The last two mayors couldn’t be less alike in profile — but do most New Yorkers really feel any difference?

also fulfilled his campaign promise to accelerate the decline of stop, question and frisk as an NYPD tactic and he has boosted the implementation of “community policing.”

Big, important stuff, to be sure. If you are, for example, one of the 10,000 or so people who hit the lottery for a new affordable apartment last year; or one of the thousands of innocent black and brown New Yorkers who might have been routinely tossed by a cop six years ago; or the parent of one of the 70,000 four-year-olds who enrolled in school this fall, your life is better for having de Blasio in City Hall.

It is easy to come up with other splits, in style and substance: Bloomberg tamped down city expenses, at least relative to profligate mayors, where de Blasio has gone on a civil service hiring spree. Bloomberg backed the creation of the High Line. De Blasio has banned cars from Prospect Park.

But in a city of 8.5 million, a relatively small number of people have been directly touched by the regime change. Which points to one reason de Blasio’s New York doesn’t seem all that different to most New Yorkers: Any mayor who dreams of overhauling the way New York operates faces the challenges of sheer scale.

He or (someday) she also has to contend with Albany; it shot down Bloomberg’s bid for a West Side stadium and it has stiff-armed de Blasio’s repeated attempts to raise taxes on the rich. The city is also shaped by larger forces — globalization, Washington, D.C. — more than we like to admit.

But this is the surprising thing: Just below the surface, in his day-to-day stewardship of the city, de Blasio has so far been less of a departure from Bloomberg than their caricatures and agendas would suggest. Part of that is because of deliberate choices made by de Blasio that have extended the influence of the Bloomberg years.

“For the most part, the quality of the commissioners he has appointed is very good,” says Kathy Wylde, the president of the Partnership for New York City, a powerful business group. “Bright people, as bright as the people Bloomberg chose.”

Mitchell Moss, an NYU professor of urban planning, points to sanitation boss Kathryn Garcia and Meera Joshi, head of the Taxi and Limousine Commission, as among the best — and points out that both served in the Bloomberg administration. “Garcia has brought more data and science to the allocation of garbage collection and snow-clearing, and she’s been very aggressive on pushing recycling. Joshi has built on David Yassky’s reforms at TLC.

“And city planning, which Bloomberg empowered under Amanda Burden, has really flourished under de Blasio, in technical skill and their role in decisionmaking.”

Another reason the makeover hasn’t been more jarring is that, just as Bloomberg was less conservative than his tax bracket might indicate, de Blasio has been somewhat less liberal than his oratory would lead you to believe.

Picking Bill Bratton as his first police commissioner was the most dramatic demonstration of de Blasio’s latent streak of Bloombergian realism; installing Alicia Glen, a Goldman Sachs veteran, as deputy mayor for economic development is another.

“When I say he is a pragmatist, it’s in the sense that he understands that when you have to rely on the local economy, you have to do business with the corporate community,” Viteritti says. “Three out of four dollars in de Blasio’s housing plan are coming from the private sector. So he had to work with them. A lot of progressives don’t understand that.

“The universities are filled with people who never figure out how you get from step one to step three. De Blasio has been very pragmatic when it comes to the means he uses to reach goals.”

On other fronts, the shift from Bloomberg to de Blasio has fallen short of profound because of inertia.

“Economic development hasn’t really been a major priority for this mayor,” says Jonathan Bowles, the executive director of the Center for an Urban Future. “And you can argue that maybe it didn’t have to be: The economy is going pretty well, the city has gained 700,000 jobs in the past ten years, and there’s nothing de Blasio has done that has thrown a real wet blanket over the economy.

“Bloomberg was pretty active, especially in his final term after the financial crisis, in rolling out all these initiatives — tech incubators, for example — designed to get the economy going. De Blasio hasn’t talked a ton about tech; you’ve heard more, and justifiably so, from him about diversifying the pipelines into tech sector jobs. But quietly he’s kept the Bloomberg momentum going. This past quarter New York had more venture capital spending than San Francisco, for the first time ever.”

Bloomberg and de Blasio would appear to have little in common when it comes to the public schools, particularly in how they’ve attempted to lift its neediest students. Bloomberg shut down large failing schools and reconstituted them into smaller bodies, a practice de Blasio halted in favor of social-service-infused Renewal Schools. Bloomberg championed charter schools and de Blasio considers them a sideshow.

The differences even infuse their approach to school discipline; Bloomberg was fine with suspensions, while de Blasio worries about their disparate impact on black and brown kids.

Yet stubbornly low reading and math scores, particularly for African-American and Latino students, have frustrated both men. Both have notched steady progress. But steady progress is far too little for far too many parents.

“De Blasio is in the awkward position of having spent $580 million on Renewal Schools and not having a whole lot to show for it,” says Aaron Pallas, the chairman of the Department of Education Policy at Columbia’s Teachers College.

One significant reason, in Pallas’s view, is that de Blasio has done little to alter the admissions mechanisms that help perpetuate economic and racial segregation in the city’s high schools.

“The process was designed 15 years ago under Bloomberg and Joel Klein, and it continues under de Blasio,” Pallas says. “The success of the high school choice system is evaluated on the basis of what percentage of students gets one of their top three choices. It does what it’s supposed to, but it doesn’t have any systemwide constraints on it that say, ‘We’re not going to allow more than x percent of struggling students to end up in a particular school.’

“So the process gives most parents what they think they want, but it doesn’t manage the system as a whole toward greater success. You get large concentrations of struggling kids in certain schools, and it results in a fraction of schools being relegated to the trash dump.”

Bloomberg tried a frontal assault on an entrenched system; de Blasio has tried making nice. Yet the switch in tone masks the slow pace of structural reform. “There’s been a much friendlier relationship between the teachers’ union and City Hall, so the system has changed in that respect,” Pallas says. “But a lot of policies persist from the Bloomberg era, and it’s really hard to point to signal accomplishments under Carmen Farina and de Blasio, outside of the obvious expansion of universal pre-K.”

Perhaps the most significant continuity, however, is the one that’s both hardest to see and yet carries the greatest stakes. Under Bloomberg, after 9/11, Ray Kelly built a sophisticated, highly-independent antiterrorism division within the NYPD. The courts reined in one of the most intrusive elements of the Bloomberg years, the NYPD’s “Demographics Unit,” which surveilled mosques and Muslim neighborhoods.

De Blasio, though, has left intact many components, like assigning New York cops to overseas posts, including London and Paris, where they supplied rapid intelligence after recent attacks. Like Bloomberg, he has given the police department millions of dollars to install cameras and acquire heavy weaponry.

And despite significant strategy changes — a community policing approach whose aim is to reconnect New Yorkers with beat cops — this remains in many respects the NYPD built by Bill Bratton and Ray Kelly under Rudy Giuliani and Mike Bloomberg.

De Blasio is about to get four more years to see if he can carve a sharply distinct legacy from Michael Bloomberg — to truly turn the massive ship that is New York City. Right now, you can see the vessel trying to navigate the narrow harbor. Smith is a contributing editor at New York magazine.