In July, law enforcement officers in New York impounded 266 vehicles from scofflaws. That’s right, scofflaws, or in this case, individuals who were allegedly cheating tolls, ducking red light cameras, or driving stolen cars. The big prize, though? Finding people with fake ‘Ghost Plates.’
Authorities caught most of these individuals through several coordinated operations targeting drivers using bogus plates. Now, the city appears poised to crack down even harder on a practice that a borough president calls unsafe, illegal, and a cheat.
If he gets his way, the city will adopt several methods to reduce ghost plates. It’s a comprehensive plan aimed at an almost insurmountable task. If it works, it could rake in millions of dollars more each year.
The term ghost plates includes ones that are fake, fraudulent, and defaced. Let’s explain those one at a time. Fake plates are pretty self-explanatory. They’re not real in any sense of the word beyond being a physical object. They don’t point to a specific car or owner and are often made of paper.
Fraudulent plates do relate to a car, but not the car that they’re actually on. Finally, defaced plates are probably the most prevalent of the three. They, again, sound like what they are, a plate that is modified so as to skirt cameras and tolls.
The lengths people go to though are kind of wild and sometimes impressive. Just look at these two plates covered with paper bags and literal foliage.
The city lost $108 million last year from the sheer volume of drivers skirting speed cameras with fake or obscured plates, according to a recent report from the city comptroller’s office.
Read more: https://t.co/63YoVF7VDT pic.twitter.com/jBFzvzmsLj
— Gothamist (@Gothamist) May 14, 2024
In other cases, drivers will literally deface their plates by adding marks to make them impossible to read or they remove paint for the same effect. It’s not just the bad guys doing it either. One person alleges that they caught an NYPD employee doing it too. [Ed note: I am shocked as a former NYC resident that the NYPD would not closely follow NYC traffic laws. – MH]
Do I get a pat on the back for removing the tape obscuring this #NYPD employee' Florida plate? pic.twitter.com/CANbtzQSLu
— Just So Tired of BS (@SilverFoxReturn) July 31, 2024
People use tape, plate covers, and even James Bond-style mechanical gizmos to block the plate remotely. This is such a huge problem in the area that there’s an entire website dedicated to tracking complaints and summonses. That’s still the case despite the authorities impounding hundreds of cars over the last year related to this sort of crime.
Now, Mark Levine, the Manhattan Borough President wants to crack down further. He says that over five percent of the cars that pass through areas with tolls or red light cameras have unreadable plates. According to him, there are “hundreds of millions of dollars in tickets, fines, and tolls from enforcement cameras that go unpaid.”
You've seen it on the street in NYC: Dark covers over plates. Plates partly scratched out. Fake paper plates.
It's all illegal. It's making us less safe. It's cheating us out of millions in fines and tolls.
Today we are releasing a plan to fight back. 1/pic.twitter.com/UkZCNuZQfl
— Mark D. Levine (@MarkLevineNYC) August 12, 2024
His plan is a multi-faceted one. First, he wants to see New York add RFID tags to license plates. In fact, he’d really like the federal government to force automakers to add digital tags to every vehicle during production. Secondly, he’d like law enforcement to have training and on-body hand-held devices to scan tags wherever they are.
Artificial intelligence plays a role in the new governance too. Levine wants to use technology to automatically match up partial plates with cars based on make, model, and color. Of course, should all of this work, it’ll increase revenue but the plan also includes penalizing people further when they’re caught.
Finally, he wants to end the sale of fraudulent plates, temporary plates, and plate covers which is frankly laughable. It’s not that it’s a bad goal, it’s just comical to think that it’s objectively possible.
Getting all of the states in the area on the same page in terms of laws seems like a tough goal all by itself. Keep in mind that even if one could end the sale of fraudulent or fake plates, these cheaters could still sidestep cameras with some leaf litter.
Nevertheless, if you’re like some in the area who are doing their tax-paying duty and frustrated, you have authorities and others like Gersh Kuntsman (video embedded below) on your side. If and when Levine gets his plan to go into action is still unknown.
Considering the vast majority of people that run ghost plates are the people in charge of cracking down on this…yeah
here in France with the new ( well they are a few years old now ) plate system, cops are able to tell if the plate is a straight or a dodgy one, if the car is insured or not and how many points the owner has on his license, just by entering the plate in a database.
About a year ago, Ontario installed Automated License Plate readers in every cop car. They check your registration and insurance in real-time as you get near the cop.
They are popping people left, right, and center for either having no insurance or suspended license or outstanding warrants.
They’ve been around here for years. My brother-in-law kept getting tickets for a lapsed inspection sticker on his street-parked Toyota Avalon.
Seriously, who can’t maintain an Avalon to the state minimum standard of function?
I like my brother-in-law, but sometimes I just end up shaking my head.
Toronto seems to have a lot of cars with completely defaced plates. What gives?
Bad batch of license plates. There was about a 10 year period where the reflective coatings would delaminate over time.
We could just let people drive on the public roads without paying tolls.
Commie-talk! Next you’ll suggest taxing job creators, and then that sports teams pay for their own stadiums!
Yes. To all.
It’s easy to create many jobs when you split one salary into three employee paychecks.
New York and other states could use the typeface called FE-Schrift (Fälschungserschwerende Schrift (‘forgery-impeding typeface’)). The typeface was developed after the Deutscher Herbst (German Autumn) when the terrorist group, Red Army Faction, easily altered the letters on the numberplates to throw the police off their trail.
FE-Schrift has been proven to be impossible to alter without being visually obvious that the letters were altered. More and more countries have adopted this typeface or a slight variation of it.
It may have been a valid way to prevent forgery in the days before easily-downloaded TrueType fonts, but it would barely even slow down anyone forging plates today.
While they’re at it, they should also go after all the motorcycles with “relocated” license plates that makes them almost impossible to see.
I’ve seen squids leaning back and covering their rear plate by hand when going through automated toll plazas.
Cheap fucks the lot of them. Hope they lose balance and fall over.
This is a symptom of the overall increase of a lawlessness attitude in the U.S. I love the idea of built-in electronic plates on every new car. In addition to reducing ghost plate abuse, it could also be used to identify arrest evasions and reduce accidents caused by police pursuit. The idea that our lawmakers sit around and think of ways to fleece drivers with speed and red light camera revenue has a bit of big-brother paranoia to it. The fact is, states and cities need to increase revenue to maintain infrastructure, both physical and social. And I believe said deterrents sincerely start with public safety in mind. If you don’t like it then don’t break the law. Simple.
When the government depends on bad behavior for its revenue, the definition of bad behavior will expand until the government’s revenue needs are met.
I dunno, stopping the use of fraudulent tags doesn’t seem like the expansion of any definition of ‘bad behavior.’ It’s just enforcing laws that have been on the books for like 100 years. No need to turn this into another conspiracy.
My comment is in response to both the poorly phrased statement by the government official: “We are being cheated out of millions” and the post I replied to: “The fact is, states and cities need to increase revenue to maintain infrastructure”.
If these people are indeed breaking the law, I support their prosecution. But the reason shouldn’t be because the government is losing money. Infrastructure should be supported by enough in taxes and/or usage fees to support itself; it should not rely on fines. That leads (as I stated) to the government having a perverse incentive to encourage law-breaking.
People illegally not paying for tags or to use toll roads seems to be cheating and by definition means the government (ie all of us) is losing money. It means the rest of us have to pay for the use and wear and tear associated with people who use the resource but don’t pay.
Living in a city where there are a lot of fraudulent tags, I can confirm that those Altima drivers with fake out of state tags are the cause of a disproportionate amount of the wear and tear.
Our state got new style plates maybe 2yrs ago. My wife makes a game of counting how many people are still driving with the old expired plates.
If I tried that, I’d end up slammed onto my hood with cuffs. Never could get away with anything.
You and me both. I forgot to renew my tags a few months ago and got pulled over the police – not in my own county mind you. But it’s good to know that there is some enforcement out there!
People seem to have forgotten the core lesson of Ferguson (the Michael Brown incident in Missouri, not the SC case), which had nothing to do with racism and everything to do with what V10omous wrote: Ferguson was in the state it was in because it relied on the court system to produce a vast chunk of the city’s operating revenue.
This is, incidentally, why I’d never endorse a lottery. California has a lotto, while other Western states (like Utah) do not; California claims said lotto supports educational funding, even though educational outcomes aren’t really better in California than elsewhere. Fundamentally, it means that when budget crises come up, the way to open up the money spigots is to market the lotto – often times to those poorest, least-educated, and ill-able to afford it. It amounts to a regressive tax. Same thing happens whenever we stop seeing fines (traffic or otherwise) in their proper context (“Way to suitably encourage the end-user not to do something damaging to society of roughly that cost again”) and instead view them as a way to generate revenue.
We should be punishing scofflaws. We should not be relying on them to generate revenue for government operations.
I think in California tax money raised is ‘raided’ and not spent where they said it would be.
Getting voters to approve a new tax to raise money for schools, roads & veterans is easy to sell. However once the money is raised it get spent elsewhere as it gets lumped into the ‘general fund’.
Your comment about the lottery being a tax on the poor is spot on btw.
One of the problems with electronic plates is that it comes from a private company(this is important and I’ll explain why) but you can only purchase them through whatever DMV/BMV your state uses. So in addition to paying your government more money compared to a regular metal plate, you also have to pay the private company money as well. While the government will have a fixed cost for the plates overtime, the private company will do what private companies do best. They’ll raise the prices year after year while also mandating that e-plates are the “safer option” because “it saves the kids”. People will overwhelmingly agree with that and that’s how every state ends up with $2000 a year vehicle registration renewal costs. Oh and this is before that e-plate company goes public and has to return a larger profit for shareholders every year.
In other words we will have licenses plates sold as SAAS(software as a service) and it’s just another subscription service we will all be signing up for.
Or someone can do the hard thing and just admit how much money they need to meet citizens’ expectations – generating the required revenue through taxes.
Generating money through enforcement cameras never works the way the city expects. The camera companies take a SIGNIFICANT portion right from the start, and a lot of people fight the tickets in court. Taking an hour of a magistrate and police officer’s time in the initial hearing wipes out any financial benefit to the city.
Nobody thinks it’s the scheming government trying to get ticket money. Everyone knows it’s a scheming government camera vendor trying to fleece the city.
Fleecing the government/public is the name of the game…see public funding/TIFs/etc of stadiums, large industrial projects, etc.
Around here, the only traffic cameras left are on the ‘wealthier’ side of town. Guess they just pay the bill and dont complain. Probably have set up autopay 🙂
They must have found a way for the cameras to detect driver skin tone.
would help for amber and silver alerts too if they could tag the cars as they were on the move. but thats if you trust it not to be used to track everyones movements no matter who they are. i certainly dont.
it has to be mentioned that the greatest concentration of defaced and fake temp plates, near-opaque plate covers, and bullshit fake placards is always on the sidewalks surrounding precinct houses.
there is no enforcement on this or almost any other road safety issue because the police don’t want to give up their special unspoken entitlement – free parking and toll evasion.
road safety needs to be separated out from other kinds of police work in New York. there is no excuse for the way things are now. if you’re mad at tickets from cameras, talk to your city councilman.
Lots of the people who regularly do these things come from other neighborhoods or even other states and so maybe they don’t think that talking to local reps would help. In that case, I guess those people can choose to work somewhere else. The city does not exist for the sake of bridge and tunnel people. It exists for its residents. If residents want street safety, the interests of commuters have to be subordinated to that desire. it’s pretty simple.
Ahh, I clicked on this hoping it would be about these f***ing people who live on my finances old block in Astoria. They have a few cars, and it seems to rotate, but it’s a 4Runner with some airbrush work, a variety of BMWs with painted hood work, and an admittedly sick looking 190E, but all the plates are PA plates that say PRO DIPR or a variation thereof depending on plate. These people lived in queens. There was no trace of a PA registration or inspection sticker on any of these vehicles, and the plates would move around sometimes… that just pissed me off to no end. I mean sure, I might not love forking over money every year to keep my car registered in PA, but I listen to it and I do it, because that’s what you have to do. Just blatantly ignoring that puts them, in my opinion, in the same camp as the drivers who don’t get insurance even though they legally need to and make you pay more for your premiums
I must be naïve or something. I had always thought and hoped that vehicle licensing, cameras, tolls etc were there to promote traffic safety. Silly me. According to this report. they are obviously nothing more than indirect taxation benefitting city and state’s miscellaneous petty cash funds, to be used for anything but traffic safety. Maybe conventions in Las Vegas for the pols and cops?
Licensing and tolls are direct taxation on the use of vehicles and always has been. Enforcement of traffic laws is ostensibly to promote traffic safety, not registration and tolls.
The wording and phrasing of their message does leave a lot to be desired.
These reads more like a cash grab by the city.
There’s two ways to look at it:
1) Cash grab, which is the government finding new ways to wring money out of constituents
2) Revenue clawback, in which the constituents are forced to pay for the services they have been stealing.
It all depends on your perspective.
Or maybe don’t have toll roads and just pay for the roads with the taxes and registrations that are intended to fund them instead of that going to the general fund to pay for the Mayor’s limo or what not.
I do get that for NY it’s mostly out of towner’s using the toll bridges to get to work in the city as they can’t afford to live there, I’m sure there’s some other lesson in there about affordable housing too.
But like here in NC, the state has money, LOTS of money. There’s the research triangle, Charlotte has the banking centers, the state budget usually has a surplus. Yet many major road construction projects require they be a toll road or be toll lanes or they ‘wouldn’t get built’. It’s crazy. We moved down here(over 10 years ago so legacy new, not new new) from Connecticut, a tiny state that never makes budget, they got rid of tolls in 1986 and never went back.
Why not make out-of towers pay for the infrastructure they use but don’t support because they pay taxes elsewhere? And in NYC, many of them don’t even pay NY State taxes. If more took transit, fewer road improvements would be necessary.
paying for something based on how much you use it and/or benefit from it seems awfully reasonable to me. Tolls are just one of the clearest/most direct way of accomplishing this as it relates to infrastructure.
Use of the public roadways should be free.
Of course it should.
Now how are we going to pay to build/maintain them?
THAT’s the underlying topic here.
Taxes. Like the fuel tax and excise tax I already pay. Maybe toll roads work in less corrupt areas, but here they barely cover their own operating costs and still apply for federal grants, etc for maintenance. We basically collect enough tolls to pay the people who process the toll payments.
Tolls are basically a use tax – like car registration and property taxes.
That way someone who isn’t paying NY taxes or registrations and isn’t buying fuel in NY are still paying to use the bridges & tunnels in/out of Manhattan.
Meanwhile – how are we going to pay for roads when fewer people are using dino-juice to fuel their vehicles?
The gas tax should also be this, getting trickier with EVs. I’d be fine if it was just tolls or just gas tax, but both gets tiresome.
Gersh’s last name seems really unfortunate.
Gersh, there shure are a lot of shcofflaws and cheatsh in New York.
At least the initials for his first and middle names aren’t “O” and “M”
NYPD officers are one of the worst ghost plate offenders. They all live outside the city and want to avoid the tolls and park on the sidewalk.
Any parked car with defaced plates within three blocks of a police station should be crushed without appeal, since 100% of them belong to cops who know what they are doing is wrong.
I’ve always felt that city/police jobs should go to people that actually live in the city they serve and have stakes in its prosperity. City money should go to city residents, not some fascist that commutes in from the suburbs.
Sure, but who can afford to live in NYC on a civil servant salary? It’s an actual problem here in Toronto; tons of folks peaced the scene during COVID to work remotely and can’t afford to move back.
That’s a valid point. I am mostly familiar with what Seattle jobs pay and the lowest paid worker I could find a job opening for was a parking lot attendant starting at $50k, but the majority of jobs are $90k+ which is a livable wage in the city (for a renter…). I would say my preference is at least for police officers to be stakeholders in the community and the entry level for that is $103k and I’m sure that rises with overtime very quickly so definitely a livable wage in the city.
NYC cops are very well paid, and get tons of OT. Starting is $70k, with $120k after 5 years, excluding overtime and other differentials (night, etc).
$240K/year doesn’t get you a 2 bedroom condo in Manhattan.
5% of vehicles through a toll booth had unreadable plates does not mean that 5% of drivers have purposely/maliciously rendered their plates unreadable.
come to New York and see how many are clearly intentionally defaced.
Okay but also the old Empire Gold plates have paint that just falls off, through no fault of the driver, and if you have a Gold plate it’s still legal to keep it and transfer it to new vehicles rather than getting a new one.
Nah the paint is plenty durable. My neighbor still has plates that predate those hideous yellow plates and the paint is just fine.
If the paint is flaking off it’s not an accident.
Specifically, Empire Gold paint just sloughs off the plate. I had one for ten years and the only reason the paint was still over the metal is because the license plate frame was holding it there.
It was a bad enough problem that until very recently the NYS DMV had a page addressing the issue and letting people get replacements without a fee, and when they switched to Excelsior plates they switched suppliers.
https://web.archive.org/web/20240625081127/https://dmv.ny.gov/registration/peeling-license-plates
My point was about poor use of statistics, not any sort of claim on the moral purity of New Yorkers lol
I don’t have a particular issue with the initiative, but am I the only one who finds their wording… scummy?
Lost income from tolls is a fair metric to track, but “lost millions of dollars from speed cameras and red light cameras” reads quite villainously. It’s not “accidents caused”, “danger to the public” or even “potential accidents”, it’s pure income. The word “safety” is nowhere on the article, nor is “danger” or “public” or any other term that would imply a non-financial motive. “crime” is mentioned once, but only referring to the act of having a ghost plate itself.
It’s just so brazen, so unapologetic. I somehow expected politicians to be more tactful than to proudly announce to the world that speeding fines are an income source with no bearing on safety. At least PRETEND you’re trying to serve the people…
It is all about revenue. A couple years ago I got nabbed by a speed camera in a school zone in Brooklyn. On a Friday night. During summer vacation. Turns out that the city decided to turn on the school zone cameras 24/7.
That sounds about like what I’d expect. It’s alarming how they’ve gotten so shameless that they don’t even bother with posturing anymore.
Wow that sucks. Glad I’m in a state where speed cameras have been ruled unconstitutional so I don’t have to worry about them, just the cyclical quota time when highway patrol is out with 10 cars per mile for a few days each month to meet their quotas. Sorry I mean “goals.” Thankfully I’m not the kind of cop that has to write tickets, I just deal with gang members and s** offenders.
The city I used to live in decided to install red light cameras, administered by an out of state company. They had to change the driving ordinances to make the owner of the vehicle liable for the infraction, instead of the driver, so they could just mail the ticket to the registered owner. I think they generated about $9 million in fines (I forget what percentage of that the city got, but I know the company kept a good chunk of it) before a business owner threw a stink over his employees’ driving habits and a judge ruled the city’s special ordinance violated the equal protection clause, and voided all of the tickets. If memory serves, the city had to pay back the whole $9 million, and the cameras disappeared pretty quickly after that.
A similar thing happened in the city I live nearby. They installed red light cameras at some busy intersections such as nearby a regional hospital. The revenue began. But then the county noticed a surge of new food stamp/housing assistance applications. Turned out that when they studied what ZIP codes had the most red light camera fines and which had the biggest uptick in social services applications, there was basically a 1:1 correlation. What had happened was that people, often historically discriminated against, living paycheck to paycheck couldn’t afford the fines. Also common was racking up multiple fines and losing their cars for unpaid fines come registration time. Around here, no car means no job. The revenue from the cameras was less than the increased spending on social services. Add in the historical discrimination piece. Once the city and county councils found out they reversed their stance quickly. The cameras were turned off the next day and removed a short while later.
It’s amazing how short sighted people/government can be. I think Colorado discovered that tax income from legalized weed wasn’t covering their own costs related to its increased use (for example guardrail repairs from impaired drivers running into them, and things like that), and that didn’t even account for private loses (damaged or destroyed property, injuries caused by the aforementioned impaired drivers, etc). And yet even more states are joining the party.
People see dollar signs and think “oh, goodie – more revenue” but don’t completely examine the corresponding costs. That new revenue isn’t free – somebody winds up paying for it, and it frequently isn’t who they thought it would be.
I’d read an article confirming this claim about CO. I didn’t hear anything of the sort living there for the first ten years of legalization.
Looks like it costs about $55,000/year to lock someone up in CO. Saving that on a few non-violent cannabis offenders should free up room in the budget for a replacement guardrail.
We have three dispensaries in my town. All the guardrails are in good repair. Maybe Coloradans are just bad drivers.
That sounds like what was happening in the little town my brother was living in in Utah. If I recall correctly something like 70% of the town’s budget came from speeding tickets on the highway that ran alongside the town. It was called Mantua and I remember my brother bitching about it because the chief of police(they had 3 officers in total) was also the mayor and the fire chief, so he was pulling three salaries and funding them all with the tickets he was writing for people doing 66 in a 65 down a very steep hill for the mile of highway in the town. It’s not so bad anymore after that asshat got caught and canned for being a corrupt douche but still not ok that it was happening in the first place.
There is something deeply uncomfortable about the phrasing “We [the government] are being cheated out of millions in fines and tolls”.
Even if the practice of obscuring plates is distasteful, which I grant, this is not the way to phrase ones approach IMO.
Absolutely. The way they can talk about it so brazenly without even trying to pin it on safety or public order, just calling it income without batting an eye, is completely unhinged.
Agreed, makes the perpetrators appear as victims. Maybe rightly, it seems like the level of enforcement would have to be pretty intense for obscured plates to become an epidemic among the general public.
Is this your “stealing tolls is ok, because it only impacts the government” moment? /s
I read it more as “we [the tax/toll payers] are being cheater out of millions”. Being that every person who does pay has to support those that do not pay over time through ever increasing toll rates.
A few years ago PA went after a NJ company that had $30k in fines and tolls for purposefully using EZpass lanes without having one. I don’t believe the state was ever able to recover the money because the company was registered in a different state.
Now that is a good reply!
I mostly agree with you, but I still don’t like the word “cheated” in this context. Especially as far as traffic fines go. Tolls are one thing, but explicitly stating that the purpose of traffic fines is just for revenue is in poor taste.
This task becomes a lot easier with the proliferation of LPRs. The operator of the LPRs, Flock Safety, can build a database of individual cars with unreadable or defaced plates and then forward that list to law enforcement.
I once got a ticket for having a perfectly clear cover over my license plate to help keep it clean. It was only illegal in one county in Georgia. Money grab.
Honest question – doesn’t the clear cover get just as dirty as the plate would, so there’s no major functional difference?
It just keeps junk from getting stuck between plate and the frame. (easier to clean)
I don’t live there, but If I did live in a place that had speed cameras I would consider defacing or otherwise obscuring my plates. Seems like a pretty reasonable response to bullshit enforcement to me.
I’ll bet you live in a place that has LPRs owned and operated by Flock Safety.
Had to look it up, but yeah most likely that or something like similar. I doubt a system like that is doing much to drive any kind of widespread plate obscuration by the general public though, it seems much more likely they are pissed about automated ticketing.
So you think it’s okay to speed in cities?
Yup.
I expect better of you, Dan.
I was being somewhat facetious, without any kind of qualifier I can’t say no. I have no moral issue with 5 over on a 45mph expressway, but I drive 5 under in most neighborhoods.
I’m glad to hear that. 🙂
Have you tried not speeding?
I’m always trying, sometimes I even succeed!
I remember a while ago a cyclist got arrested for removing some crap from a plate – even though the owner of the car was obviously doing this, the cyclist was violating his private property or something like that.
Law enforcement likes cyclists less than obscured license plates.
Does being a cyclist give you the right to mess with someone else’s private property?
It can simultaneously be true that we shouldn’t be so attached to our cars and also that I was contemplating courses of action when an old person used the front of my hood as leverage with their arm to get onto a sidewalk one time.
It doesn’t, and in an ideal world no one (cyclist or not) should be ghost plate vigilante. But was it right to arrest the cyclist and let the owner of the car go? Owning a car clearly doesn’t give you the right to obscure the plate, even if it is your property.
It was probably right to arrest the cyclist and fine the car owner. Both sound like they broke the law.
Is the state license plate private property?