MTA Superintendent Busted for DIY Placard

An MTA superintendent crafted homemade placards to regularly park his two out-of-state cars all over the city — until he was caught, demoted and effectively drummed out of the agency, the MTA’s watchdog reported.

The MTA Inspector General’s Office, acting on a tip, hunted its prey between March and September 2025, eventually catching the fake placard perp parking illegally in a “no standing zone.”

His use of a fake parking placard “demonstrated a lack of honesty and integrity that does not befit someone in a supervisory role,” MTA Inspector General Daniel Cort said in a statement. “His permanent demotion and unpaid suspension show that behavior like this will be met with severe consequences.”

The superintendent, who joined the MTA as a track worker in 2007 and was promoted to superintendent in 2014, was never approved for outside work. But he later admitted that he had been running a car repair and cleaning service since 2021, the inspector general’s office said.

In an interview with the inspector general after he was caught, the superintendent, whose name was not released, said he found a placard “laying around” in an office he was cleaning. (Later, he changed his story, saying he found the placard when it fell out of a ripped trash bag.)

He scanned the placard at home to match the font style, created the fake placards on his home computer and used them for years, according to the report.

He parked with the placard at job sites around the city, though his position as an MTA employee came with free transit, the report added.

His out-of-state license plates were registered to addresses he had not used since 2006, according to the report. The inspector general contacted the superintendent’s insurance carrier following the investigation so it could take “whatever action it deemed appropriate.”

The MTA responded to the inspector general’s report by saying it had “immediately” suspended the superintendent and sought his dismissal. He now has the title of Trackworker, an hourly position, but there’s currently no work for him, the MTA added.

“[He] remains in a no-pay status until such time as a budgeted position in his hourly title becomes available,” the agency said.

Bill Amarosa, the NYC Transit executive vice president for subways, added in a statement to Streetsblog that the employee “knowingly violated MTA policies and his dishonest conduct is unacceptable.”

City agencies do issue legitimate parking placards, but employees can only use the permit for brief stops on official city business. In reality, the placards function as status symbols, alerting police and traffic agents that the illegally parked car belongs to one of their own.

A 2024 Department of Investigation report found that there were over 100,000 parking placards in circulation among the NYPD, DOT and Department of Education. The report criticized a lack of coordination between the three agencies, calling for them to “phase out the use of physical permits.”

Streetsblog has documented how the same impunity granted by a placard is often extended to people who may not have the permit but still have some kind of vest, hand-scrawled sign or symbol of devotion to a member of law enforcement.

The social media account @placardabuse wrote in Streetsblog last year that they had published over 40,000 photos of seeming placard abuse over the past 10 years.

“The practice shreds the city’s social fabric. It is shocking and dispiriting to realize that parking laws do not apply where governmental employees congregate,” the account wrote. “As a result, New Yorkers no longer expect the police to enforce the law.”