Gov steers away from tunnel questions

Gov. Cuomo on Wednesday refused to discuss the $250,000 worth of blue lane dividers he ordered installed in two East River tunnels in apparent violation of federal road-safety regulations.

Asked about the vanity boondoggle during a Manhattan news conference on an unrelated issue, Cuomo at first claimed he “missed the thrust of that question,” then said, “All right, I would refer you to the MTA.”

But he also made clear that he knew all about the problem, adding, “The [lane] delineators are not my area of proficiency.”

Hours earlier, The Post had revealed that Cuomo replaced about 3,500 orange pylons with blue ones — to coordinate with the state’s official colors of blue and gold — inside the Brooklyn-Battery and Queens-Midtown tunnels during recent reconstruction projects.

The Federal Highway Adminis- tration says the change violated safety regulations governing the color of “tubular markers,” which must be either completely or “predominantly” orange, or “the same color as the pavement marking that they supplement.”

But the MTA claims the plastic posts in the tunnels aren’t covered by that rule because they’re “lane delineators,” and not “channelizing devices.”

Cuomo has admitted taking a personal interest in the $588 mil- lion rebuilding of the tunnels following 2012’s Hurricane Sandy.

During a Friday ribbon-cutting ceremony, he joked about pestering construction workers to straighten out crooked tiles “every time I went through” the Queens Midtown Tunnel.

His administration also issued a 91-page manual in 2015 that details the use of color to convey the state’s “personality traits.”