ALBANY — Under cloak of darkness, the state Senate moved to help more than 130,000 reckless drivers avoid accountability in a middle-of-the-night watering down of the Stop Super Speeders bill, which only targeted the worst-of-the-worst drivers in the first place.
At 12:48 a.m. on Tuesday, followers of the bill received an alert that a new, amended version of the bill was on the floor. The main change? Instead of requiring drivers with six or more speed-camera or red-light camera tickets in any 12-month period to install a speed-limiting device in their cars, the bill now only carries that requirement for drivers with 16 or more tickets — and only speed-camera tickets rather than a combination.
In other words, instead of a bill that would slow down more than 150,000 drivers in New York City alone, the amended bill would cover fewer than 18,000.
The bill’s sponsor, Sen. Andrew Gounardes (D-Bay Ridge), was obviously disappointed, but said the amendment was made to “help us move the bill” — which, as Streetsblog has reported, is at once a no-brainer (because it doesn’t deprive drivers of access to their cars) and a controversial measure (because virtually all lawmakers are drivers, and many think that six speeding tickets in a year is no big deal).
It’s common Albany knowledge that if legislators can imagine themselves being hurt by a bill, they vote against it.
Gounardes said he was comfortable with the amendment, citing a city Department of Transportation finding that cars with more than 16 speed camera violations in a year were twice as likely to be in a crash that resulted in death or severe injury.
But a review of New York City’s speed-camera program shows that amending Gounardes’s bill will have devastating ramifications on the number of drivers it slows down. In the 12-month period from June 2024 through May 2025, 152,928 cars were nabbed for six or more speed-camera tickets.
In the same 12-month period, only 17,084 drivers had 16 or more, according to the city’s open data portal, as crunched by data expert Jehiah Czebotar.
Still, Gounardes defended the amendment. A smaller cohort of reckless drivers forced to install a speed-limiting device in their cars will “make sure that we can work out any potential kinks in this and then continue to build the program from there.”
“It’s just like over the last decade we’ve grown the speed camera program and the red-light camera program,” he said. “I don't want this program to fail by requiring [speed governors] on several hundred thousand cars right away. … We want to stand it up to test and then continue to build on it and improve [the threshold].”
He recognized that his colleagues are not as gung-ho as he is on safety. “People [lawmakers] have different comfort levels,” he said.
The bill was also softened to no longer count red-light camera towards the 16-ticket-per-year threshold, even though studies have found that red-light runners are also speeders.
A source with knowledge of bill negotiations said senators expressed concerns about red-light violations because people who run red lights are not technically speeders — and a speed limiter would not inhibit someone’s ability to run a red light. In other words, the perfect became the enemy of the good.
And there’s the sheer fact that lawmakers see themselves as drivers first and foremost — and are therefore reluctant to do anything perceived as punishing drivers. Assembly Member Michaell Novakhov (R-Midwood) famously said that six speeding and red-light tickets in a single year was too low a threshold, for example.
“I think this is too little," Novakhov told Streetsblog. "Any driver can get much more than six. It's the regular constituents, just people like me and you are getting those tickets."
It’s worth noting that he made those comments at the funeral of Natasha Saada and daughters Diana and Deborah, who were killed in March by a recidivist speeder who had just racked up her 16th speed-camera ticket of the year days before the crash.
The drenching of legislation to dilute their full impact is an Albany tradition. In 2022, when the legislature was reauthorizing the city’s speed-camera program, pols eliminated several key provisions, including escalating fines, notification to an insurance company whenever a driver got five speeding tickets in any two-year period, and suspension of registrations for excessive tickets, as Streetsblog reported.
And watering-down bills is not merely an Albany practice. Then-City Council Member Brad Lander’s Reckless Driver Accountability Act originally sought to have cars booted or towed if they were caught speeding or running red lights five times in a year. It was eventually softened to 15 such tickets — and then only allowed DOT to demand that offending drivers take a safety course. In the end, only 12 cars were ever seized because their drivers did not attend the course or reoffended after taking it.
Despite the bad changes to the Albany bjll, there were a few good ones: It now includes escalating periods of time when speed-limiters must remain inside the car: 12 months for the first offense, 24 months for the second, and 36 for the third.
And the limiters will have to be returned and reused, which will reduce the cost to the state.
But the changes in the Senate will likely mean similar changes to the Assembly version of the bill, which failed to pass this session anyway. Gounardes admitted that his counterparts on the other side of the Capitol may see the Senate version as a new starting point, and propose an even higher threshold next session.
“That's always a risk when we do negotiations,” Gounardes said.
Clarification: An initial version of this story miscounted how many speed-camera tickets Miriam Yarimi had before she drove recklessly and killed members of a Brooklyn family. She had 16 such tickets between April 4, 2024 and the crash on March 28, 2025. So even under the watered-down bill, Yarimi would have been required to put a speed limiter in her car. But she got the 15th and 16th tickets two days before the crash, making it unlikely that a judge would have ordered the speed limiter in time. She received the sixth speed-camera ticket on October. 31, 2024 — months before she killed the Saadas — leaving plenty of time to stop her.
