Andrea Peyser: Put a hard brake on heartless speed demons

Put a hard brake on heartless speed demons

They’re terrorists on wheels. Assassins in Spandex.

The bicycle menaces must be stopped.

It’s already too late.

Chances are, if you’ve spent time in New York City, you’ve experienced more than one terrifying near-collision with these speed freaks. That is, if you haven’t been hit with the force of a sledgehammer on methamphetamines.

Entitled, obnoxious and armed with two-wheeled deadly weapons and “don’t f–k with me’’ attitudes, the bike creeps speed through the streets and parks of this town, barreling through busy crosswalks, tormenting small children, pets, senior citizens and the rest of us sitting ducks with curses on their lips — and blood on their hands.

I grieve for Jill Tarlov. She didn’t have a prayer.

Outmatched and outgunned by a tyrant on tires, the 59-year-old mom from Fairfield Conn., wife of a CBS TV executive, was, like millions of oblivious pedestrians, walking without a care through Central Park Thursday afternoon, in town to buy her daughter a birthday present.

Then near an intersection at 63rd Street on West Drive, a hellion named Jason Marshall, 31, who’s a baritone-saxophone player from Harlem when he isn’t terrorizing the citizenry, was riding a loaded weapon. It was a $4,000 Jamis Eclipse racing bike. That’s $4,000 for a pimped-out children’s toy! Was it worth it, dude?

He rode like a maniac in a lane reserved for cars. And when he spotted Tarlov on a collision course from hell, he didn’t stop. He didn’t slow down. He didn’t risk injury to his own body, as he should have, by throwing his vehicle to the ground and ending his joyride.

No. Witness Phillip Fenton from England told The Post that Marshall didn’t appear to try to halt at all. Instead, a source said he shouted a series of commands. Or were they threats?

“Get out of the way! Get out of the way!’’ Marshall barked.

It wasn’t known who had the green light at the intersection. But wouldn’t you hit the brakes if you saw a vulnerable woman in the cross hairs of your carnage-causer?

I don’t know if Tarlov heard Marshall’s voice. I have no clue if the ugly words he spat were the last to enter into her consciousness. Fenton’s pal, Tom Longman, said Marshall was hunched over his brakeless, triathlon-style “aerobars’’ attached to the handlebars of his spiffy, yellow-and-black bike. And he struck her hard, causing Tarlov to hit her head on the pavement.

She was rushed to New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center, where, sources told The Post, she was declared brain dead.

A stroll in the park. A shopping trip. And now her husband, Michael Wittman, her son, daughter and friends are praying for a miracle that may never come.

This has gotten out of hand. Former Mayor Michael Bloomberg tried to make every New Yorker of walking age ride these contraptions, inflicting the Citi Bike bike-sharing program on the city and insanely increasing the number of bike lanes. I doubt he could have predicted the misery the bike proliferation would cause.

Throw kamikaze bicyclists in jail! It won’t save Jill Tarlov. But it might prevent the next tragedy.