Congestion tolls will push drive-and-ditch commuters to flood northern Manhattan and outer boroughs

The invasion of the Bridge and Tunnel crowd won’t just be on weekends anymore.

Commuters to the Big Apple will be turning neighborhoods across the city into their own personal parking lots beginning this week, ditching their rides to save their wallets because of the $9 congestion pricing plan, concerned residents told The Post.

The plan is expected to upend neighborhoods closest to the 60th Street tolling zone with nightmarish gridlock as a surge of drivers begin scouring for free parking spots.

“Parking is already very much an issue. We have nine hospitals in our district, and many of them are north of 60th Street,” said Upper East Sider Valerie Mason, a member of New Yorkers Against Congestion Pricing Tax, a group suing to stop the scheme.

Hospital workers and visitors already eat up the majority of the nabe’s street parking, she added.

“We’re also very concerned that [the toll] will cause a huge amount of traffic and more cars trying to park north of the [59th Street Bridge],” Mason said. 

The Upper West Side and Harlem are also expected to get slammed — a problem when parking spaces are already a precious commodity.

East Harlem is already plagued by congestion from out-of-town traffic taking up parking spots before heading south in the borough — because it’s faster than using the FDR Drive, said Xavier Santiago, chairman of Manhattan Community Board 11. He predicted the parking crisis “will continue to escalate” with congestion pricing.

The outer boroughs are also panicking.

Communities such as Long Island City in Queens, the South Bronx, and ritzy Carroll Gardens, Cobble Hill and Park Slope in Brooklyn are fearing their quality of life will be uprooted – not only by their own drivers but also those schlepping to the Big Apple from New Jersey, upstate New York, Long Island and Staten Island.

“My constituents who still have no real public transit connection to Manhattan are looking forward to treating the posh, transit-rich, gentrified, brownstone Brooklyn as their new park-and-ride,” quipped NYC Council Minority Leader Joe Borelli (R-Staten Island), when asked about the tolling scheme pushed by Gov. Kathy Hochul and other left wing Democrats.

Borelli and other critics of the plan claim it will bring more air and noise pollution to the outer boroughs – including parts of The Bronx and Staten Island — as drivers look to avoid the toll.

Genevieve Giuliano, a professor specializing in urban transportation at USC’s Price School of Public Policy, expects motorists to spend the next few months “experimenting” with new routes to decide whether they’re better off paying the tolls, relying on mass transit or chasing free parking.

“Can you imagine doing” a drive-to-subway commute “every day?” said Giuliano. “Because some days the parking spots might be there; other days they might not.”

Ultimately, many commuters want to spend as little time as possible on NYC’s crime-ridden subway system — warned Jim Walden, a lawyer running for mayor — so expect them to relentlessly drive around the outer boroughs looking for prized parking spots.

“My friends on the far left really don’t care about the outer boroughs,” said Walden, a moderate independent. “They’re creating less congestion in Manhattan [with the tolls] and more congestion everywhere else.”

Kathryn Freed, a retired state Supreme Court justice and former Lower East Side councilwoman, is expecting the worst.

“People are going to do whatever they can to avoid [the toll],” Freed said.

And that means a toll camera on 1st Avenue between East 60 and 61st streets could bring traffic chaos. Motorists getting off the Queensboro Bridge planning to head north will be hit with a charge if they take the lower level to 1st Avenue.

But the upper exit to East 62nd street will bypass the charge — creating a potential choke point as drivers try to avoid the toll.  

Meanwhile, online entrepreneurs have long been hawking license-plate covers for motorists trying to dodge toll machines and traffic cameras, but the state-run MTA has warned it plans to crack down harder on rogue riders once congestion pricing is in effect.

There is at least one cheat code available.

Video shared on social media in April exposed a potential hack to beat a toll camera on West End Avenue by driving the wrong way through a one-way, one lane parking garage on the toll-zone border — with an entrance on 60th Street and an exit on 61st Street.

A manager at the Sessanta Garage, who identified himself as “Sergio,” told The Post the business “is aware of the issue” and plans to eventually install barricades to avoid “head-on collisions” involving toll evaders.

“We’ve just been waiting to see if this congestion pricing really goes into effect or not,” he said last week.

The MTA declined to comment.