Opinion

Asphalt bungle

“This is not your father’s DOT [Department of Transportation]. This agency says they do something, and they do it.”

— 34th Street Partnership

President Dan Biederman
in the New York Times.

And how. Even as the city struggles with a massive deficit and fields the smallest police force in years, Mayor Bloomberg’s favorite pet commissioner, DOT boss Janette Sadik-Khan, has struck again. Her latest, taxpayer-gouging ego trip: Close 34th Street to auto traffic between Fifth and Sixth avenues.

The minimum estimated cost of turning the throbbing block into another miserable “pedestrian mall”: $30 million, according to the Times.

How weird, inappropriate and out of touch is this?

For starters, $30 million could buy a lot more cops. The average, starting cost of each new police officer is a relatively small, affordable $100,000 a year, including salary and benefits.

True, annual outlays going forward obviously can’t be compared directly with a one-time extravagance. But crime has risen ominously in recent months.

You don’t need a degree in municipal finance to grasp that $30 million of taxpayer dough squandered on whimsical meddling with the urban fabric is indefensible when the city faces mortal fiscal and social perils.

Traffic congestion on 34th Street is, at worst, a nuisance that’s never brought the city to its knees. Anyway, the scheme to ameliorate it makes no sense even on its own terms.

It would supposedly speed bus traffic from river to river by creating dedicated bus lanes down the center of the street, including through the mall. But the Times, which was spoon-fed the story by the DOT, is apparently afraid to let its reporters wander outside their Eighth Avenue fortress.

Had they braved the teeming streets, they might have noticed that 34th Street already has dedicated bus lanes running most of its length, and has had them for several years; the redesign would merely move them from the sides to the middle. How, exactly, would that make the buses move faster?

The DOT’s rationale seems to be that the existing lanes don’t work well because some motorists ignore the rules by driving and even parking in them. Of course, there’s a solution that would cost a lot less than $30 million: build a fence. But that elegantly simple remedy would get in the way of Sadik-Khan’s campaign to transform throbbing Manhattan into a Copenhagen-like lolling ground.

Her ever-proliferating bicycle lanes not only look dreadful, they’re hardly used; I’ve counted as few as a dozen riders per half hour, mostly Chinese-food deliverymen, in the lanes on Grand Street, Ninth Avenue and Broadway.

Her Times Square “plazas” are even worse — block after block of prison-yard asphalt devoid of meaningful landscaping, furniture or other amenities, crowded mainly with Big Mac-chomping tourists.

Not only are they unworthy of their iconic setting, they will be conducive to mugging and “wilding” should there occur even the smallest uptick in street crime on top of the one we’ve already seen. It remains to be seen as well how the tourist takeover will play with the great companies that make their homes astride the Bow-tie.

Next up: a new “mall” on the Broadway block just north of Union Square Park — a pointless, vulgar annex to one of Manhattan’s most welcoming outdoor public spaces.

The 34th Street stretch between Fifth Avenue and Herald Square is even more problematic. It’s Midtown’s longest block and one of its widest. If auto traffic is banned, what will fill all that space? More asphalt and cheap chairs? The junk vendors Bloomberg is (wisely) driving from the parks? A monument to Janette Sadik-Khan?

Unlike most cityscape alterations requiring a public review with teeth, the latest Mall Bloat is 100 percent guaranteed to sail through despite phony “public hearings.” It won’t undergo meaningful scrutiny by the City Council or any agency other than DOT itself — even though it’s required of innumerable proposed changes with far less impact than a wholesale gutting of Manhattan’s historic energy pattern.

Meanwhile, business and civic leaders, terrified of retribution by city agencies, will proclaim that the traffic rerouting is just what they’ve always wanted — as they did in Times Square. They’ll get the street environment they deserve.

And the job of undoing the damage will be left to those in charge after Sadik-Khan has moved on to her next toy Copenhagen.scuozzo@nypost.com