Plan to bring more deadly e-bikes to Central Park is plain crazy

Earth to the Central Park Conservatory: Encouraging more e-bikes to race through the park is not only wrong, it’s a betrayal of the park’s very purpose.

Along with the Parks Department and the Department of Transportation, the Conservatory is looking not just to give e-bikes a permanent OK to barrel around Central Park, but also to reserve a full lane in the Park Drive for “micromobility” vehicles like e-bikes and e-scooters (while removing some traffic signals that the ebikers routinely ignore anyway).

This is crazy: It’s only been six years since cars got banned 24/7 from Park Drive; why privilege a new class of machines?

Plus: E-bikes are a proven danger to pedestrians, the very people the park is most for.

In October, an e-bike killed a 60-year-old woman the Brooklyn Navy Yard; another fatally hit a 49-year-old man crossing a Greenpoint street; days after that, a third e-bike plowed into a 3-year-old girl in Williamsburg, sending her to the hospital.

E-bikes are heavier and faster than regular bikes, with some models able to hit speeds of 30 mph — and no one needs any license, much less any safety training, to operate them.

Mayor Adams set a 15-mph limit for these speed demons in October, but the bikers are notorious for ignoring traffic laws; stories of e-bike hit-and-runs are all too common.

The Conservancy’s mission is “to preserve and celebrate Central Park as a sanctuary from the pace and pressures of city life”; how does inviting e-bikes to run wild serve that purpose?

If the park should let anyone go crazy, it’s kids — but instead this move endangers them.

The logical thing to do is to ban e-bikes, not cater to them.

We suspect some idiot ideologues imagine e-bikes are environment-friendly alternative transportation, and so worth encouraging to “save the planet.”

That likely appealed to Conservancy executives as a cause they could take up to justify their obscene salaries.

Conservancy CEO Elizabeth “Betsy” Smith, who draws a cool $933,000 a year, has been on a roll of late — posturing against the managers of Wollman Rink, dumping on the traditional and beloved park carriages and bungling a redesign of traffic patterns on key parts of the Drive.

Maybe this move wasn’t Smith’s idea, but the product of one of her $300,000-a-year minions.

Either way, it’s beyond obvious that these “professionals” are serving the wrong interests — trying to impress the “right people” by signing on to foolish causes.

It’s past time for the Conservancy’s board to clean house, and hire managers who actually care about Central Park.