As the clock ticked down to a potential transit strike, Mayor Bloomberg stepped up his rhetoric against a walkout while Governor Pataki, the elected official with the most power over the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, reiterated his warning that a strike would be illegal.

Statements yesterday by the mayor and governor were part of an elaborate show in the final hours before the 33,700 men and women who run the subways and buses were poised to strike if there was no resolution in the contract dispute.

And there was no resolution. A spokesman for the MTA, Tom Kelly, emerged late last night to say, “The MTA has put a fair offer on the negotiating table. Unfortunately, that offer has been rejected by the Transport Workers Union. The MTA remains ready to continue the negotiations.”

Early this morning, the union’s executive board met at its Upper West Side headquarters to weigh options.

Though the president of the Transport Workers Union Local 100, Roger Toussaint, and the MTA chairman, Peter Kalikow, had returned to the negotiating table early yesterday, most of the talking was conducted at press conferences and rallies designed for a television audience.

“It’s like bluff poker,” a deputy mayor from the Giuliani administration who was involved in past contract negotiations, Randy Mastro, said yesterday. “They’re each trying to get the other side to show their final and best offer.”

Early yesterday morning, the war of words began with comments by Mr. Toussaint, who called on the mayor to allocate more city funds to transportation and criticized the governor for not getting involved in the negotiations.

“We have two words for the governor, which is ‘respect us,'” Mr. Toussaint said.

His comments came as he stood at the Queens depot of the Triboro Bus Company, one of the two private bus lines that went on strike yesterday, foreshadowing what could happen to the rest of the city’s subway and bus service if the contract talks prove unsuccessful.

Almost immediately, the mayor fought back, using language like “intolerable” and “disingenuous” to describe the union’s bargaining posture.

At a morning press conference, Mr. Bloomberg said a strike would not force the MTA to offer a better deal.

“If anything,” he said, “it’s probably going to dig them in. There’s plenty of time to negotiate. You don’t have to negotiate a deal between now and tonight. We have municipal unions that have gone two or three years negotiating and eventually they did get a contract. The strike is illegal. It would be reprehensible.”

Mr. Bloomberg called the union’s no compromise position on the retirement age and medical benefits “intolerable,” and said it is “disingenuous” for the union to argue that any changes in pension plans could have a negative impact on other workers.

He also said the transit workers have already hurt businesses.

“I talked to the head of the largest department store chain in the country over the weekend,” Mr. Bloomberg said. “Sales at the big New York City department stores were off 30% or 40% on Friday just from the uncertainty of people not knowing whether they could get to work.”

A spokeswoman for Federated, America’s largest department store company, said the company does not comment on sales by store or division.

Mr. Bloomberg postponed his annual holiday party for the press at Gracie Mansion to focus on being ready for a possible strike.

Meanwhile, the governor – who jetted to Iowa, New Hampshire, and Puerto Rico to raise support for a possible 2008 presidential bid as negotiations proceeded in New York – maintained yesterday that he would not involve himself directly in the negotiations.

He emphasized that striking is illegal under the state’s Taylor law.

“I said it before: It is illegal. It has dire consequences,” Mr. Pataki said. “First of all, there is a reason it is illegal. Because of its impact on the 8 million plus people who need our mass transit to get around, not just to get to work, but to get to see a doctor or respond to an emergency, that’s why the law makes it illegal, and that’s why the law has very real penalties for those who break it.”

Mr. Pataki’s comments were not enough to appease the transit union.

It held a rally outside the governor’s Manhattan office. It was the third rally in a week. The union also began airing television commercials, claiming that union members didn’t want to strike and that they were being forced toward a strike by the uncompromising position of the MTA.

“They want to cut my pensions and benefits and raise your fares,” one worker says in the commercial.

As the two sides battled publicly, neither seemed willing to make concessions to reach a compromise over what has become a central issue: the MTA’s desire to raise to 62 from 55 the age when new employees can retire and receive a pension equal to half their salary based on the average of their best three years. The pension is adjusted for the cost of living.

The union had hoped it could force the MTA to take the issue off the table by filing a petition on Sunday with the state’s Public Employment Relations Board. But the MTA did not respond by yesterday afternoon, effectively forcing the union to engage on the pension issue.

The employment board’s executive director, James Edgar, said that if the transit workers strike today, the board will order the MTA to begin docking their paychecks: two days’ wages for every day off the job.

The looming strike created an atmosphere of uncertainty as riders wondered if they would wake up to gridlock and a commute turned upside down, as many Queens residents did yesterday when 700 workers from two private bus lines in the borough walked off the job, leaving the lines’ 57,000 daily riders in a lurch.

Many of the commuters piled into commuter vans to get to work or into a subway that would take them into Manhattan.

Mohammed Ahmed, 51, who was on his way to Manhattan from his home in Long Island City at noon yesterday, said he waited for nearly 45 minutes without a bus, commuter van, or livery car offering him a ride, unaware that a strike had been initiated. He had 20 minutes to get to work.

“I can’t make work on time,” Mr. Ahmed, a Bangladeshi immigrant, said. “Maybe I’ll walk, after I call my boss. I don’t get the bus; I don’t get a taxi. What can I do?”

Pensions, health care, and wages are all at issue in the negotiations.

The last New York transit strike, in 1980, lasted 11 days.

The MTA has said that in the event of a strike it will take steps to prevent sabotage and to keep certain trains running without passengers to keep the rail infrastructure from seizing up.