It’s a good thing that New York is the city that never sleeps — since it takes all day to get anywhere.

A perfect storm of subway repairs, highway construction, commuter rail woes and worsening gridlock is creating a commuter doomsday the likes of which the city has never seen before.

“It’s really bad out there, and it doesn’t seem like it’s going to get any better,” Robert Sinclair, spokesman for AAA Northeast, said of the amalgam of transit troubles. “For the next four or five years, every day will be like Thanksgiving.”

‘L’ on Earth

The dreaded April 2019 kickoff of the 15-month shutdown of L-train service between Brooklyn and Manhattan is still months off, but the line’s riders are about to face a painful precursor.

Starting at 11:30 p.m. Friday, much of the line will go dark until 5 a.m. Monday, with trains operating only between Broadway Junction and the southern terminal at Canarsie-Rockaway Parkway.

The pattern will repeat for another 14 nonconsecutive weekends between now and next spring as the MTA performs prep work for the larger shuttering.

Business owners and commuters along the line are looking nervously to this first weekend shutdown as a possible barometer of things to come.

“I feel like everybody lives off the L and everybody’s life is centered around the L, and I feel like everybody is going to lose it [during the shutdown],” groaned Pierce Landeis, a barista at Freehold on South Third Street. “It’s going to make Brooklyn events more centric to Brooklyn because no one [from Manhattan] is going to try to come because it’s going to be too complicated.”

Added Ernie Sandy, manager of the Blind Pig sports bar across the river in the East Village, “It’ll definitely put a dent in our happy hour sales. A lot of the staff lives in Brooklyn right off the L, so it’ll probably make it harder for them to get into the city.”

Shuttle buses and additional service on existing bus routes and other train lines are supposed to pick up the slack, a proposition commuters are greeting with skepticism.

“I think some people are scared, and some people aren’t,” said Dave Urbanos, owner of Sugarburg on Metropolitan Avenue. “Honestly, I don’t know what to expect. I don’t think anybody does.”

Subpar Subways

The L-train madness aside, regular subway riders have long given up on getting anywhere on time — and that won’t change anytime soon.

The average weekday on-time rate of trains across the system continues to languish at 64 percent between July 2017 and June 2018 — barely an improvement from the previous year’s 61.8 percent, despite the $836 million Subway Action Plan stopgap born out of 2017’s transit “Summer of Hell.”

‘This is straight hell.’

Even when the trains arrive, unplanned snafus still frequently snarl the larger subway system, setting off a string of rush-hour delays like a row of dominos.

As recently as Wednesday, three separate incidents decimated service across the system on both the morning and evening rushes.

A track fire at Lexington Avenue and East 53rd Street was coupled with signal issues at Chambers and Fulton streets to muck up the a.m. trip, while switch issues between 125th and 145th streets ruined the evening ride home.

“Everybody’s stressed out early morning when they should be relaxed,” said Rose Singh, who says her average morning commute from Long Island to the city has become “a nightmare.”

“Everybody’s pushing … People are yelling at each other. They’re frustrated,” Singh griped. “The problems are everywhere.”

MTA officials said they’re working on fixing what’s wrong, but it will take time.

“We’ve stabilized the system, we’re making huge investments into modernizing our infrastructure, and it will take hard work but these efforts will deliver better service for New Yorkers,” said MTA spokesman Shams Tarek.

Helix to Hell-ix

Extensive roadwork is set to begin Friday on the New Jersey highway that leads to the Lincoln Tunnel – and after that officials will tacklethe final stretch of the oft-snarled spiral to the tubes known as the “helix.”

Already deemed the worst traffic choke point this side of Chicago, Route 495 carries about 10,000 vehicles an hour during peak travel times.

On Aug. 17, the repairs ramp up as one lane in each direction will be closed off for round-the-clock construction, setting up the stretch for hellacious bottlenecking.

The $90.3 million project, begun last September, is expected to drag on for two years.

“That is going to be a headache for anyone trying to get to the city by car,” said Kate Slevin, senior vice president of state programs and advocacy for the Regional Plan Association. “We have underinvested in our transportation network for many years and are paying the price now.”

Meanwhile, the New Jersey Department of Transportation, which is overseeing the project, is offering few alternatives, adding no trains to NJ Transit service.

A ‘rail’ headache

Escaping the five boroughs doesn’t mean leaving behind their transit woes, with the Long Island Rail Road and NJ Transit looking closer to the subway system with each new foul-up.

Aside from the increasingly run-of-the-mill signal issues and delays out of Penn Station, less predictable problems have crippled LIRR service of late.

A Port Washington-bound train derailed on Aug. 1 on the Queens side of the East River tunnel — the second such incident in just a span of two weeks.

A July 21 derailment caused two days’ worth of cancellations and delays as workers attempted to right the train.

The state of affairs on NJ Transit isn’t much better, plagued of late by, of all things, a slew of engineer absences.

Between Monday and Tuesday, 27 trains were canceled altogether: three due to shortage of equipment, about six owing to mechanical issues, and the remainder to unexpected staff shortages, an NJ transit spokeswoman said.

And on Thursday evening, another train trip was scrapped due to worker absence.

“It’s a madhouse. Crazy, just crazy,” said commuter Leslie Prince as he beheld the scrum of commuters jostling for a 4:30 p.m. train at Penn Station.

The 56-year-old electrician, who uses the service to get to and from his home in Matawan, NJ, shook his head in disbelief as he fretted about the ripple effect other local disruptions might have.

“What they’re doing is not helping right now,” he said. “It’s going to make matters worse.”

Road Warriors

For all the subway’s problems, it’s still a lot faster than getting behind the wheel.

Average auto speeds in Midtown are a glacial 5 mph — as an all-time-high 2 million cars are now registered in the Big Apple, including a record 120,000 for-hire vehicles.

That figure represents nearly triple the number of for-hire rides clogging city streets in 2010, before the rise of Uber, Lyft and similar services, city data show.

It’s not much better for all of Manhattan south of 60th Street, where average speeds have plummeted from 9.1 mph in 2010 to 7.1 mph last year, according to the Department of Transportation.

In an odd feedback loop, the June report blamed the surge in cars on the road on unreliable mass transit.

The announcement Wednesday of a plan to cap the number of for-hire vehicle licenses — at least for a year — is expected to stanch congestion, but only with attrition in the current ranks.

Vicious ‘cycle’

Even pedal power won’t get you far.

Citi Bike is improving, but many of its rides are in various states of disrepair — if you can find them at all.

Early results on dockless bike trials launched in the city weeks ago have been dodgy, with scores of the “pedal-assist” rides routinely found clogging sidewalks or outright inoperable.

Of the 100 bikes placed by Uber subsidiary JUMP in the central Bronx in late July, only eight could be found by The Post on one recent day. Only two were rideable.

Bronx truck driver Cory Williams summed up city travel as a whole this way:

“It keeps getting worse. If it was a nightmare, it would have come and gone by now,” groaned the lifelong city resident. “This is straight hell.”

Additional reporting by Olivia Bensimon and Katherine Lavacca