Exclusive | New website tracks wait times for trendy NYC eateries — by paying locals to film diners in line

If you think this is odd, get in line.

A new website is providing real-time wait-time predictions for buzzy Manhattan eateries — by paying nearby residents to put webcams in their apartment windows to spy on the hot spots’ lines, infuriating some of the businesses and weirding out locals.

DamnLines.com is the brainchild of 24-year-old software engineer Lucas Gordon, who launched it earlier this month to “determine and share the best time to visit the most popular restaurants across New York City,’’ he told The Post.

“We pay tenants across New York City to install an IP camera outside of their unit to monitor the line,” says the “Matrix”-inspired green text on his website.

“It’s not really sustainable, yet,’’ the site acknowledged.

The cameras are stationed outside four locations so far, all in Gordon’s West Village neighborhood.

They include Breakfast by Salt’s Cure and John’s of Bleecker Street pizzeria — where manager Joey S. blasted the set-up for churning out wait estimates that are “inaccurate.

“It’s misleading, misinterpreting. … There are a lot of variables that this system doesn’t take into account,” the manager said.

He said the Web site doesn’t take into account whether people are in a single party or others are waiting for to-go orders vs. sit-down dining.

Joey said nobody informed the restaurant that the website was tracking its queue.

Based on the past month of line data gathered so far, DamnLines has estimated that wait times for John’s on Thursday evenings, for example, surge to a nearly 40-minute wait around 7 p.m.

But Joey said that “exaggerates” the actual queuing period.

“The longest the wait times here are during Christmas week … but that’s when the line goes all the way down the block on Morton Street, not right in front of the restaurant,” he said.

Several passers-by outside another monitored eatery — to-go slice shop L’Industrie Pizzeria — were shocked and even disturbed to hear of the surveillance.

“Just see what’s in front of you. You don’t need to go on your phone for it,” said 22-year-old Priva Donner, who was waiting in a short queue outside the shop Wednesday.

Tech worker Vaughn Stewart, 50, who was visiting from California, griped, “For the concept of someone else’s convenience, I now get my privacy invaded.

“If they make a mistake, they can also negatively impact the business, like saying there’s a long wait time when there really isn’t.”

Gordon, who is funding the project himself, declined to comment further, citing the media policy of his employer — the Elon Musk-founded xAI artificial intelligence company.

He only said he hadn’t considered the site’s impact on the businesses it tracks.

He declined to share how much he pays his neighbors to use the cameras.

His website said the service uses a “60-year-old theorem, a service-rate observer, and a real-time people counter” to try to help customers.

It denies that the collection of any surveillance data is done outside of a business’ operating hours.

The site said wait times are determined by the number of people in line divided by how many people exit the queue over a “rolling time window.

“This holds regardless of arrival patterns, service variability, or how the queue is structured,” the website reads. “It’s a universal law of queuing systems — and the foundation of everything we calculate.”

The fourth restaurant currently being watched is Salt Hank’s.

Cole Rabedeau, a 28-year-old manager at L’Industrie, said of the cameras “don’t bother me.’’

But Joey argued the math still doesn’t add up for his business.

“They account for heads outside, but they don’t realize whose group is together. They don’t know how much seating we have,” he said. 

“A camera can’t calculate all of that. They have no idea how we operate our business.”