The plan to turn 34th Street into a ‘busway’ is a road to nowhere

The next unwelcome upheaval coming to Manhattan’s streets has nothing to do with congestion pricing.  The Department of Transportation’s latest strike against motorists is a “proposal” to turn 34th Street, from Third Avenue to Ninth Avenue, into a “busway.”

There are quotation marks around “proposal” because the scheme is certain to be a done deal by August. The DOT always gets its way, never mind a rubber-stamp City Hall review.

The 34th Street project’s purpose is to speed up buses  — currently cruising at a mere 3 mph on the major crosstown artery — by 15%, the DOT said.

But banning 34th Street to through car traffic is of a piece with the insidious  agenda  the DOT has inflicted on New Yorkers for years: limiting or disallowing  auto traffic at any particular location in the name of reducing congestion — but with the unstated, actual goal to increase congestion on neighboring streets and avenues. The purpose: To prove that cars are evil and bikes are better.

Now, if cars can’t use most of 34th Street — duh — they’ll have to go somewhere else. Once the change takes effect, expect presently crowded 32rd, 33rd, 35th and 36th Streets to bear the brunt of the spillover.

The 34th Street diktat stinks even on its own supposedly mass transit-friendly terms. As The Post’s Gabrielle Fahmy reported this week, regular, actual bus users  argued before Community Board 5 that the new busway will do little or nothing to make bus travel faster. That’s because the MTA, which works in lockstep with the DOT, won’t do what’s needed most: provide more buses.

The passengers weren’t mistaken. I counted precisely two so-called Select crosstown buses, one in either direction, on a half-hour stroll along 34th Street’s commercial heart between Fifth and Seventh avenues Wednesday afternoon. Of course, simply adding buses would remove the supposed need to warp a thoroughfare that’s a critical part of the city’s commercial DNA.

Although 34th Street won’t have a bike lane, the gridlock points that inevitably pop up when cars are diverted are cited by the DOT’s bike-lobby stooges as proof that the problem is too many cars, and by Gov. Hochul and former governor and mayoral candidate Andrew Cuomo, who inflicted “congestion pricing” on us.

But the cycling lobby, led by an uncompromising organization called Transportation Alternatives, cowed elected officials into ignoring the reality of how most city dwellers reach their jobs.

According to the latest US census, 1.87 million Big Apple residents take public transit to work. Just over one million more go by car, either as drivers  or as part of a car pool.

In contrast, the number of city dwellers who get to their jobs by bike was  61,600 in 2023, as per the  DOT. That’s a “whopping”  2.2% of total city residents: a percentage that would be lower still if the data included commuting patterns of the tens of thousands of suburbanites who pour into Manhattan each day.  

Yet the relatively tiny bike-riding cohort enjoys special privileges at everyone else’s expense. Metastasizing bike lanes, which now stretch 1,500 miles in the five boroughs, are the largest reason for the nightmare that streets are today for ordinary motorists, taxi and truck drivers — and, even, yes,  for buses.

Other tricks the DOT has up its woke sleeves are “plazas” inserted where there’s no need for them; no-left-turn rules that trap hapless motorists on 23rd Street for blocks on end;  and Third Avenue traffic lights from East 60th to East 96th streets   re-timed to reduce speeds from 25 mph to 15 mph, the latter speed ideally suited to cyclists.

When bike lanes, barriers and  “plazas” reduced Broadway to a single auto lane  south of 34th Street, was it surprising that the traffic merely spilled over to surrounding avenues and streets?

Congestion pricing? Hah! Notoriously gridlocked West 47th Street between Sixth Avenue and Times Square remains a horn-honking horror ever since Broadway south of West 48th Street was closed to cars several years ago, forcing them to turn left onto Seventh Avenue.

The DOT, enabled by spineless mayors, was hijacked by anti-auto, climate-obsessed ideologues with little interest in the agency’s traditional  mission to simply make streets as safe and sane as possible. Little wonder DOT commissioner Ydanis Rodríguez touts the city’s “bike infrastructure accomplishments as a climate-justice solution,” City & State reported.

Let’s hope the next mayor will have the guts to make the DOT return to its core mission. But given the candidates’ pro-cyclist sympathies, the Dodgers will return to Brooklyn sooner.

scuozzo@nypost.com