A small but persistent group of New York City drivers has racked up dozens, sometimes hundreds, of speeding tickets with little effect on their behavior.
These drivers, whom safe-streets advocates refer to as “super-speeders,” make up less than 1 percent of drivers in the city. Studies show they are far more likely to cause serious car-crash injuries and deaths, especially near school zones.
A driver must be caught on camera speeding 16 or more times in a single year — or more than once a month — to qualify as a super-speeder. In New York City, that designation currently includes about 14,600 vehicles.
Now, Gov. Kathy Hochul is seeking to pass a bill that would require the drivers of those vehicles to install speed-limiting devices. Its fate is tied to state budget negotiations with the Legislature, which has so far failed to pass the measure.
The device, known as Intelligent Speed Assistance, is a small box affixed to the dashboard that uses GPS to identify the speed limit — 25 m.p.h. or less on most local streets, and higher on highways — and caps the driver slightly above it. The driver may temporarily override the device, in certain circumstances, with the tap of a button.
Proponents say the program could lead to a big improvement in street safety, where other interventions have failed. Critics argue that the technology is invasive and could endanger drivers if it malfunctions or if they need to speed up suddenly, though similar devices have been used successfully elsewhere.
“Suspending the license doesn’t do anything,” said Emily Gallagher, a state assemblywoman representing parts of Brooklyn, who backs the super-speeder bill.
Many repeat offenders will continue to drive, she said, so the aim should be to limit the harm they can cause.
“Punishment is not the goal,” Ms. Gallagher said. “The goal is saving lives.”
Mayor Zohran Mamdani, in a statement, voiced strong support for the governor’s measure. “There is nothing more important than keeping New Yorkers safe, and reining in super-speeders will save lives,” he said.
Though the State Senate passed a version of the bill last year, the Assembly has not put it to a vote. Michael Whyland, a spokesman for Carl Heastie, the Assembly speaker, declined to address his position on the legislation, but said that budget talks were continuing.
“This is one of more than 100 policy items that the governor has put into a fiscal document that we are reviewing,” Mr. Whyland said.
Research has shown that when collisions occur, small changes in a driver’s speed can be the difference between life and death. A driver who hits a person while traveling at 30 m.p.h. is twice as likely to kill the pedestrian than when traveling at 25 m.p.h., according to the Transportation Department.
The super-speeder bill would be the latest change designed to curb reckless driving in the city. New York City began installing automated speed cameras near school zones more than a decade ago, and there are now roughly 2,300 of them citywide.
City officials credit that program with changing the behavior of many drivers, who receive a $50 fine for each violation the cameras catch. There were 209 traffic fatalities in the city last year, one of the lowest rates since 1910, according to department figures.
But drivers caught by automated speed cameras do not receive points on their licenses that could lead them to be suspended, because the tickets are tied to the vehicle, not the individual.
The penalties have not deterred the city’s super-speeders, who have accumulated a staggering number of violations.
The 10 most frequent offenders in New York City last year accrued an average of 179 camera speeding tickets, and the worst driver had been caught more than 1,000 times since 2023, according to an analysis of public records by Transportation Alternatives, a safe-streets advocacy group.
One of those drivers was James Giovansanti, a police officer on Staten Island who has amassed more than 500 speeding and red light violations since 2022, according to the transportation news site Streetsblog.
At a news conference on Wednesday outside City Hall, elected officials and advocates who support the super speeder bill stood behind a table stacked high with replica speeding tickets. One box represented Mr. Giovansanti’s many offenses.
A Police Department spokesman said that the officer’s tickets were under internal review, and that the violations occurred when he was off duty.
Andrew Gounardes, the state senator from Brooklyn who sponsored a version of the super- speeder bill, said installing a speed-limiting device was the best way to curtail dangerous driving.
According to the legislation, drivers would be required to cover the cost of the device and the monitoring. The devices cost about $150 to install, and there is a $4-a-day subscription fee, according to the SteerSafe Partnership, a coalition of groups that support speed-limiter technology.
New York City has already installed speed-limiter devices in a portion of its nonemergency fleet of vehicles and plans to expand their use. Officials reported a 64 percent reduction in speeding among the drivers of the vehicles, and the results helped persuade the U.S. Department of Transportation to upgrade the technology from experimental to “best practice” for city fleets.
Several states, including Virginia, Maryland and Washington, have already passed super- speeder bills, and the technology is also in use in Europe.
A New York Times reporter last week drove a car with a speed-limiting device in Queens. On a street where the speed limit was 20 m.p.h, the device allowed the car to reach 26 m.p.h. On a highway with a 50 m.p.h. limit, the maximum speed allowed was 56 m.p.h.
Pushing the accelerator beyond the speed cap did not cause the car to jerk. When the override option was selected, the system logged the request, and allowed the car to exceed the speed limit for roughly a minute.
Supporters of the bill call the device a minor imposition on drivers who refuse to change their behavior.
Emma Thebault, 35, was crossing the street with her infant son near her home on the Upper East Side of Manhattan last year, when the driver of an S.U.V. ran a red light, made an illegal turn and hit them, according to a complaint she filed in civil court.
Ms. Thebault and her son were violently knocked to the ground, video of the incident showed. Both survived, but she is suing the driver, Inson Dubois Wood, charging that he was negligent and repeatedly drove recklessly.
Mr. Wood had more than 180 speeding, red light and other traffic violations at the time, for which he had paid $20,000 in fines. But he continued to rack up traffic tickets even after the crash, according to the complaint and a review of his license plate.
For colliding with Ms. Thebault, he was penalized with a maximum $250 ticket for “failure to yield,” according to a police filing. Mr. Wood did not respond to requests for comment.
“If $250 is what you get when you threaten other people’s lives, there is nothing that protects us,” Ms. Thebault said in an interview.
“We have ways to protect people,” she said. “We need to do it.”
Alain Delaquérière contributed research.
Stefanos Chen is a Times reporter covering New York City’s transit system.
The post A Way to Slow Down ‘Super-Speeders’ Who Keep Breaking the Law appeared first on New York Times.
