Gov. Cuomo should stop parking illegally ... because it encourages people to run his plate to see what a reckless driver he is.
After the mayoral candidate's car was egregiously parked in Midtown on Monday, we quickly discovered two more speeding tickets since the last time we wrote about his reckless driving when he got two tickets from different cameras on the same trip on the West Side Highway.
The governor has now received four speed-camera tickets in the less than three months since he put his Dodge Charger into service — and that's only through May 2.
Cuomo got his most recent tickets for speeding in a school zone — which, remember, he can only receive for exceeding the speed limit by 11 or more miles per hour — on April 27 in Brooklyn and on May 2 also in Brooklyn. Like all of Cuomo's tickets, these $50 tickets were promptly paid. (Cuomo did not receive a red-light ticket for an incident last month, but that is because the city has only a few hundred red-light cameras, covering only a minuscule percentage of intersections.)
In an email exchange with Streetsblog, Cuomo campaign spokesperson Esther Jensen focused mostly on the illegal parking.
“Officers were on site and were conferred with," Jensen wrote. "The car was attended to by a staffer at all times and were prepared to move it if asked, and there were no tickets from this event."
She added that "the car is driven by multiple people, all of whom have been reminded to obey the speed limit, and there are no outstanding tickets.” She did not deny that Cuomo was driving when the car was nabbed on April 27 and May 2.
In a previous story, Jensen praised "Gov. Cuomo’s commitment to public safety" and reminded Streetsblog readers that, as governor, Cuomo did support the expansion of the city's speed camera program that is now catching his car.
It's worth noting that Cuomo's four speeding tickets have been accrued in a 35-day blitz. If he kept up that rate of speeding, his car would be slapped with tickets 41 times — more than twice the number of tickets (16) a driver needs under a pending state bill before being required to install a speed-control device inside the car. That would effectively turn Cuomo's muscle car into a safe vehicle.
Last week, before the latest tickets showed up on Cuomo's record, mayoral rival Brad Lander had choice words for the way Cuomo drives and why he chose a Charger, which is always among the top cars for speeding tickets.
"His style of leadership is like using his finger to poke people in the chest," Lander said as he received StreetsPAC's endorsement. "He imagines himself behind the wheel, but most New Yorkers take the subway or take the bus and need a mayor who thinks like they do and is in it for them, not just in it for his own ego. But that’s what Cuomo shows us every day."
On Monday, the Lander campaign had more fun with the topic.
“In fairness to Andrew, he probably thought there was a reporter behind him trying to ask him questions," said Kat Capossela, Lander's spokesperson.
And Zohran Mamdani, who is running neck-and-neck with Cuomo according to some polls, called Cuomo's driving "reckless and unlawful — like so much of Andrew Cuomo’s behavior and record in office.”
Like Mamdani, a spokesperson for Zellnor Myrie focused on the bad driving as a metaphor for other misdeeds by Cuomo, who indeed, resigned under fire in 2020.
"Andrew Cuomo has a decades-long pattern of acting like he is above the law, and this is no different," said the spokesperson, Julia Rose. "But then again — we have seen time and time again that Cuomo is a man who does not understand when he is being told to stop."
Reducing the speed of cars in this city is vitally important for safety, given that the likelihood that a person will survive being hit by a driver at 25 miles per hour is far far greater than if the driver is going 35 — or more, as Cuomo has been traveling (at a minimum):
