Congestion pricing toll digital camera in Manhattan close to the Brooklyn Bridge.
Picture by Lloyd Mitchell
March means price range season in Albany, and this 12 months the MTA is hitting the highway in assist of laws that may reinforce ongoing efforts to crack down on toll evasion.
Toll-dodging drivers rip off the MTA (and their fellow New Yorkers) to the tune of $50 million a 12 months – cash that might be invested into modernizing our bridges and tunnels and the whole transit system. We’re not letting that stand.
Two years in the past this month, we launched a multi-agency process power with 12 regulation enforcement companions together with the NYPD, NYS Police, and NYC Sheriff’s Workplace. Collectively we’ve recovered greater than $60 million in unpaid tolls and costs and towed greater than 6,000 autos throughout 124 enforcement operations. Good progress, however we are able to do much more to recuperate public cash.
The invoice at the moment working its approach by the Legislature, which I’ll level out has bipartisan assist, would ship instruments we have to extra forcefully handle the 2 commonest types of toll evasion: drivers who purposely cowl or obscure their license plates and people who obtain their payments however refuse to pay, in any other case generally known as Persistent Toll Violators (PTVs).
The sections of the invoice focusing on use of so-called ghost plates would permit police to confiscate unlawful plate coverings on the spot and add factors to the scofflaw’s driving document after three convictions for obscuring a license plate inside 5 years.
That is additionally necessary for security causes. Based on the advocacy group Transportation Options, most of the Metropolis’s worst “super-speeders” use ghost plates to repeatedly evade cameras and drive dangerously with impunity.
The toll evasion invoice additionally seeks to cut back misplaced income from PTVs by:
Giving MTA PD and MTA Bridges and Tunnels officers the authority to implement judgments, not simply the NYC Sheriff;
Reclassifying toll evasion as a extra severe ‘theft of service’ Class A misdemeanor cost;
Closing procedural loopholes which have allowed drivers to keep away from penalties by re-registering their automobiles beneath a brand new driver, typically a pal or relative.
I wish to be clear – we aren’t focusing on on a regular basis drivers who unintentionally overlook a toll invoice or those that merely can’t afford to pay. The MTA works intently with these prospects to resolve their points.
That is about equity. It’s not proper when drivers – typically rolling round in Mercedes-Benzes and Porsches – use bridges and tunnels and skip out on paying their fair proportion. Similar to with subway and bus fare evasion, it may well make the parents who observe the principles, the overwhelming majority, really feel like suckers.
We are able to’t – gained’t – permit that to proceed.
