New York City drivers have avoided more than $100 million speeding tickets by using illegally obscured license plates and ghost plates. The city says that its speed camera rejected more than 1 million potential tickets due to plate issues.
Theses findings came as part of an audit from the office of NYC Comptroller Brad Lander that found that speed cameras have been effective in reducing incidents of speeding in the city. However, photos in which the license could not be read continue to be an issue for the cameras.
“Speed cameras reduce speeding, prevent crashes, and save lives,” said Lander. “Unfortunately, a small but rapidly growing number of drivers are illegally obscuring their license plates in order to speed without getting caught. These scofflaws are putting their neighbors’ lives and safety at risk – and cheating the city out of $100 million a year.”
According to his office’s study, 22 percent of all instances of speeding that triggered the camera system were rejected because of difficulties reading plates. Of those, 327,714 instances involved a plate was covered, and 748,468 related to a temporary (or ghost) plate. Together, those two categories amounted to 1,076,182 cases in which the city could not collect on a ticket.
The audit found that these lost tickets could have been worth as much as $54 million in the first half of 2023, suggesting it lost more than $100 million for the full year. And it may get worse, as the use of these plates has grown by 5,000 percent since 2019. Lander has a few suggestions on how to stop this.
Read: New York City May Install Speed Limiters On Repeat Speeders’ Cars
Lander suggests that the city should step up enforcement of license plate laws at bridges and tunnels, where photos of license plates are taken anyway. He adds that the city should also increase fines for using and selling fake temporary plates, and that it should introduce legislation that allows citizens to report obscured plates in exchange for a portion of the fine. Finally, he is recommending legislation allowing regulators to shut down dealerships suspected of issuing fraudulent temporary plates and suspend the licenses of drivers who use them to evade fines and tolls.
Despite these “scofflaws,” Lander’s audit found that the speed cameras have been useful to the city. First introduced to the city in 2013, New York City authorized 750 cameras in school speed zones in 2022. Since 2014, the number of speed fines in these zones has fallen from a daily average of 123 tickets per day, to just 10 in 2022.
