Facing a blizzard of criticism, Mayor Bill de Blasio admitted Friday that he knew Thursday morning the city would be blanketed with up to 5 inches of snow — but still pointed the finger everywhere except at City Hall for the chaotic evening commute.

Responding to an angry “George in the Bronx” on WNYC’s “Brian Lehrer Show,” who was stuck in the snow for four hours on Gun Hill Road, Hizzoner offered a lengthy reply that stopped short of a mea culpa.

“I think the crux of this matter was on Wednesday night the National Weather Service was saying 1 to 2 inches. Around Thursday morning, it jumped up to 3 to 5 inches,” de Blasio said, acknowledging that the city had hours to plan for the evening rush.

“Per se, even 3 to 5 inches of snow doesn’t do a whole lot to the city of New York. But then it became clear it was going to hit right during rush hour, heavy snow, wet snow, fast snow,” the mayor said.

“Obviously early in the season, leaves still on trees. That’s when it became clear we were dealing with something very different. I think if we had better knowledge, we would have told people Wednesday night: Do not drive today, get off the roads. But honestly, by the time we got the information, it was too late to do that,” he continued, without explaining why “leaves … on trees” had anything to do with the mess.

“Something was different here. The George Washington Bridge. No one I know has a memory of it shutting down in rush hour … I think the domino effect of that was huge,” he said.

He then whined that even if he had taken tougher action, people would have blamed him for crying wolf — and called the snowfall “the perfect storm.”

“We could have, in retrospect, been even more conservative [after] hearing 1 or 2 inches of snow. We could have sounded the alarm,” he said.

“But the problem with that is people would have said, ‘Why the hell are you declaring an emergency for 1 or 2 inches of snow?’ We have to figure out how to make adjustments when we only have a few hours, but this was … kind of the perfect storm. This was a real tough one, but we got to do better.”

De Blasio earlier had said “bad luck” and lousy forecasting — not poor planning — was mostly to blame for the city’s inept response to the small snowstorm that practically paralyzed the Big Apple.

“There are definitely some things we need to learn from this and things we need to do better,” de Blasio admitted on NY1.