The Big Apple is back — to driving you crazy.

“Insane” gridlock has commuters kvetching about their travels in and around New York City — as fears mount that it’ll only get worse now that the pandemic is officially over.

“The traffic is insane this week,” cab driver Sean Karim, 35, told The Post Thursday in between picking up fares in Midtown.

“The summer’s over and school’s back, you’ve got Fashion Week, the UN is coming back next week, and there’s a lot of construction. Next week with the United Nations, it will be gridlock.”

The traffic was crawling so badly Thursday morning that Karim, who has driven yellow taxis for nearly a decade, reluctantly turned down a fare near the Port Authority bus terminal because it would have been four times faster for his passengers to walk.

“Some ladies just came up to me and said they wanted to go to Times Square. Driving would have taken 20 minutes but walking would have taken 5 minutes. I said, ‘Guys, I’m losing money, but walking would be four times faster,'” he said.

“There’s no point driving.”

Others, too, insisted that traffic seemed heavier than usual of late.

One New Jersey commuter, Alexis Gutch, 28, said she even had to turn off her car inside the Lincoln Tunnel during the Thursday morning rush after her usual 40-minute trip from Rutherford took well over 90 minutes.

“I just hit the park button in the Lincoln Tunnel and literally turned my car off, just for a second,” she said as she filled up at a gas station on 10th Avenue and West 36th Street.

“I was worried I was going to get stuck in the tunnel with no gas. I had to conserve gas. Traffic wasn’t moving.

“It shouldn’t take me this long to get in. I left at 10:30am, so it should have taken me 25-30 minutes to get into the city, but it’s 11:25am now and I’ve only just got out of the tunnel,” Gutch continued.

“I’m not even in the vicinity of where I need to go … You can’t avoid rush hour anymore.”

Despite the complaints, the MTA’s dashboard that tracks tolled roads and bridges across the city hasn’t shown a spike in the number of vehicles on the road in recent weeks.

But subway ridership, which has hovered around 60% of pre-pandemic levels for weeks, experienced a spike on Tuesday of 4 million straphangers — up 500,000 riders from the same day a week earlier. Service was snarled on some lines earlier this week, however, thanks to vandals who smashed up dozens of train windows.

Bus ridership, though, hasn’t experienced a similar surge. The number of riders has remained around 60% of the pre-pandemic figures for weeks, the data shows.

Karim, the cab driver, blamed his gridlock woes, in part, on the COVID-19 pandemic — arguing rush hour had shifted since people started making a return to the office.

“Since COVID, people don’t keep regular schedules, so rush hour has changed and you can’t avoid it,” he said. “There’s no schedule now.”

He said that while traffic was always bad after Labor Day, it was particular worse in Midtown now because of heavy construction and reduced lanes.

“They are making the streets tinier and tinier,” Karim said.

“For example on 8th Avenue from 47th, there used to be five lanes open but now there’s just two lanes open. They’ve made one lane for walking, one lane for parking and one lane for the bus, so two lanes are open. When truck deliveries come and park, there’s only one lane open. When the school buses come, it’s a parking lot,” he continued.

“Last year to drive up 8th Avenue from 42nd to 57th — 15 blocks — it took 2 to 3 minutes. Today, to drive just 4 blocks up 8th Avenue from 42nd to 46th is going to take 15 minutes. You’re going nowhere with all this traffic. “

Delivery driver Oscar Echeuerria, 42, said he resorted to changing up his routes this week to try and avoid the particularly bad delays.

“This week, the traffic is bad. Everybody is back at school and the UN is starting,” Echeuerria said. “The traffic is bad all the time, it’s bad all day, so I’m changing all my routes to try and avoid it.”

The Big Apple was ranked the worst city for congestion across the US earlier this year – with drivers having to endure a whopping 236 hours, or 10 full days, stuck in rush-hour traffic per year, data from the TomTom Traffic Index showed.

The annual data, published in February, showed it took nearly 25 minutes on average for New York motorists to travel just six miles last year – a 90-second increase from 2021 when workers were slowly returning to the office from COVID-19 shutdowns.

Additional reporting by Nolan Hicks