MTA nabs 44 toll cheats who owe just about $1M in unpaid charges all over four-day crackdown: ‘Elementary equity’

Metro

Via Mary Kay Linge

Printed
Dec. 16, 2023, 5:43 p.m. ET

An MTA enforcement blitz this week nabbed 44 automobiles owned via continual toll evaders who owe just about $1 million value of unpaid charges and fines, officers mentioned.

“That is about basic equity,” MTA chair Janno Lieber instructed newshounds Friday.

“It’s now not proper when drivers, some rolling round in Mercedes and Porsches, come onto our bridges and thru tunnels and skip out on paying tens of millions of greenbacks in tolls.”

The four-day crackdown on the Verrazzano Narrows Bridge linking Staten Island and Brooklyn resulted in the seizures of automobiles and vehicles of each description — from a white BMW SUV and a black Mercedes sedan to a rubbish truck owned via a non-public hauler.

“There’s a Vary Rover again there and the fellow owes 50 grand,” Lieber mentioned.

MTA officials stopped this automobile at the Verrazzano Narrows Bridge Friday after a registration number plate reader flagged it as a continual toll violator. Marc A. Hermann / MTA

The entire automobiles sported bogus out-of-state license plates that New York’s cashless tolling device can not observe, or respectable plates disguised via plastic covers that thwart toll cameras.

MTA chair Janno Lieber confirmed examples of bogus paper license plates at a Friday press convention. Marc A. Hermann / MTA

The 44 accused scofflaws owe the MTA a complete of $922,500 — a fragment of the $46 million in earnings that the MTA estimated used to be misplaced to toll evasion in 2022.

A few of the ones snagged within the dragnet had been discovered to be uninsured or using with a suspended license.

Cars stuck within the MTA toll crackdown are saved underneath the Verrazzano Narrows Bridge till the tolls and fines are repaid. Marc A. Hermann / MTA

The automobiles had been impounded and the automobiles’ registrations suspended till their homeowners settle up, officers mentioned.

Regulation enforcement officials from the MTA, the NYPD, and the New York State Police have interdicted 2,705 automobiles for toll evasion this 12 months – a 50% building up from 2022 — because the transit company struggles to fill a yawning finances hole that, it says, justifies a debatable new congestion pricing scheme.

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