Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/01/24/fake-plates-cost-new-york-city-108m-in-lost-fines.html
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I can see how these laws would apply to regular citizens, but certainly not to sovereign citizens, right?
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Every day that I commute, I walk by a fire station and a police station. The amount of illegally parked cars and those without a normal and undamaged metal license plate is staggering. There was an unplated car parked in no-standing zone for three weeks - on 9th ave between 34/35. No tickets, no nothing.
So, when they mention all of these crackdowns - I wonder how many of the “caught” are part of this privileged class.
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292 tolls amounting to nearly $20,000.
Umm, that doesn’t pencil out. ~$68 per toll on average?
Only way to hit that toll level with the Port Authority would be with a class three to six three-or-more axle vehicle. (I suppose it could also be with a 6 or 7 axle truck going the full length of the NYS Thruway, but that isn’t part of the Port Authority.
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Fuck 'em, they’d only spend it on more cops.
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Because they obviously don’t spend it on PATH trains.
“Weekend service running with delays due to ongoing track maintenance.” – The guy who did this station announcement message actually died in 2011. /s
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Write them a ticket for not paying their previous ticket, that’ll show 'em.
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how awful!
They should lose much more money.
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If I’m the kind of person that is putting a fake plate on so I can illegally speed past cameras or avoid tolls, and then came to my car and saw my fake plate had fallen off, I wouldn’t keep illegally speeding past cameras and avoiding tolls would I? You wouldn’t start getting money from the fines you’d give me because I wouldn’t be doing the thing you’d give the fine for. The ‘lost’ fines are a calculation based on catching people every single time this happens but if you did catch everyone they would mostly stop and you wouldn’t perpetually get this constant revenue stream from morons thinking they will get away with it even though they got caught last time and the time before. You can’t lose money you never had so how is it ‘lost’?
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There is also the ongoing scam of buying fake temporary dealer tags allegedly originating in Texas.
The big issue for New York City is not so much the unpaid fines and tolls, its the large numbers of uninsured vehicles milling about in a high accident environment. Cars with fake tags are also not registered which also means they are not insured.
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I understand the stick-it-to-the-man sentiment here but these shenanigans can have real effects on ordinary schmucks like me. The LA/ Orange County area has a number of toll roads, mostly for wealthier folk to zip between their favorite spots without mingling with the hoi polloi. I never use them.
A few months ago I received a letter from the outfit that runs the roads (built with public money, managed for profit by private companies) demanding a $7 toll for using a highway I’d never even heard of. Naive me, I thought I could point out the error and save myself $7.
A month later the fees had risen to a couple of hundred bucks and I was still arguing with clueless phone jockeys who insisted their plate-reading cameras had identified my car. Even though my car is an older Honda and the toll-dodger was driving a Tesla! The Tesla had a paper temp plate and its number identified me as the owner. So I appealed to the DMV to back me up.
That’s when I learned that while the DMV hands out the paper temps to dealers, for some incomprehensible reason they do not track them. They have no way to connect a given temp plate with a given vehicle. I finally went to the dealer who sold us the Honda years ago and found the temp number in the original sales records. Our temp number turned out to be a couple of digits off from that on the Tesla. The TR guys finally admitted that either the camera or a data flunky had misread the number and input our old number instead. How the hell the Toll Roads had my name attached to the temp plate in the first place, when the DMV had no record at all, is beyond me.
So in the end the whole mess began with a misread plate, not necessarily a fake or stolen one. The point is, if I’d just paid the $7 in the first place my name would have remained attached to the Tesla’s plate. Had the driver decided to dodge a toll again I’d be the one who got stuck. I mentioned the fine had increased to a couple of hundred bucks. At the time they finally straightened things out I was two weeks away from the next level, which was a DMV hold that would have prevented me from renewing my car registration until I paid up. That’s one reason I feel it matters whether or not fake plates are weeded out.
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Meanwhile sovereign citizens are buying custom plates that are emphatically not licence plates and getting pulled over. If they just tried to cheat their way out instead of standing up for their beliefs they would get away with it.
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I had an insured who sold his car to a guy for cash and took off his plates. But the insured never turned in the plates to the DMV or called to cancel the insurance policy after the sale.
The buyer then sold the car again to someone else and obtained a fake Texas dealer plate for the car. Of course, the new owner gets into a major car accident within a week of buying it. A VIN number check by the police came up with the original owner and his insurance policy. The passengers of the car all sought personal injury coverage under that policy.
The only reason the original owner (and the insurer I work for) was not on the hook for the accident was because he took the plates off when he sold the car. It automatically terminated the policy.
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Sovereign citizens aren’t a huge problem in NYC. But cops (especially federal LEOs) and firefighters with obscured plates are a big problem. And they rarely get tickets.
That car might actually be impounded. The Midtown South Precinct is on 35th just off 9th Ave and they have a lot of cars they’ve impounded that they keep illegally parked in the area right around the station. You can tell if it’s an impound because it’ll have a little blue and white barcode sticker on the driver’s side of the windshield. That said, Midtown South does a TERRIBLE job of enforcing parking and license plate rules in the areas around their station. Almost none of the cars in the “police authorized” zone on 35th between 9th and 10th actually have legit police parking permits, and the cars with legit permits all park (illegally) on the sidewalk, in front of hydrants, etc.
It probably includes penalties. The toll for most PANYNJ crossings is $17.63 if you pay by plate. But they can add up to $100 per unpaid toll if you fail to pay. So that does in fact pencil out.
Texas actually closed that loophole a couple years ago (one of those rare situations where the Texas government actually does the right thing!). I almost never see Texas temp tags any more. But the Georgia and NJ ones are still profligate. Streetsblog did a SUPERBLY reported series of articles about the temp tag problem. As well as a more light-hearted but very entertaining series of posts about actually trying to buy fake tags.
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Ahh, got it.
Still seems like funny math, including the penalty costs is as unfair as giving the retail street value of a wholesale amount of intercepted illegal drugs.
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You just sum up all copyright damage lawsuits. They can’t get money that is not there to begin with.
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The funny numbers get even funnier sometimes. At one point one of the NY-area toll agencies (I forget which and can’t remember where I saw it) published some stats showing they were collecting a huge percentage (I think it was like 95%) of delinquent tolls. But if you dug into the numbers, they were including penalty payments in the numerator and excluding penalty charges from the denominator, so in realty a huge (probably >50% ) of the delinquencies were going uncollected, yet they were claiming to have this enormous collections success.
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I’m reminded of the case last last year where a citizen removed a leaf that was obscuring a plate, and was arrested for damaging a city employee’s car:
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The arrest story was wild. But there are sooo many examples of people in authority who think it’s OK to cover their license plates. Here’s a cop’s personal car, illegally parked on the sidewalk, with blurry license plate covers to thwart toll and speed cameras:
That cop also illegally removed his registration from the windshield to make it harder for traffic agents (who already are terrified to issue tickets to any vehicle that they think might be a cop, so they almost never do) to give him an automated ticket with their barcode scanner.
Later, that same car was spotted with the license plate covers removed, but he also took off his front license plate altogether (illegal in NY), and painted white the bottom horizontal line on his rear license plate’s Z to turn it into a 7 to try to fool cameras. Police responded to 311 complaints about the painted license plate with “no action necessary.”
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