New York mayor Michael R. Bloomberg is fighting to replace the Crown Victorias in the city’s taxi fleet with relatively fuel-efficient hybrid cars, as my colleague William Neuman has reported.

Here’s another idea for saving gas: requiring taxi drivers to learn how to drive smarter. At the moment, there seems to be no focus on fuel-efficient driving (sometimes called hypermiling) in taxi school, except insofar as it overlaps with defensive driving and passenger-relations training.

“There is no training specific to that,” said Allan Fromberg, a spokesman for the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission, a regulatory body, referring to hypermiling. He emphasized that hybrids would aid fuel-efficiency.

Hypermilers could find plenty of savings, however. In New York, taxis often screech down side streets, even when a red light looms ahead — then they slam on the brakes to stop for the light, a tactic that can reduce fuel economy as much as 5 percent in town, according to CleanMPG.com, a hypermiling Web site.

As a general rule, the less abrupt braking you do, the more gas you save, according to CleanMPG. By zooming down the streets and then stopping, taxis are simply wasting the gas they used to accelerate — not to mention being unsafe.

Similarly, after the traffic light turns from red to green, New York taxis often floor the accelerator and race off — another waste of fuel relative to accelerating more slowly (and money out of the pocket of the driver, who pays for the gas).

Andrew Vollo, who is the director of a taxi-driver training institute at La Guardia Community College, said that defensive driving courses overlap with fuel-efficiency courses. “If you’re going to be driving with a heavy foot like that, you’re going to be driving dangerously,” he said.

He noted, however, that competition among taxi drivers has recently become fiercer, so the heavy-foot syndrome may “increase even more” as they battle for fares.

Possibly the taxis’ most irritating tendency, because it affects other drivers as well, is the habit of crowding into intersections when the light is about to turn red. This inconveniences other drivers, who cannot enter the intersection when the cross-traffic is blocking it, increasing everybody’s idling time and wasting more gas.

In July, David Paterson, the governor of New York, signed a law that raises fines from $90 to $115 for “blocking the box” in New York City.

In my five months in New York, I have never seen anybody ticketed for it.

By KATE GALBRAITH

As a result, he had little time to react when a sedan from a car service making a left turn cut him off, sending him sailing over his handlebars and onto the ground.

Mr. Barwick and the driver of the sedan shouted back and forth, he said, after which the driver headed off, but not before a construction worker noted the license number and the sticker from the car’s employer: Northside Car Service, on nearby Bedford Avenue.

Mr. Barwick, who, as it turned out, had fractured a collarbone and an elbow, decided not to press charges. He did, however, stop by Northside’s office, where, both sides agree, the driver and a manager of the car service apologized. The car service also paid the portion of Mr. Barwick’s medical expenses that were not covered by health insurance.

That might have been the end of it, except for the fact that Northside, which is based near the heart of Williamsburg, has a long history of tension with Community Board 1, which represents the area.

According to Teresa Toro, the chairwoman of the board’s transportation committee, complaints about the car service date back years and include dangerous driving, excessive horn-honking and parking at bus stops. In 2005, the board wrote the company a stern letter and met with its management, she said, but the complaints continued.

“Consistently, when people complain about reckless behavior, or just rude behavior, bad neighbor behavior, it seems to be Northside Car and Limo,” Ms. Toro said, adding that the board was trying to arrange a meeting with the city’s Taxi and Limousine Commission to discuss the matter.

Northside’s license was renewed in May, and Matthew Daus, the commissioner of the taxi agency, said the community board did not object during the process. Nevertheless, he said, “we will work with C.B. 1’s transportation committee and Northside to ensure that they are the good neighbors we all expect them to be.”

Galo Bermello, the Northside manager who answered the telephone on Tuesday at the company’s office, acknowledged that relations with the neighborhood were tense, but said that at least six other car services have offices within a mile of Northside, each with about 200 cars at its disposal. Northside has about 300 cars, with independent drivers who own their vehicles and pay the agency $100 a week to field calls.

“You can’t just blame all of that on us, just because we’re one of the biggest,” Mr. Bermello said.

In response, Ms. Toro said that the great majority of the complaints are about Northside, not the other companies.

Mr. Bermello said that his drivers follow all state and local rules, adding that they have it hard too.

“She can only hear what other people say,” he said of Ms. Toro. “She’s not in a vehicle, she’s not a driver, she doesn’t know the daily hassles that drivers have to go through seven days a week, some of them working 12-hour days.”

The concerns of the community board have brought the company some unwelcome attention, he acknowledged, but he said that business was sound. A television reporter recently inquired about a rumored local boycott of the business, Mr. Bermello said, adding, “While he was talking to us, I had all my 10 lines ringing.”

Recently, deep into the morning, as I lingered with my fellow drivers, waiting on line to consummate our payment ritual with the night dispatcher, one of my colleagues eyeballed me and blurted out: “Don’t you just love it when passengers spend the entire trip talking on their cell phones.”

I was taken aback: “Now why the hell would I love that?”

“Because then we don’t have to talk to them.”

This then is what our business has come to: a grim little snap shot of the collective taxi experience in the post-TAXI TV epoch. In an industry which long projected a folkloric mythos of old-school New York archetypes with earthy communication skills—a generation of gruff, hardscrabble characters manning the wheels, who knew how to get you anywhere in the five boroughs, while holding forth in a dour and intermittently good-humored way on any subject passengers might toss their way—there is now a complete and utter disconnect between drivers and the riding public.

The TLC would have us believe that the back of the cab should more closely resemble something betwixt a telemarketing boiler room and Foxwoods Casino, and that as per the claustrophobic partition designs in the new hybrid cabs, the driver should function as little more than a servile robot encased in a fiberglass booth, not unlike that which Eichmann occupied while standing before the Israeli war crimes tribunal (please don’t feed the cabbie…). Never you mind that this horrific Plexiglass contraption impedes the ability of passengers to see the meter let alone to communicate with the cabbie, or for drivers to safely and accurately deploy their rear view and side view mirrors. Not surprising given that such mandates invariably trickle down from people who’ve never spent a single day behind the wheel of a NYC Yellow Cab.

With each and every new regulation and technological wrinkle, the cab driving experience has become fundamentally more dehumanized. So why then are people surprised, even outraged, when more and more cabbies simply toss out the baby with the bathwater: tuning out both the oppressive, endlessly looping din of the TAXI TV, as well as any connection with the passengers—leading some drivers to manifest indifferent, even unprofessional behavior.

Years back I used to hear a lot of “…oh, you’re the first white cab driver we’ve ever had,” but I quickly poured cold water on that polluted stream of discourse: “What ever gave you the impression that I was white?” Huh? Then there were those who observed that I was their “first American cab driver.” Well, it has always been an immigrant’s business—it’s just that the nature of immigrants has changed.

Now, many customers are pleasantly surprised when their driver demonstrates any inclination to carry on a friendly dialog: “You know, you’re the only cab driver I’ve ever had who was willing to actually talk with me,” a 35-year old Brazilian mother of two told me just the other night in wonderment. “Many don’t respond at all or are too busy talking on their cell phones.”

Never mind for a moment that according to TLC regulations, any form of cell phone usage by cab drivers is illegal. According to motor vehicle laws, civilian drivers are allowed to operate a motor vehicle when deploying a hands-free cellular device. But the TLC asserts, with some credibility, that such cell phone usage constitutes an unnecessary distraction, and that taxi drivers should devote their complete attention to the tasks at hand (and yet sees no contradiction in forcing drivers to endure the irritating, dangerous distraction of a TAXI TV system re-cycling the same programming over and over and over again).

Be that as it may, there is a more compelling reason for not gabbing away on your cellular while ferrying a passenger to their destination: how about because it is discourteous and unprofessional. I mean, what a bunch of nimrods; I take taxi cabs, too, and I’m sorry dude, but if you can’t even manage to muster half your attention to the task at hand—ferrying me to my destination in a safe and timely manner—well, you’re not going to pocketing any tips from moi. Good Lord, man, can’t you even wait until your cab is unoccupied to blab away on your freaking Blue Tooth?

How much effort is involved in offering a pleasant greeting to your passengers upon entering the vehicle? Or even a simple follow-up as to how their evening is going? It doesn’t take much effort to let people know that you are not some sullen, embittered slug. And from the passengers’ perspective, it often affords them enough of a comfort zone, enough of an opening, to feel comfortable in engaging the driver in conversation…or not as they so choose—it is just as easy to ascertain that some folks would just as soon enjoy a quiet ride, looking out the window, wrapped up in their own thoughts.

Still, you’d be amazed how many passengers are actually interested in the taxi driver’s lot: our experiences and reflections. Just as often, some pleasant conversation helps make those long, solitary drives home pass more easily. A few months back I picked up a young Hispanic woman in lower Manhattan, heading home to Bushwick around 2:00 AM following a long waitress shift. She’d already been turned down by a couple of other taxi drivers. I could not—and cannot—fathom how dumb you have to be to turn down any fare at two in the morning, let alone from a waitress or bartender, who more often than not are salt of the earth types, not unlike…CAB DRIVERS, who also work for tips and who deal with a lot of the same customers as we do. This precipitated a wide-ranging conversation over the next half hour, as we made our way down Broadway in Brooklyn, out beyond the Popeye’s Fried Chicken underneath the elevated train tracks on Myrtle, talking about the restaurant business and the proclivities of our customers, the shifting nature of Hispanic communities up my way in Washington Heights and in her own Bushwick neighborhood, the positive evolution of Brooklyn with influx of refugees from Manhattan, and her creative aspirations as a painter.

When I finally got her home, she laid a very generous tip on me, but I was far more moved when she told me: “That was fun—thanks for keeping me company on the way home.”

As another female passenger commented some time thereafter, “Well, I’m sure that many of your passengers feel exactly that way.”

“That may very well be, Miss,” I replied, “but she was the first person who ever articulated that to me.”

Not a gabby cabbie by nature? Or do you feel like some drivers that “I’m not getting paid to talk—I’m getting paid to drive,” well there are some practical professional reasons for engaging in small scale conversational forays. A few months back I experienced a pretty curious series of cluster-f*&k events: one night might it seems as though all of your fares are from Toronto; another week you might encounter female sculptors over the course of four successive shifts—on this particular week I had passengers leave expensive Blackberry cellular devices in my cab three nights in a row.

The only reason I was able to successfully return any of them was because I’d briefly engaged them in some small talk…nothing deep, just trying to be pleasant. The first lost Blackberry identified itself as belonging to one Ravi Gupta, which is tantamount to saying John Smith in Hindustani. Well, my cluster-f*&k for that particular shift involved customers of South Asian origins—I had five different fares in one shift, but then after all, this is New York City. One group of four was from Michigan, heading up to Rockefeller Center…they were tourist types, and they talked me up pretty steadily, mostly with questions about food and music and night-spots. Another individual was far less talkative fellow, clearly pre-occupied with his work, so by and large I left him be, until he asked me some questions, and from our back and forth I gleaned that he was in town on business from London, and worked in the financials there for Citibank. Having found his name on one screen, just by accident I fumbled across another screen where the credit on the bottom read: © 2003-2007, Citibank UK, and I immediately put two and two together—the gentleman I dropped off at the Embassy Suites on Vesey and North End. I called the hotel, asked if anyone had reported a lost cell phone and bingo—happy ending.

The very next evening I picked up a couple in the Village, who were very confused about the actual address of a Georgian restaurant in Brooklyn; I was able to decode the address they gave me, and translated it into where they actually wanted to go (they had avenues confused with streets, and it turned out that they wanted to go to Tbilisi at 811 Kings Highway, between E. 8th and 9th streets, just off of Ocean Parkway). During the decoding process, I discovered that the young lady was a Georgian national, that she was working in Washington D.C. and that they were staying at the UN Plaza Hotel. By the time I discovered their phone I was in Riverdale, so I had to wait until shift’s end to call their hotel, and again, someone had the foresight to report a missing Blackberry. The next evening in a driving rain storm, I hooked up with the young lady on her boyfriends cellular, and when I was just downwind of 44th Street and First Avenue, on Avenue C and 10th Street, he paid me to turn on the meter, I drove up the FRD Drive, pick them up at the hotel, and took them to another restaurant on the East Side, wherein they paid me the fare, plus fifty dollars, which was very gracious of them to put it mildly. But as with most cellular devices, the young lady’s entire life was on that Blackberry, so the simple act of engaging my passengers in a conversation had a positive outcome.

Look, I recognize that not every driver has my gift of gab, nor that many are so inclined to talk (or listen). The reality is that there are some nights when a cabbie’s lot weighs more heavily on him than others, and in such a pall of darkness, I could fall into a barrel of tits and come up sucking my thumb—at such times, it’s difficult to work up much enthusiasm for conversation.

But believe you me, it’s invariably worth the effort, unless you’re mood is so dark you’re like to scare folks to death. But even then, to me, the art of conversation is part and parcel of what it means to be a professional cab driver. And sometimes your conversations with customers can define your evening in a surprisingly congenial manner, making the time proceed more quickly, while leaving you with the feeling that you’ve touched people in a positive fashion—least ways, you didn’t add to their daily tsuris.

The communications nature of this job is far too important to be supplanted by cheesy infomercials and entertainment devices, but if taxi drivers don’t make some middling effort to reach out to their passengers (which of course requires the passengers to be friendly and open to some form of give and take), then our job will become more and more of a grind than it already is, if you can conceive of something so grim. And we will find ourselves treated with even less deference and respect.

In the second half of this article, we’ll relate the broader outlines of an atypical shift, highlighting those encounters we enjoyed (and those not quite so enjoyable) over the course of 10-12 hours.

By Chip Stern
http://www.chipstern.com/

A ticker-tape of headlines that runs along the bottom of TV screens in many yellow taxis displayed news items that were weeks old because of a technical snafu.

Jesse Davis, president of Creative Mobile Technologies, the company that runs the technical side of NY10, said the problem was a failure to communicate.

WNBC changed the source of its local news feed, but Davis’ company didn’t get the memo, so it didn’t make needed changes in the system.

Riders tuning into the latest happenings found not-so-breaking news from Oct. 26: the Giants beating the Steelers, the Jets besting the Chiefs and a car slamming into a Manhattan restaurant.

“It’s a technical glitch,” said Jennifer Vessio, a spokeswoman for NBC, which provides the news content for the taxi channel, known as NY10.

The result was old ticker headlines, though the on-air news updates from WNBC anchors - which are changed twice a day - remained fresh, he said.

He said the problem is easy to fix, and the local headlines should be current within a few days.

“The biggest concern anyone has is stale content,” Davis said of NY10, which plays in more than 5,000 cabs.

He said he learned of the problem from the Daily News, not riders, though the outdated feeds did catch the eye of some passengers.

“I have noticed,” said Vanessa Smith, 35, of Manhattan. “There have been the same headlines for two weeks.”

Charles Freeman, an investment banker working in midtown, said he wasn’t upset about the flub because he doesn’t rely on cabs for what’s happening in the world.

“I know that when I’m in the cab, the news is stale,” he said. “I’m just there to take a ride. The TV is just an added thing. I’m neutral.”

The traffic center was officially opened on Thursday, although it has been in operation for about two weeks. It allows police officers and technicians from the city and state (they each control different portions of the city road network) to track traffic patterns, respond to accidents or other complications (like presidential visits) and distribute information to the public about road conditions.

About 500 cameras posted on streets around the city send digital video feeds to the traffic center and technicians can access the images and even change the camera angles.

They also receive data from roadside sensors that measure vehicle speeds, so they know how fast traffic is moving. That information is used to create a color-coded digital map of the city, known as the flow map, which shows vehicle speeds on major roadways.

(The city plans to put the flow map on the Internet in the next few weeks so that anyone can check traffic speeds on their computer or cellphone.)

Technicians at the center can also control about half of the city’s 12,300 traffic signals from the center.

The center was built over the last five years at a cost of $16 million, most of it paid by the federal government.

Much of the information on display at the center was already available to traffic managers, but the city and state previously operated in different rooms in the Long Island City building where the center is housed. Having them in the same room, along with the police, is meant to foster greater coordination and faster responses to problems.

“The faster we can detect an incident, respond to it and pass the information to the motorist so they can choose an alternate route, the more we minimize the impact of that incident,” said Mohamed Talas, an operations manager at the center.

An example: If an accident ties up traffic on the Gowanus Expressway in Brooklyn, traffic often spills onto Third and Fourth Avenues as drivers seek an alternate route. Technicians at the traffic center can change the traffic signal patterns on those avenues to help keep the higher volume of vehicles moving.

The center is in a windowless ground floor room with the lights turned down low to accentuate the computer images on multiple screens. The smell of new carpeting hangs in the air. The ceiling is made out of a undulating metal panels.

One wall is covered with video screens displaying dozens of video images of city roadways. Technicians at long desks sit before numerous computer screens, displaying yet more video images.

The center was officially opened by a number of public officials, including the state transportation commissioner, Astrid C. Glynn; the city transportation commissioner, Janette Sadik-Khan; and Michael Scagnelli, chief of transportation for the Police Department.

In an industry dependent on tips, the mayor dangled significant financial incentives before fleet owners reluctant to make the switch to cleaner hybrids.

The mayor said the Taxi and Limousine Commission would change the maximum lease rates that medallion owners could charge drivers, increasing the fee by $3 for each 12-hour shift for hybrids and decreasing it $12 for gas-hogging Ford Crown Victorias.

The fees currently range from $105 to $129.

“It’s not imposing mileage standards. It’s voluntary,” the mayor said at a press conference in the Long Island City taxi garage run by Zion Yakuel.

An incensed industry spokesman accused the mayor of engineering an end run around the court ruling and hinted another legal battle was brewing.

“Today’s attempt to buy off taxi operators and to use backdoor methods to force safe, proven commercial vehicles off the road is wrong,” said Ron Sherman of the Metropolitan Taxi Board of Trade.

A federal judge last month decided that the city didn’t have the authority to override federal fuel standards, leading the mayor to ask Rep. Jerrold Nadler to sponsor legislation to give states and municipalities that right.

Told that some in the industry were troubled by his plan, the mayor struck back with a vengeance. “I think it’s more deeply troubling when they’re trying to kill our kids,” he said, a reference to the pollution caused by traditional taxis.

Some fleet owners hailed the mayor.

“Most of [the drivers] ask me if I have the hybrid and tell me they would pay me more,” said Mike Levine, owner of Ronart Leasing in Long Island City, Queens, which operates more than 300 cabs. “There’s no problem with that.”

Fleets account for about 25 percent of the 13,237 medallion cabs on the road. Officials say 1,565 are hybrids.

The new lease rates would be “phased in” after public hearings to give fleet owners time to make the switch.

Also Read MAYOR MIKE’S REALM @ NYPost

“By modifying the leasing fees on fleet vehicles, we could level the playing field for drivers while also providing financial incentives for owners to purchase hybrids,” Mr. Bloomberg said during a news conference at a taxi garage in Long Island City, Queens.

City officials said that the new rules did not place an outright ban on particular cars based on fuel efficiency, and the mayor said that the rules would stand up to legal tests.

“It has nothing to do with imposing mileage standards,” he said. “It’s totally voluntary.”

The mayor lashed out at critics, saying that the pollution from gas-guzzling taxis hurt city children. Told that critics found the new incentives “deeply troubling,” the mayor snapped, “I think it’s more deeply troubling that they’re trying to kill our kids.”

The city’s earlier attempt to promote more fuel-efficient taxis was blocked last month when a federal judge ruled that a legal challenge was likely to succeed based on the argument that under current laws, only the federal government had the right to set fuel-efficiency standards.

The proposal announced on Friday involves changes to the so-called lease caps, the amount — set by the Taxi and Limousine Commission — that a fleet or taxi owner can charge drivers for the use of a cab or medallion.

Those caps now range from $105 to $129 per 12-hour shift, depending on the day of the week and the time of day. There is also a weekly cap of $666 for seven 12-hour shifts.

Under the new program, owners could increase by $3 per shift the amount they charge drivers for the use of a fuel-efficient vehicle. That would translate to an additional $2,000 a year per vehicle, according to the city, although officials said that drivers would still come out ahead because they would spend less money on gas.

On the other hand, the city would decrease by $12 a shift the amount that owners could charge drivers for the use of a Crown Victoria or other less fuel-efficient vehicle. That represents a yearly loss of $8,500 a year per vehicle, according to the city.

Officials said that the change would mostly affect the approximately 25 percent of cabs that are managed in fleets, which have daily or weekly leases affected by the caps. Under the current system, officials say, fleet owners do not share the higher fuel costs of the less-efficient cabs, which are borne entirely by the drivers.

Owners who drive their own cabs (whether they own the medallion or lease it) already have an incentive to switch to a hybrid because of lower gas costs, officials said.

Jeff Kay, the director of the mayor’s office of operations, said that the new rules balanced the costs of fleet owners and drivers. Because the initial purchase price of hybrids is higher, the larger lease cap will allow fleet owners to recoup the extra cost over time. And because the Crown Victorias cost drivers more to operate with higher fuel expenses, the lower lease cap is meant to give the drivers a break.

The new caps require approval by the Taxi and Limousine Commission. The mayor said the new rule would probably be phased in over time.

The head of the taxi industry group that brought the federal lawsuit derailing the city’s original green taxi program accused the mayor of making “an end run around” the court ruling.

“Today’s attempt to buy off taxi operators and to use backdoor methods to force safe, proven commercial vehicles off the road is wrong and highly challengeable,” said Ron Sherman, the president of the Metropolitan Taxicab Board of Trade, in a written statement. And he cited claims by his group that the smaller and lighter hybrids were less safe for passengers and drivers than the heavier Crown Victorias.

The rule that was blocked in federal court last month would have required all new taxis to meet a fuel efficiency rating of 25 miles per gallon, a standard that is reached almost exclusively by hybrids. The Crown Victoria gets 12 to 14 miles per gallon.

On Friday, Bloomberg announced a new incentive aimed at encouraging fleet owners to purchase hybrids.

Fleet owners charge their drivers a fee for the use of taxicabs; the new proposal lets fleet owners raise those fees on hybrids.

The city says that even though a hybrid driver pays a higher fee, known as a “lease cap,” the fuel savings more than make up the difference.

“Less Manhattan employment means less traffic across our facilities,” said David Moretti, acting president of Bridges and Tunnels (also known as the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority), who spoke on Wednesday at a meeting of a committee of the authority’s board.

After the meeting, he said that the drop at the Manhattan crossings “seems to coincide with the decline in employment base, and therefore traffic is down for that reason.”

Mr. Moretti said the declines appeared to be continuing this month at the Manhattan crossings, which are the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, the Queens-Midtown Tunnel, the Henry Hudson Bridge and the Manhattan portion of the Triborough Bridge.

H. Dale Hemmerdinger, the authority’s chairman, said that the drop might reflect the recent failure of Lehman Brothers and the impact of the economic crisis at other financial-sector companies, whose top executives often live in the suburbs.

“They would be the highest paid guys and gals who probably would drive and not take the train,” he said.

Data from the State Labor Department shows that in September there were 10,000 fewer financial-sector jobs in New York City than there were in the same month a year ago. But the number is expected to rise as the fiscal crisis spreads.

The traffic falloff is part of a yearlong trend at all the authority’s bridges and tunnels, which taken together have seen a drop in average weekday traffic during each of the last 12 months, when compared with the previous year.

Earlier in the year, Mr. Moretti said the change appeared to be a result of skyrocketing gas prices and higher tolls, which were discouraging people from taking car trips. But while gas prices have fallen considerably since the summer, traffic levels have continued to shrink.

The authority’s data showed that since the yearlong decline began, October saw the largest percentage drop in weekday crossings during the morning peak period, from 6 a.m. to 10 a.m.

Mr. Moretti said that toll collections remained slightly above forecasts for this year. But officials at the authority are concerned that accelerating declines in traffic could hurt toll revenue, which is used to help pay for mass transit.

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey has seen similar declines in traffic, with a greater drop at its Manhattan tunnel crossings over the last two months.

Total traffic at the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels dropped 6.4 percent in October, compared with last year, according to Steve Coleman, a Port Authority spokesman. At the same time, traffic dropped 4.4 percent at the bridges between New Jersey and Staten Island and just 2.5 percent at the George Washington Bridge.

Mr. Coleman said that many people taking the George Washington Bridge were headed to areas beyond Manhattan, while the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels were used heavily by commuters.

Traffic on the Holland and Lincoln Tunnels fell 6.3 percent in September, compared with 2007. But September traffic at the Staten Island bridges was down 6.0 percent.

The year-to-year drop in traffic at the tunnels was much greater in September and October than it was in any of the previous 12 months.

“Tunnel and bridge traffic at the Port Authority’s crossings is down this year due to record high gas prices and the economic slowdown,” Mr. Coleman said in a written statement. “We also implemented a toll increase last year with mass transit in mind. While there is a decline in tunnel and bridge traffic, our PATH system has seen a significant increase in ridership this year.”

Ridership has also been higher on the transportation authority’s trains and buses.

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/13/as-economy-weakens-bridge-and-tunnel-traffic-falls/

UPPER West Siders should be afraid, very afraid, of the Department of Transportation brainstorm to make their neighborhood more friendly to strollers and bicyclists.

The bubble-brained traffic-busting scheme isn’t exactly the same as in other parts of town, but its gist is the same - new bike lanes to benefit a tiny handful of riders and fewer lanes for cars, trucks and buses.

To see what they’re in for, folks who live west of Central Park should check out Broadway between 35th and 42nd streets.

There, cars and trucks inch through two lanes while a new bike lane - which took away a third auto lane - is lucky to see a rider go by in the time it takes to sit through “Mamma Mia!”

Meanwhile, skanky little “pedestrian plazas” protruding into the street draw only a few lunch eaters and an equal number of raving lunatics.

Strollers who are neither homeless nor insane are avoiding the pedestrian paradises, and similar ones around town, in droves. The DOT’s stab at bringing joy to the streets has instead delivered chaos, confusion and lots of empty chairs.

The plazas and bike lane have made Broadway a very narrow way below 42nd Street. To barricade the plazas against vehicles crawling by, DOT installed clunky planters like those used to deter truck-bomb terrorists.

A parking strip plunked between the plaza and moving traffic looks as if a bunch of cars broke down in the road simultaneously. The madness just came to Grand Street as well, where a dangerous bike lane is shunned by any sane cyclist.

It might come as a surprise to Mayor Bloomberg, but New York is already the world’s best walking town. Putting pedestrian plazas where they don’t belong only recalls Christo’s “The Gates,” which heaped miles of crappy art on Central Park - the man-made masterpiece needing no help from Bloomberg’s pet artist.

The DOT is just out to make drivers miserable - a sneaky subterfuge around Bloomberg’s congestion-pricing defeat.

Most hurt are taxi drivers, who don’t have the luxury of leaving the car home. Publicist Shelley Clark was headed for a meeting in the West 30s when her cab got snared on Broadway where three lanes become two.

“The driver went into a panic,” she recalls. “Everybody was blowing horns. He couldn’t figure out which way to turn.”

Meanwhile, a loony redesign turned Ninth Avenue from 14th to 33rd Streets into a horn-honking horror. Cement “islands” set off a bicycle lane used mainly by amphetamine-propelled deliverymen.

DOT also threw in scary metal bollards and unintelligible zebra markings. The fun climaxes at Chelsea Market, where drivers squeezed from three lanes into two must suddenly decide whether to veer left or right around a mid-avenue plaza.

If City Hall really cared about pedestrians, it would do something about a blight of its own making - the sidewalk bridges that drape half the buildings around town.

The idiotic, Ed Koch-era law requiring the monstrosities for the least façade work plunges miles of sidewalks into darkness.

Some of the gloomiest bridges cast shadows on the same blocks DOT redesigned to be stroller-friendly. Maybe next, they’ll bring back the Third Avenue el.

scuozzo@nypost.com