The NFL's Super Bowl isn't until Sunday, but for us street safety nerds, today in Albany is the so-called "Big Game": The annual legislative hearing on the transportation portion of the governor's 2026 budget!
Tout le monde will be there to cover Gov. Hochul's key proposals, including the effort to cut car insurance premiums (that Kevin Duggan has been covering so intently), a proposal to increase outreach to homeless people on the subway (which is so vital, as we've reported), and others.
But also on the agenda is the culmination of years of effort to "Stop Super Speeders" by allowing New York City to require the installation of speed-limiting devices into the cars of the most reckless drivers. Gov. Hochul put it in her budget (see Part D on page 9 here), but left it to the city Department of Transportation to fill in all the details, including how many speed-camera tickets would trigger the speed-limiting device, what court would order the driver to get the device, how the NYPD would enforce whether the requirement had been met, and, most important, how would a cop even know that the DOT had required the driver to install the device if the state Department of Motor Vehicles isn't involved?
"How would it work is one of our questions," said state Sen. Andrew Gounardes, the Bay Ridge Democrat who has been pushing the speed-limiting bill for years. "The language [of the governor's bill] leaves a lot of unanswered questions."
Obviously, it's of vital importance that the program works. As DOT reported in its most-recent speed camera report, drivers with 16 speed-camera tickers are twice as likely to be involved in a severe crash — and, at the time, there were 3,147 such cars being driven all over the city.
Gounardes said he was very "optimistic" that everything will work out and that people with multiple speed-camera tickets will finally be forced to abide by the speed limit, but he's going to be working to make sure that the final program involves some traffic court and the DMV.
"Without that, I don't see this working," he said. "A court would have to order the speed limiter."
The problem, as I see it, is that currently, speed camera tickets don't show up on a driver's record. So if a cop happens to pull over a recidivist speeder, the officer has no way of knowing if he or she has just apprehended one of the worst drivers in the state or just a first-time offender.
But if the cop writes a ticket, that ticket goes through the court system and eventually finds its way into the NYPD database so that the next cop knows if a driver has surpassed the number of points required to suspend the license.
And how is the city DOT expected to deal with the fact that half of the speed-camera tickets are issued to drivers who live outside the city? There's a reason why this was supposed to be a state-run program.
"If you don't have some statewide entity like a traffic court to adjudicate this, it'll never work," Gounardes said.
Off the record, I'm hearing the same concerns from inside DOT, though no one wants to go on the record because, first and foremost, they want this thing to become law.
"The city has been very supportive of this measure, so I have to believe they view this tool as additive," Gounardes said. "And I don't believe it has to be done only one way. If she had not put it in the budget, we would have had an incredibly difficult time moving this bill through the legislative process. It is hard to get street safety bills passed."
And on the plus side, government watchdogs say that some version of the Stop Super Speeder initiative will pass.
"From an advocate's point of view, once the governor puts it in the budget, it's almost done," said Blair Horner, the NYPIRG Albany legend.
To listen to today's hearing, click here. Or you could just wait until Austin C. Jefferson's report later in the day on Streetsblog Empire State (yes, we have a statewide edition now. Check it out!).
In other news:
- Welcome to the war on cars, Upper East Site.
- Of course, suburban drivers benefitted from congestion pricing. (Bloomberg)
- The Gateway Tunnel agency sued President Trump to get back their money. (NYDN)
- DSNY is still digging out bus stops in Queens. (QNS)
- If you think our bike lanes are filled with snow, you should thank your stars that you're not in Toronto, where the local government hates cycling so much, they don't even bother to plow the lanes. (Toronto Today)
- Curbed and the Times looked at the new normal, post-snow, but neither outlet mentioned in any great depth the unpicked-up piles of dog poop. So Jimmy and the Jaywalkers turned the fecal condition of our sidewalks into a song parody of Neil Young's "Rockin' in the Free World." Yes, it's called "Picking Up Your Dog Poop."
- The Daily News focused on garbage, but the Post editorial board simply exaggerated the extent of the problem: "New York is by no means functioning," the paper opined. "Not even close." Um, it's actually very close (though this video of a garbage truck on fire doesn't inspire confidence).
- There's a new observation deck in town. (NYDN)
- Deaths from the cold continue to rise. (NYDN, amNY)
- And we're not out of the frozen woods yet. (Gothamist)
