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,...