As New York City prepares to roll out congestion pricing tolls in Manhattan, police are writing about 75% more tickets for “ghost cars” — vehicles with covered, defaced or phony license plates, according to data shared with Gothamist.
The highly anticipated tolls for vehicles that enter Manhattan below 60th Street will read plates and charge passenger cars $15 and large trucks up to $36 for each trip.
Experts warn that without even stricter enforcement, the program could spark a surge in vehicles that illegally dodge tolls and speed cameras by using phony, dog-eared or defaced license plates. That new wave of fare evasion could stunt the program’s long-awaited and badly needed earnings, undermine its traffic-busting goals and ultimately raise prices for those who do pay.
“If certain people are not paying, that means people who are following the law end up having to pay more,” said Elizabeth Adams, deputy executive director for public affairs at transit advocacy group Transportation Alternatives. Congestion pricing is legally required to bring in $1 billion per year in the form of tolls; if not enough people pay the $15 fee, the rate could go up to meet that target, Adams contends.
Sam Schwartz, a transit consultant who once served as New York City’s traffic commissioner, predicts that without strict enforcement, as many as 1 in 5 drivers could obscure their plates once the new tolls hit.
Schwartz said phony plates are cheap and easy to acquire. He said he was able to snap up a fake Mississippi license plate on eBay for just $15 — “the charge for just one ride” in a passenger vehicle under congestion pricing.
“I’m not going to use it, but I just did it to show how easy it is,” he said. “If I was a bad guy, I’d put it on my car and ride around and not worry about cameras being able to track me.”
Other drivers have used plastic plate shields, reflective paint, surgical masks and even leaves to conceal their tags from cameras.
The predicted surge in ghost plates could cost the MTA hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, according to Schwartz. Fare dodgers could also undermine the program’s ability to conquer the problem it’s meant to help solve: reducing the number of vehicles on Manhattan’s streets.
“If we’re basically giving a green light for some people to cheat the program, we will not have a fair system for funding our public transportation and will not reduce congestion, which our climate crisis and our overcrowded streets so heavily demand right now,” Adams said.
At an MTA board meeting last week, Chair Janno Lieber said the MTA and other agencies would step up their efforts to make toll cheats pay what they owe.
“We’re gonna go after it hard and make sure that people are not getting away with that, because the credibility of the whole [congestion pricing] effort is at stake,” he said.
Camera-dodging with few consequences
In 2022, the Adams administration announced a targeted crackdown on the scofflaws, who bend, cover or swap their license plates to avoid tolls and tickets. Since then, police have written hundreds of thousands of tickets, issued thousands of summonses and towed a few thousand vehicles. The city also banned the sale of camera-blocking license plate covers within city limits, including through online retailers like Amazon. And eagle-eyed New York commuters who spot the plates in public – with some even restoring the plates themselves – can now call in wayward drivers using a designated 311 complaint category.
But some drivers still elude cameras. About 5% of cars that triggered red light or speed cameras this year couldn’t be tracked because of fake, missing or illegible plates, according to data from the Department of Transportation – up from just 1% of cars in 2019. And MTA cameras can’t collect tolls from about 6% of bridge and tunnel drivers, according to a recent report by the agency’s Bridges and Tunnels Committee. A data analysis by Streetsblog found that sightings of the defaced plates increased 200-fold between 2017 and 2022.
Transit experts say that the new set of congestion fees expected to take effect next spring could trigger a new wave of plate-covering toll-dodgers.
Data shared by the city police department suggests that the city is stepping up some forms of license plate enforcement ahead of the congestion pricing start date. So far this year, officers have written more than 12,000 moving violations for covered plates — three-quarters more summonses than this time last year, according to the data shared with Gothamist. Parking tickets for obscured plates have held steady during that same timeframe at around 230,000, and arrests for temporary tags have dipped by about a quarter. All three measures are up substantially compared to their pre-pandemic values.
New Yorkers, too, are pitching in to report the plate-defacing pirates via 311. So far this year, the NYPD has received more than 1,500 complaints per month on average from members of the public, up from about 1,000 per month in mid-2022 when the category was first introduced.
But a closer look at both datasets shows that many camera-dodging drivers are undeterred, and in some cases they’re going unpunished. Of the 300,000-plus parking tickets written for license plate infractions between July 2022 and June 2023, about a third were given to drivers who’d racked up at least five tickets that year alone. About two dozen drivers had over 100 tickets apiece. And around 60% of the 311 complaints haven’t led to any type of correction, according to the city’s service requests database.
Adam White, a lawyer, cyclist and erstwhile license plate vigilante, says that without stricter enforcement to set an example, even drivers with intact license plates could start covering theirs once the tolls start hitting. White himself was arrested for uncovering an obscured license plate. He later sued the city over the charge of criminal mischief.
“If enough people are doing it without consequence, and people in the neighborhood are seeing them, then [they] start thinking, ‘Wait a minute, I’m the only person paying taxes,’” White said. “‘I’m the only person getting hit with this. Why should I be the schmuck holding the bag?’”
Experts and advocates interviewed by Gothamist all had different ideas for how the city could stem the tide of toll-dodgers. Schwartz, the former traffic commissioner, said police should turn over traffic enforcement to the transportation department, which he argued is better equipped to lay down the law against offenders, including police who’ve been caught with covered plates. White, the attorney, wants police to make use of powers that allow them to separate plate pirates from their vehicles, including boots and impounding. He also wants to see the federal government step in and ban paper plates, which are a popular choice for toll-dodgers.
Adams and others are pushing for laws to make it harder to get hold of phony out-of-state plates. A City Council bill introduced last spring would ban the sale and distribution of fake tags.
Another bill announced last week would raise the maximum penalty for an obscured or defaced plate to $1,000. Right now, the fine for a parked car with an obstructed license plate is $65, according to NYC’s Department of Finance.
“I mean, that’s like a couple of trips over the Verrazzano bridge,” said Councilmember Robert Holden, one of the new bill’s sponsors and a sworn enemy of the plate-swapping scofflaws. He said that the penalties of driving with obscured plates have to outweigh the cost savings.
“Where there’s a will, there’s a way,” he said. “If somebody can save a lot of money by obscuring their plates, they’ll do it. And they’ll do it in a very creative way, whether it’s through technology, covers or a leaf.”
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