WE’VE DESCENDED INTO SOME SORT OF BIZARRE HELL-WORLD IN WHICH PHILADELPHIA IS SEEN AS A BEACON OF SANITY: While NYC descends into chaos, Philadelphia is a model of urban order.

How different a city looks without scaffolds! My eyes popped over main drags such as Market, Broad and  Walnut streets without the ground-level eyesores that make most every block at home appear shabby. Even Park Avenue, Broadway and Wall Street look as if bombs had fallen on them.

Philadelphia’s near-absence of bike lanes recalled the era when our own streets and sidewalks functioned as they were meant to: streets for motor vehicles, sidewalks for people on foot.

Philadelphia has about 20 miles of bike lanes; New York, its government in thrall to environmental zanies and cycle-advocacy bullies who shout down opponents, has more than 650 miles of them.

Philly motorists are spared the havoc wrought by the lanes in the form of congestion-breeding narrow streets and of cars forced to park in the middle of streets in order to create “protected” bike lanes.

But the greatest benefit is to people on foot. It took me three days to grasp that I could cross an intersection without a wrong-way cyclist bearing down on me, and to stroll sidewalks without fear of being sideswiped by heedless, law-breaking jerks on wheels — the norm from The Bronx to the Battery.

I was in Manhattan the week before last; my first trip there since 2019. With all of the bicyclists and e-scooters wreaking havoc at intersections, the city reminded me of Saigon as depicted in the 2008 Top Gear Vietnam special. But in communist Vietnam, cars are only now slowly arriving to displace the scooters. Over the last 20-30 years New Yorkers, led by the obsessions of former mayor Mike Bloomberg, have voluntarily ceded their city to what P.J. O’Rourke once dubbed “The Bicycle Menace,” aka “this dreadful peril on our roads.”