Imagine you’re staying in a nice hotel in midtown Manhattan and you want to visit the legendary Saks Fifth Avenue.

One option would be to take a taxi to the Port Authority Bus Terminal. Then you could fight through the crowd and pay $18 to board a bus. Then you could take a long ride in bumper-to-bumper traffic. Finally you would be let off at a mall that has a Saks store.

Or you could just walk down Fifth Avenue to Saks Fifth Avenue.

Which would you prefer?

I suspect that won’t be a tough choice. Yet the future of the American Dream mall in the Meadowlands is premised on the notion that the typical tourist would prefer a sightseeing tour of North Jersey traffic to a pleasant stroll through the city he or she came to visit.

I wish the mall developers the best. But I can’t for the life of me envision that mall attracting the tens of thousands of daily visitors it will need to survive.

What the company calls the “chaptered opening” begins at 10 a.m. Friday. It will include an ice-skating rink and the Nickelodeon Universe Theme Park. If you go to the website of the mall operator, the Canadian-based Triple Five group, you will see that all of the tickets for the rides are already sold out.

Sounds good. But aren’t kids in school on a Friday morning? Normally, yes. But my sources in the swamp tell me that Triple Five is going to paper the room by inviting kids from local schools to ride the rides. Triple Five did not return my call for comment on that.

I hope that’s not an omen. But based on my long experience in the amusement business, I fear it is. I grew up working on the Seaside boardwalk. One thing we all noticed was that Labor Day was like a light switch. Once school begins, the switch is turned off.

I can’t see how things will be much different at American Dream, even though they are going to have some innovative attractions. One is an indoor ski slope, which is set to open Dec. 5. Another is a wave pool that will open next month.

That stuff is nice. And I can see why Triple Five’s other mega-malls are packed. If you live in a place like Minnesota or Alberta, that sort of thing is really exotic. There’s not much else to do other than get in the car and drive to the mall.

But driving to the Meadowlands mall requires negotiating some of the worst traffic in America.

How about mass transit? That will eventually be provided by the state agency that managed to create a transit disaster at the 2014 Super Bowl, despite having years to plan for it.

This time around, you won’t have to worry about long lines for those trains. That’s because there are not yet any trains scheduled to run. Transit is relying on the aforementioned buses for now.

Even when train service begins, the service will be sporadic. There were plans for a direct link to the commuter rail lines that pass within sight of the mall. But the state never built that link.

That mall never should have been built either. Back in 2002 when the plan originated, I used to ask the politicians and planners an obvious question:

You say you want to bring shoppers back to the downtowns. So why the heck do you want to build a new mall out on the highway?

The answer was pure crackpot politics: Since Essex County was getting a sports arena, Bergen County would get a shopping mall.

Never mind that Bergen County is the shopping-mall capital of the universe. The pols decided to go with the plans for what was then known as Xanadu.

Xanadu closed before it ever opened. I guess the state had to do something with that garish hulk left behind. But I can’t see how this has a happy ending.

Even if American Dream succeeds, it will pull shoppers away from existing malls that are already suffering because of competition from online sales.

Elizabeth Mayor Chris Bollwage told me he’s not too worried about that. The malls that do best these days are the outlet malls, such as Jersey Gardens in his city.

“It has a niche in the mall-oriented business,” Bollwage said. “The access is much better than access to American Dream.”

Furthermore, parking is free. American Dream will have a sliding scale that hits $24 for parking any longer than 8 hours.

Bollwage questions the big subsidies, well in excess of $1 billion, that the Meadowlands complex has received.

“It’s so heavily subsidized,” he said. “It’s unconscionable the government put so much into it.”

It is indeed. In politics, the best option is often to do nothing.

This was one of those times.