Mayor Bloomberg wants the city’s subways and buses to be running as of 12:01 a.m. on December 16, but in case they aren’t, the mayor has a personal emergency plan in place – sleeping on a cot at the Office of Emergency Management.

Dozing on a municipal cot may not be as comfortable for Mr. Bloomberg as sleeping in his Upper East Side townhouse, but he said it might be the only reliable way for him to get to work.

“I want to be able to get to work, and there’s no question if there’s a transit strike it’s going to be hard to get around,” Mr. Bloomberg told reporters yesterday. He warned that everyone in the city should start thinking about forging a contingency plan as the threat of a transit strike looms: “I would suggest to everybody, if you have a friend that lives near where you work, see if they’re nice enough to put you on the couch.”

The last time a subway strike was threatened, in 2002, Mr. Bloomberg purchased a bicycle at a TriBeCa shop, which he said he would ride to work in the event of a transit strike. This time, he said, he would “probably pass on buying a bicycle.” (He gave away the last one to a Brooklyn youngster after management and the union agreed on a contract.)

Yesterday, just eight days before the 32,000 men and women who keep subways and buses running through the city may strike, representatives of the Transport Workers Union and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority did not hold negotiations. There are no plans for them to meet Friday, and last night it remained unclear when the two sides would next sit down together to try to hammer out an agreement.

Governor Pataki yesterday urged the union and the MTA to “do whatever it takes” to reach an agreement before the contract expires.

“When you have labor negotiations, one side always seems to be saying something about the other side, but my goal and my hope is that at the end of this all the parties negotiate in good faith and we get a fair contract for the workers and the riders, and I’m confident that can happen,” he said, adding that calling a strike in violation of the law would be a “terrible mistake.”

“The essence of our country is respect for the rule of law, and no one is entitled to break the law, and if they do, there are serious consequences,” he warned.

While New York City has yet to announce a specific plan for coping with a strike, Mr. Bloomberg said an emergency plan the city may release in the coming week will “maximize the use of the roads to the extent humanly possible.” He added, “People are going to have to have lots of people in their cars, and we’ll have a plan as to where and what hours you’ll have to do that and we’ll cope but I would prefer that we didn’t have to cope.”