio, or Mike Bloomberg before him, desired this chaos — but it’s obvious that neither ever worried about what his policies would mean to motorists.

The ideologically driven love of bike lanes, pedestrian plazas and other urban-planner fetishes left each all too ready to believe that remaking the city’s roads would be all gain, no pain (to anyone they cared about, anyway).

Just to be clear: We’re not opposed to all bike lanes or pedestrian plazas — but the madness unleashed in Times Square by the Bloomberg-de Blasio plaza is proof positive that the planners didn’t really think through the impact of their meddling.

Planners keep insisting that their schemes — creating new bicycle lanes by removing traffic lanes, turning Broadway into the last avenue you’d want to drive on, banning turns at countless Midtown intersections — somehow improve traffic flow. Common sense, and the progressive slowdown on the city’s streets, suggests otherwise.

“The city streets are being engineered to create traffic congestion, to slow traffic down, to favor bikers and pedestrians,” a former top NYPD official told The Post. Average speeds in Manhattan are down to 8.2 mph, even with 45,000 fewer vehicles a day entering Midtown than in 2010.

Team de Blasio’s contribution to the mess includes ordering traffic officers to focus on aggressive summons-writing, rather than directing traffic. The mayor’s aiming to reduce pedestrian deaths with his Vision Zero plan — but they’ve ticked up this year.

Look: Anyone who ever tried to argue with Bloomberg is familiar with his habit of treating anything that confirms his biases as “scientific fact,” and any evidence to the contrary as just your (ignorant) opinion. De Blasio, meanwhile, won’t even talk to anyone who doesn’t share his ideology (unless, of course, political donations or power are at stake).

And the mayor’s refusal to start finding long-term solutions to the mess around Trump Tower is fresh proof that he doesn’t think his job involves solving any city problem that he can simply blame on others.

Don’t look for traffic to get better until New Yorkers have a mayor who doesn’t hold much of the public in contempt.