Some of the MTA’s worst toll dodgers evaded an average of more than $30,000 each from crossing the agency’s bridges and tunnels.
Officers with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s Bridges and Tunnels division towed 166 vehicles of its most “persistent” toll evaders in July, who together accounted for more than $5 million in unpaid charges, or around $30,120 apiece.
So far this year through Aug. 9, B&T officers caught and towed more than 1,100 vehicles whose drivers didn’t pay some $16 million for repeat toll violations, while issuing nearly 2,000 summonses for covered or obstructed plates.
“We are committed to the collection and protection of our toll revenue, which is reinvested in our facilities and helps support MTA mass transit. Bottom line: we never stop chasing the money,” said MTA Bridges and Tunnels President Daniel DeCrescenzo in a statement.
On one day alone on July 27, the cops towed 15 cars, 11 of them on the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge, according to MTA.
One driver the state officers stopped on the overpass between Staten Island and Brooklyn had a temporary paper plate in the rear window registered to Texas. The license plate number has also been fined seven times for illegal parking over three months late last year, mostly in the Bronx, according to state records.
Nearly a million vehicles crossed MTA’s seven bridges and two tunnels on an average weekday, according to the latest figures from May.
The MTA stands to lose about $50 million this year in unpaid tolls from drivers using fake or obscured plates, the Transportation Authority’s Chairperson and CEO Janno Lieber previously estimated.
One of the agency’s own managers was caught dodging $100,000 in tolls and fees over a decade and across three different agencies, including around $30,000 he owed to the MTA, an Inspector General’s probe found last year.
Mayor Eric Adams in early July vowed to crack down on drivers using phony or expired paper plates, a little over a year after his predecessor Mayor Bill de Blasio launched a similar enforcement effort.
This year through July 31, NYPD issued 18,909 tickets to drivers for using illegal or obstructed license plates, towed 2,200 vehicles, and seized 2,823 vehicles, according to a police spokesperson.
