Tuesday’s Headlines: Reckless Drivers, Reckless Pols Edition

Here’s one theory why politicians are so unconcerned about super speeders: They know a hell of a lot of them!

Thanks to all sorts of “driver protection” laws passed by politicians at all levels of government, it’s very rare that the media ever identifies the worst super-speeders — as we did last month with Staten Island cop James Giovansanti, who had been caught on city speed- and red-light cameras 547 times since 2022. (He was easy to figure out, given that all those tickets were in a very small area of the Rock.)

But there are other ways to shame, albeit not name, the scofflaw class.

For instance, the Department of Motor Vehicles classifies privately owned cars as “passenger” vehicles, with the three-letter code PAS. That’s how Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie’s two personal cars are registered. We wouldn’t know they were his, of course, except that we saw him get out of one while the other was in the garage. His PAS-registered cars have gotten three speed-camera tickets since January 2024.

What about other pols? Well, unless you see them get out of the car from the driver’s seat, it’s almost impossible to know whether a particular pol is a recidivist speeder like Heastie.

But we do know that as a group pols and other politically connected people think the law only applies to other people.

For instance, if you open up the city’s Open Data portal for speed-camera and red-light tickets, you can filter by registration type to determine, say, how many tickets state politicians, judges, Members of Congress and even former prisoners of war speed or run red lights. Here’s what I found out:

• Drivers with official New York State Assembly license plates have gotten 215 school zone or red-light camera tickets since 2016. The leading offender? Assembly plate number 1 — which ferries around Heastie: It’s been caught 13 times since 2017 (add another eight tickets if plate 1A also is assigned to Heastie).
• Drivers with state Senate plates have gotten 30 speed camera or red-light tickets since 2016.
• Drivers with official New York City Council plates have been caught 35 times since 2016.
• Someone with U.S. Congress plate 18 has gotten four speed-camera tickets since 2020. (It’s not Rep. Nicole Malliotakis, Republican of Staten Island, but her car has been nabbed 71 times for speeding and running red lights since 2013, and 23 times since 2024.)
• Judges of the state Supreme Court (actually New York’s lowest court) have racked up 204 speed- and red-light tickets since 2016.
• And cars with license plates indicating a state agency — registered as STA — have racked up 6,875 speed- and red-light tickets since 2015. That’s more than 650 per year.

All this is to say that lots of people with connections to pols — including the pols themselves — are reckless drivers who endanger their neighbors. And all Gov. Hochul is asking is for those pols to agree to install devices in the cars of the worst speeders that will prevent those vehicles from exceeding the speed limit. It’s an easy bargain: Agree to Gov. Hochul’s proposal, or we in the media will keep an eye on your speeding.

In other news:

• Albany Bureau Chief Austin C. Jefferson wrote about the super speeder effort in the statehouse. (Streetsblog Empire State)
• Here comes the PATH fare hike. (Gothamist)
• Massachusetts is looking at new e-bike rules. (Streetsblog Mass)
• Gothamist looks at the decades-long dream of thru-running.
• New truck routes are coming, the Daily News reported, but Streetsblog readers already knew that.
• We reported on the Mamdani administration’s bike parking plan, and amNY followed.
• And, finally, Pete Alonso went from being a beloved New Yorker to just another out-of-towner complaining about traffic: