Errol Louis: Welcome to “You Decide.” I'm your host, Errol Louis.
Gersh Kuntzman: And it's a cop. I don't know if you can see this is the cop from Transit Bureau 23. Transit Bureau 23 is all the way out the Rockaways. And it's interesting because he's got a covered plate on the back. And it's funny because I got a screwdriver. This guy used to get a lot of speeding and red-light tickets till last year, perhaps when he put that cover on. Now, would a Transit Bureau 23 cop beat me up? I don't know. Easy enough to find out. Criminal mischief. NYPD.
Errol Louis: That was journalist Gersh Kuntzman, who, among many other things, is a license plate vigilante. That's according to a recent piece in The New York Times. And he's been dealing with, and what we're going to talk about today is a situation, I don't know if this goes on in other cities, but it is a big deal in New York. You've got scofflaw drivers out there who tamper with their license plates. They put a piece of tape over it. They tape something to it. They blot out some of the letters and it makes them undetectable by the cameras that are supposed to charge you a toll or stop you from running a red light or send you a ticket if you do run a red light and on and on and on, speeding cameras as well. And that, along with placard abuse, putting some kind of a fake piece of paper on your dashboard so you can park on the sidewalk or wherever you want. It's really a problem. And we're going to get into the dimensions of it. If you think it's just like a minor thing, you are quite wrong, and we're going to give you some real numbers about the extent to which this is costing you, whether you have a car in New York or not. Anyway, Gersh has been dealing with this. I've been writing about this for years. I mean, I think it's just a form of open corruption. In 2019, I had a column where it wasn't the first time I'd written about it, but I described it as a gateway drug to much broader municipal abuse. It is a form of corruption. If there were cops out there or anybody else, city workers, who were regularly stealing mail or stealing a cup of coffee or shoplifting on the regular, we would say this is a problem. We can't let this go on every day. And yet at every precinct, on every shift, in every corner of the city, every single day, there are people who are doing this.
Anyhow, I've talked with Gersh before. Regular listeners may remember we had him on “You Decide” a couple of years ago. He has become, though, this vigilante and sort of a local hero, actually. He's got this social media campaign called Criminal Mischief that shows him fixing license plates, like pulling the tape off, undefacing them. He pairs it with this catchy theme song which he actually wrote apparently. You just heard a little piece of it. I didn't realize he was a music composer. He's become a bit of a local vigilante in the Robin Hood mold. And he's recognizable enough. Frankly, we booked this podcast because my producer saw him in front of a Park Slope hotdog place, not the food co-op, some hotdog joint, and, you know, recognized him. And there's a little suspense. You should check out these videos. Sometimes you don't know if Gersh is going to get confronted by an angry car owner who, if they're a cop, might have a gun while he's like, you know, using a screwdriver or a Sharpie or something to make the license plates readable. New York Times has written about them. He's been here on Spectrum News on Mornings on 1. But his real job is he's the editor-in-chief of Streetsblog NYC, which connects people to information about reducing dependency on automobiles. He and I don't see eye-to-eye on cars. I've got one, we're going to talk about that. He's got a new campaign called March Madness, I want to find out more about that. But let's get to it. Every time we turn around Gersh is doing something interesting and creative. Welcome to the podcast. Great to see you.
Gersh Kuntzman: Well, it is great to be here. It's great. And I'm glad you gave yourself a hat tip about your column where you said it was a gateway drug of corruption, because I was going to mention that as one of the still, like, lasting images that almost everybody has when they talk about placard abuse was that column because you just crystallized it, it was very, very well done.
Errol Louis: Oh, well, thank you. I mean, it bugs the crap out of me. I mean, you know, look, while driving in the city and trying to get some place on time, every single time you go past the precinct, what is it, the 78 that covers Park Slope, although it's on the Prospect Heights side, just cars everywhere, they're on the sidewalk, they're in front of hydrants. They're in places where if you or I did this, your car would be gone. Your car would be at the tow pound, it would cost you a couple hundred bucks to get it back, plus half a day or a couple of hours or whatever. And the cops who were supposed to enforce this, the ones who give me, you know, they give us the tickets are the ones who are doing this.
Gersh Kuntzman: And the thing about the placard corruption that you observed and that creates the chaos around the police precinct houses, that has evolved into the covered plate thing that I've been doing in Criminal Mischief because it's sort of part of the same phenomenon of corruption. And like you said, the gateway drug was placards. But once the city started to really double down on enforcement cameras, which, you know, the city has decided because the NYPD didn't really want to pull people over for speeding, and didn't want to stop people for red lights, or failure to yield. The city did decide they wanted to expand the speed camera, the red-light camera, and now bus lane camera program. So that was a decision that was made with the NYPD's knowledge and consent. But as a result, there's now a lot of cameras and they are operating 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And I noticed, I did a story a couple of weeks ago, that in August of 2022, last August, when the cameras went on 24/7, for the first time ever, and there were now about 2,000 camera systems, in that month, the number of plates that could not be read by those cameras jumped from about 3% to 7%. Now, it has since come down a little bit, but it's an indication that once people started getting these tickets even more places and even more times in the, you know, you're accustomed to speeding at midnight. Sure. Well, now you're going get a ticket for it, the number of people covering their plates, defacing their plates, removing a letter, etc., really jumped. And it's come down a little bit, but it's still a problem. You know, this costs the city. You know, it's cost the city. People think of these speed cameras as a revenue producer. They do produce revenue. They are ultimately about safety. But, you know, cost the city tens of millions of dollars a year just in the 5-6% of plates that can't be read.
Errol Louis: Where do you get that number from, by the way? You say 7% or 3%.
Gersh Kuntzman: Where do I get that number from? First of all, I had to FOIA it. I had to file a Freedom of Information Law request of course. In fairness, THE CITY, that media website, THE CITY, did the same thing a year earlier during the first peak, when the first wave of cameras started, the number of plates that could not be read went from about 1% to 4%. Once the cameras started to be really rolled out and then it jumped to 7%. So I just repeated their work and filed a Freedom of Information Law request, which is sort of I mean, I won't say it's outrageous, but it's just weird that this kind of data, which is available to the city officials, isn't just available to the press. You know, we have to go through this process. But they did give it to me relatively quickly. Right. It showed, you know, it really had a big jump.
Errol Louis: There's room for a law to be passed right there, to say that this data must be published every month. Right. I mean, write Transportation Committee or somebody shouldn't, you know, take this up and it should just be freely available, because without the accountability, this stuff never changes.
Gersh Kuntzman: Yeah, I mean, in fairness, the people getting tickets, all of their plates are in a database. It's just the ones that I wanted were how many couldn't be read. In other words, how many ticket people are getting a quote unquote getting away with it. The number of tickets, I should say, the tickets themselves peaked when they went to 24/7. But the tickets themselves have started to come down a little bit because people are becoming. Enforcement works. Yeah. I mean, people do get tickets and these tickets, just so people, so your listeners know, especially if they don't drive, these are only $50 a pop and they do not count against your driving record, which is a source of real frustration for people in the street safety movement because if the tickets aren't counting against your driver's license, there's really no accountability other than the $50. They don't escalate up over time and they don't add to more points over time, like real tickets do issued by a cop. But the number of speeding tickets issued by cops have been declining over the years.
Errol Louis: Back in the '80s, basically back before my son was born, when I became a great driver, once I had to drive him back from the hospital that literally that day, I just like, okay, speed limit or less, you know, let everybody in, we you know, we got precious cargo here. Back then you did not want to get pulled over by a cop because it would be two points on your license. And when you hit like four or five or six, you would have your license suspended.
Gersh Kuntzman: Yeah, actually, it's, I think three speeding tickets issued by a cop at this point in 18 months would be a license suspension.
Errol Louis: Right. I came perilously close to that at one point and had to sit through a traffic safety course of some kind. Well, you know, I tell you what happened, we all sat in the back and talked about ways to get like little PBA, you know, tokens or.
Gersh Kuntzman: The gateway drug of corruption.
Errol Louis: Tchotchkes, you know what I mean? Look, you know, from your journalism days, I have walked into this studio, full disclosure, I've walked into this studio and found on my desk a PBA card saying NY1, like sitting there on my desk. I didn't ask for it. I didn't know they were coming. I mean, I wasn't the only one. They gave them out freely.
Gersh Kuntzman: I never had one. Just for the record, full disclosure, I never had it.
Errol Louis: They don't want us to cover this. And so if you know any cops and I know a lot of them just by being members, they have this whole stack of these little things and they give them out. And there's this unwritten rule where nobody gives you a ticket. If you have one of those sitting on your dashboard.
Gersh Kuntzman: And it's a related story about that, just to interrupt is, a couple of years ago, we covered an incident where a cab driver made a left turn and cut off a cyclist and it was caught on camera for some reason, I guess the cyclist had a camera, and this was the one time I saw I ever saw a cabbie present his PBA card to a cop. And the cop said, I don't give a sh*t about that, get the f out of here, here's your ticket. And so I went to the police commissioner at that time, Jim O'Neil, and said, 'Hey, did you see that video? We finally had a cop who, like, upheld the law and defended pedestrian cyclist rights' and he didn't care, he was like, well, that sounds you know, he didn't want to talk about it. That was the one moment where you could have pushed back on this.
Errol Louis: I remember in the past PBA officials saying that, you know, this is a courtesy that people grabbed as if this were like a one off. And it in any given one situation, it's easy to imagine. Yes, there's a cop who's working a double shift, he's on hour 16, why should he have to walk four blocks if he's doing a midnight tour, you know, at four in the morning or whatever, whatever. But that's not what this is. Right. And your whole campaign about criminal mischief is like clearly there's more here than just wanting to park near your job. What's also going on is not wanting to pay any tolls, not wanting to be caught speeding, not wanting to be caught doing anything. And there was this whole campaign. And this is where it gets real serious, not just a revenue question, but there was a whole campaign by the mayor and the police commissioner about what are called ghost cars. I mean, because if you have an unreadable or stolen license plate, your car is essentially anonymous to a certain degree. Right?
Gersh Kuntzman: Right. And there's a couple of things that go along with that. One is a lot of people who are buying these temporary tags that you see all over the city. They're buying them from legitimately licensed dealers in New Jersey and Georgia is a new market for this, we're doing a story about this next week, but they're getting them from legitimate dealers who are illegally issuing these plates. So to a cop on the street, they look like a real plate. But they are a ghost car because they're not registered to anything. So you can't issue a ticket to it. The DOT says it can't even read legitimately issued temporary tags, so none of those people are getting tickets. And also, they can't be tracked if they're caught on camera after committing a crime like a hit and run. And we had a case on Eastern Parkway earlier this year. A gentleman was run down by a guy who had a fake temporary tag on him. And you go through the records, you can't go through the records of this car. You don't know what else he's done in the past. And if it's a hit and run, you're never going to catch him. Wow. And it's bad. But getting back to the PBA cards and also the issue of placard abuse and why it's relevant to the speed cameras and red-light cameras is back in the day, if a cop pulled over another cop, they're never going to give him a ticket. And it's sort of that's what you get into, that's the courtesy of the boys in blue, girls in blue. But the speed camera doesn't know you're a cop. So that's when I think the cops switched over to defacing their plates, covering their plate. And I have to say, I'm not, you know, saying every cop does this, it's a small minority. But I'm noticing and I've been doing, I’ve done about 120 of my videos, I'd say way more than half of them, I have found police officers, firefighters, court officers involved in this kind of criminal miscreant behavior. And it's stunning because, you know, you talk about the gateway drug of corruption, if the law enforcement officials, including court officers, are engaged in this, first of all, it sends a message that what people do in their cars, criminal behavior they do in the cars, is not as important as criminal behavior they do elsewhere. But it is just as important. People are getting killed, people are getting maimed. And so that's a real bad message.
Errol Louis: And look, the congestion alone, I mean, you know, this is the thing is I started, you know, I mean, long before you started doing all of this stuff, I would occasionally just tweet out a picture because it just bothered me so much that, you know, you go by the 84 precinct, you go by Manhattan criminal courts, you go by the 78 precinct, you go by a lot of these places. I mean, like there's cars everywhere, on the sidewalk, in the crosswalks, in the bus stop. There's a place right over here near the studio. It just used to drive me nuts. It was the corner of 16th Street and 10th Avenue, and it was near the gym that I used to go to, and there'd be cars parked in the bus stop and you'd see ladies were like, with little old ladies, with walkers, people in wheelchairs couldn't get to the bus because, you know, some guy from the Joint Terrorism Task Force or the local precinct just felt like sticking their car there and knew they weren't going to get a ticket.
Gersh Kuntzman: And it's beyond that. It's not just some guy, it's some guy typically driving in from the suburbs because, as you know, the majority of NYPD officers live in the suburbs, which means they take their tax dollars out to the suburbs to spend on their local little leagues and not on ours. But that's one point. Forget about just Manhattan, because this you know, the New Yorker, when they did a story on this, referred to the area around the courthouse as the “den of malfeasance,” but all of March, we do a series in Streetsblog called March Parking Madness. And it's basically we go to 16 different police station houses. And the other day I was at the 75 precinct, which is out in East New York. And what you described about the 84 or the 78 in downtown or Park Slope Brooklyn was way worse at the 75, because not only did I see two cops who had their plates folded, and I, of course, unfolded them, but they have four parking lots at that precinct station now, and they still have cars on every frontage of the street in a bus lane. And you see old ladies not only with walkers, but old ladies of all varieties trying to get on the damn bus. And they can't.
Errol Louis: We'll be back doing more criminal mischief with Gersh Kuntzman.
Gersh Kuntzman: Hey, it's Gersh Kuntzman I'm on Baxter Street, the courthouse area where a lot of the workers here are cops and court officers. This guy's got a defaced plate that maybe I would say that was just normal wear and tear until I saw two things. One, exact same numbers are missing and he's got an NYPD unmarked vehicle utilization record. So we're just going to make it a little easy and we're going to help him out a little bit because we don't want him to get tickets for a defaced plate. And he's gotten a lot of tickets over the years. This guy is public enemy, not public enemy number one, he's public enemy number two or three. He's he's got a terrible driving record. And what we'll do is we'll do the front and then we'll do the back, make sure he doesn't get tickets that he doesn't deserve. And we know that he wants to get all the tickets he deserves because he's in law enforcement. And I'll obviously clean that up because I am a perfectionist. Gersh Kuntzman, Criminal Mischief.
Errol Louis: Now, tell me about some of your encounters here, because you know, a lot of little private rules we all have for how to get by in the city. One of my rules is not to antagonize people who are carrying firearms. Right.
Gersh Kuntzman: So, okay, that's a good rule.
Errol Louis: Clearly, you've got some other set of rules that you're working.
Gersh Kuntzman: So I don't antagonize. I actually am a pretty mild-mannered guy. But what I do is I roll up to a particular car. Now, I had a great one the other day near the courthouses. I saw this car with a plate, a big kind of truck with a plate, not a plate, a covering on the plate, but it was a clear one. Now, even though it's clear, it's still illegal, but it because it's clear it's not going to obstruct the cameras. So I kind of wondered, like, what's he doing with the clear? Why would you even bother with a clear one? And then I biked a little closer and I notice one of the E’s on the back of the plate had been turned into an F, with just a simple piece of white tape. And it just. So, again, I'm not confrontational, but then I looked at the, I want to look at the dashboard, see what kind of placard he had. He had a DA placard, a Manhattan DA, but he also had his business card, which was from his former job as an NYPD terrorism, what he called a negotiator. He was a hostage negotiation negotiator, which I thought was the greatest thing. I thought this is going to be the feature film version of it, because he had his business card with his name and his cell phone number on it. So, of course, I called him because what I'm about to write you up. So he picks up the phone and I said, ‘Hey, you know, I'm doing a story about parking downtown.’ I'm always very generic, doing a story about parking downtown. ‘I noticed you had a plate that had this weird piece of reflective tape to match the color. Then you covered up your E, turned it off,” and he's like, “I don't know what you're talking about.” I'm like, “You don't know what I'm talking about.” He says, “Well, maybe a piece of tape fell on it.” I'm like, “No.” So now, in fairness, I had to reach out to the Manhattan DA's Office because if I'm going to write up one of his employees, I was going to use the guy's name because I feel like nobody needs to know his name. He ended up getting fired. Oh, well, because he was using up the gateway drug of corruption. He was using the placard to park illegally with a covered plate, which is, you know, multiple violations.
Errol Louis: Right, right, right. On some level, it's commendable that somebody even noticed and that there were any kind of consequences. My guess, frankly, is that there's probably a million other things he was doing, you know, probably showing up later. Who knows what else perhaps.
Gersh Kuntzman: And I will say this. I did file a Freedom of Information request to find out whether the NYPD was taking the video seriously because the first wave of them, I caught about 13 cops right off the bat. So I sent those plates over to the NYPD and said, “Did you discipline any of these people because of what I caught on camera?” They didn't respond. I FOIAED it. They sent me the reports in an 84-page investigation log on seven of the cases. It's funny. You get the logs. It's like they cross every I and they dot every T. It's kind of amazing. Yeah. When they take a case seriously. And in this case, they did. They look for the car, they talk to the officer, they write down all the officer's tax code, his record, etc. So in all seven cases, they only substantiated two of my complaints. Substantiated complaint doesn't mean anything other than the investigator says, “Yeah, you're right, that weird guy with the camera is right.” Doesn't mean they're going to be disciplined. The officer told me that the cops would get a letter merely encouraging them not to do that again. So after all these, you know, 120 videos and maybe two cops get a letter, you know, it's that kind of thing. It's frustrating.
Errol Louis: You may remember that relatively early in his second term, I think was when Bill de Blasio, might even been earlier than that, but Bill de Blasio, I remember, had, when he was mayor, had a whole press conference about it, about placard abuse and how they were going to have a whole unit and they were going to crack down on some of this and some of that. I guess maybe it was pre-pandemic, because when there was some follow up, I think by you or some of your colleagues, it turned out that, you know, there had been no enforcement at all.
Gersh Kuntzman: Well, again, when you leave the enforcement up to the NYPD and look, in fairness to the NYPD, if I'm ever going to say that sentence, that's weird, but they are charged with doing some very serious things. I mean, people do get killed and people do get knifed, etc., and raped. And also there's this attention on subway crime that the mayor is obviously keen on. So they have a lot of things on their plate. I've argued in Streetsblog repeatedly this is something that shouldn't be on their plate. For example, the traffic enforcement officers who are cops affiliated with the precinct, but they're not really cops in the sense that they don't have the same relationships with their brother officers. They should be in the DOT because the Department of Transportation, first of all, the Department of Transportation workers would be trained differently. They're not looking necessarily for a gun in the back of the car. They're looking for a guy who's blocking a bike lane or a crosswalk that's unsafe.
Errol Louis: But there used to be right back when we called the brownies.
Gersh Kuntzman: Yeah, long time ago. There was some corruption involved with that. And boy, that got all reformed. The other thing that's happening is the NYPD, again, out of their own prioritization of their duties, has stopped doing a lot of these things, especially enforcement of moving violations. You know, they periodically peak and the NYPD makes a big announcement. We're cracking down on this, but it goes back to normal, typically after a couple of months. We always call that a fake crackdown. But nonetheless, they don't do this as much and it's because of their priorities. The DOT, however, would prioritize these kinds of things, because they're in the safety and movement of vehicles business. Cops aren't really in that and almost all cops drive. In fact, you need a driver's license to be a cop, which is absurd on the face of it. They drive a lot. I mean, they're always driving. And because half of them drive in from the suburbs every day, they have a different perspective on how streets work.
Errol Louis: That's an interesting point, that suburban point. There's a thing that happens where what you and I and other journalists and advocates are trying to do is get somebody's attention to find a sort of a political entrepreneur to pick the thing up and run with it. And I thought we'd struck paydirt when Corey Johnson, who then was the speaker of the council, said, look, placard abuse is corruption, plain and simple. We're going to do this, we're going to do that, introduced a bill and so forth and so on. He wanted to be mayor, that didn't work out. He wanted to be comptroller, that didn't work out. He's in private practice now.
Gersh Kuntzman: He's a lobbyist. He's a lobbyist for CitiBike.
Errol Louis: Okay. Well, okay. Well, there you go. On the other hand, it never caught on. It never caught on. And he was somebody who had a fair amount of power to compel or persuade the other 50 members of the City Council. It just didn't work. Well, do you think.
Gersh Kuntzman: That they did pass a law and this was actually a decent law, it was essentially a pilot program that the NYPD would be in charge of. They get the 311 complaints and they would compile the 311 complaints to identify 25, I believe it was hotspots, where people were making 311 complaints about placard abuse and they would have to enforce those 25 hot spots. They would change every month based on their enforcement. Obviously, if they do a good job, that wouldn't be a hotspot anymore. So that was a local law that passed was signed by the mayor, but the NYPD never implemented it. In other words, the pandemic hit and they were just like, no, we're not going to do this. And as a result, they never actually did what really was the lowest hanging fruit. You've got the 311 report, so it spits out a report, here are your 25 spots. Send two cops to each. It's talking about 50 cops right across the city, it's not very much. They never did that. And that would have been at least the gateway. Now, as a result of that failure, there is a new bill. You have to create an entirely new legislative architecture around the NYPD's failure because they won't do it. So Lincoln Restler is a council member from Brooklyn who introduced a bill called Intro 501, which would allow the public to directly report cars, any kind of car, cop car or regular car, in a bike lane or a bus lane or a hydrant. Now, originally the bill called for the member of the public, like with the idling law, to get 25% of the ticket, the resulting ticket. That part got scrapped because this City Council is ultimately pro driver, even corrupt illegal driver. That got scrapped, but there still will be, the bill is expected to pass in April. There still will be this architecture that allows you to use a DOT app to punch in a picture and the license plate and what you saw. Okay. And that person will be issued a ticket. Oh, now, I believe because of due process, that person will still be able to argue the ticket. But like speed cameras, they'll be a picture of you doing the crime. There is the potential, you know, with a new app and a new initiative, that people will start reporting this and like speed cameras, people will get tired of getting tickets and they'll stop doing it.
Errol Louis: Oh, that's interesting. Despite the way we have talked about this, to me, this is not simply about cops abusing their placards in their license plates and so forth, but they're the enforcement wing. So that's I think that's where you start. But this goes on around every hospital. This goes on around almost every firehouse. You know, there are a lot of municipal employees who, according to studies that have been done, account for a ridiculous amount of the congestion down in the civic center, down around City Hall. And, you know, depending on what the agency is like, firehouses, which are in every corner of the city, you've got more cars and trucks sitting there, in some cases with no license plates, fake license plates, defaced or altered license plates, fake or altered placards, union issued placards. That's a whole other kind of thing where, you know, you're basically saying, “I know somebody who knows somebody, I've got a fake sheriff's card,” or something like that. This cost tens of millions of dollars according to the studies that I was able to find.
Gersh Kuntzman: Right. And it's not just that.
Errol Louis: It's every year there's.
Gersh Kuntzman: There's the congestion of it. Right? There's always going to be a certain number of people who for some reason think they need to drive into Manhattan for whatever reason. Maybe I got to take someone to a hospital, etc. But those people are now being blocked and congested by a city work force that, you know, if you work at a firehouse in Lower Manhattan, you're in the center of the greatest transit system in the whole world, right? And you're going to drive to work, which not only congested streets and then you're going to park your car there all day to further block the streets and force people to drive around looking for parking. It's a real problem. But the biggest problem, you take a 60,000-foot view of it as a result of giving 50,000 teachers and 35,000 cops and all the firefighters and hospital workers and all these people placards, you're not only just giving them a place to park, you're encouraging them to use it. And as a result, there's a couple of hundred thousand extra trips that just simply wouldn't be taken and weren't taken years ago. And that's undermining the economy of the city. But worse, it's causing crashes because, you know, look, there are 215 on an average day, 215 reported crashes in the city of New York. That's an enormous number, if you think about it. About 100 people are injured every day in crashes. That number would be significantly lower if suddenly 100,000 people weren't driving every day because we give them free parking. And people are shocked when I give them that number of 215. That's just city stats. Those are only the reported crashes. Yeah.
Errol Louis: It’s not like the fender benders that nobody bothers to report.
Gersh Kuntzman: If you add those on it's probably 300 crashes a day. And that's a lot. If you really think about how many cars are hitting things or people or other cars. It's a lot, a lot of crashes.
Errol Louis: Right. Right. Well, look, in your efforts through your campaign, through Streetsblog, through the traffic safety movement in general. What's the next goal? I mean, the Vision Zero, I remember being there at the launch of Vision Zero, moderating some panel, and I think Bratton was the commissioner at the time, and it looked very hopeful. The numbers went in a good direction for quite a while. Then they they seemed to stagnate and then sort of slide back. Where do things stand now and what is the next frontier?
Gersh Kuntzman: Well, the next frontier is really reducing driving. In other words, the Movement for Livable Streets is what I cover. They're always, you know, tarred by the opponents, “You want to get rid of cars.” No, actually, nobody wants to get rid of cars because there's certain times you know it, you need a car, you got to move a bookcase, you need a car. Fine. But what we want, what the Livable Streets movement wants, is just to reduce unnecessary driving. And in the city of New York, a lot of driving is unnecessary because for all its faults, we have the best subway system with the best bus system. There's no such thing really as a transit desert in the sense that there are busses that reach to all corners of the city. Now, granted, it's not that convenient if you live in eastern Queens to get on a bus and get to Long Island City, that's not great. We get that. But driving is not much better either. First of all, it’s expensive to have a car. Second of all, it congests the roadways. It pollutes the air. It endangers children. It makes our city less livable, frankly. So what the real movement is, let's find ways to really improve transit, really improve transit. None of this bullshit that they always talk about. The MTA really is facing a fiscal cliff. They have to get their house in order too, everybody knows that. But congestion pricing, for example, is nothing revolutionary. It's a toll, right? There's already tolls on every bridge at well, most of the bridges in town, don't treat congestion pricing like it's a crazy cockamamie scheme. It's just a normal toll. So that would create $1,000,000,000 a year for transit, which would be bondable to $15 billion. And when you spend $30 billion over five years on a capital renovation program, $15 billion is not a small amount of money. So that's good. But we have opponents who are constantly talking about, well, this is a tax on the middle class. The fact about driving is people who drive or own cars almost across the board in every neighborhood of the city are wealthier than their transit using neighbors. So this is not a tax on the middle class. It's a tax on the wealthier people in each neighborhood. Now, by no means is every car owner wealthy. I'm saying any given neighborhood, they're wealthier than their transit using neighbors. And that's something that the Vickie Paladinos of the world and the Joe Borellis of the world who oppose congestion pricing, just don't want to face.
Errol Louis: You know, it's interesting because this is where you lose me, I got to be honest with you. I mean, what.
Gersh Kuntzman: What fact that I just offer?
Errol Louis: No, no, it's not it's not fact. It's really more, you know, sort of guts. No open, no persuasiveness, persuasiveness. I mean, like. Like, look, I own a car. Always have. I've had a car since I came here in 1984.
Gersh Kuntzman: You're a crazy person, but go ahead.
Errol Louis: Well, I mean, now I'm a guy who needs to get to like, lots of different corners of the city.
Gersh Kuntzman: You've chosen a lifestyle that requires you to think you need a car.
Errol Louis: I have family, including.
Gersh Kuntzman: So do I.
Errol Louis: Very sick family members who I might need to see on a moment's notice who happen to live in the New York region. Some of them are on Long Island, some of them are in Westchester, where I was raised, and a few until recently were in North Jersey. Right. And these are not options where if you need to, you know, see somebody in an adult care facility, you know, there's no option of like, oh, I'll see if I can catch the 7 train out of Grand Central tomorrow morning. Not going to happen. It's also not like, you know, oh, I'll pay $150 bucks for an Uber. I'm not going to do that either. I'm going to do what makes sense, which is get my car and go where I have to go. That's my phase of life now. Back in the eighties, when I first got here, it was like, first of all, the city was ridiculously dangerous, including the subways. I knew people who got like robbed at the point of a shotgun on the Franklin Avenue shuttle. But the point was, again, if the story is in the North Bronx, you're in central Brooklyn and your editor doesn't, as you know, your editor doesn't want to hear about, “Oh, I couldn't get a train up there.” You get in your damn car and you get up there and you get the story. So, like, that’s, that's just really basic. There are some people who, for whatever reason, are going to choose to have a car. I think it's great. I know you and I disagree on this. I think it's great that zero emissions vehicles are becoming more and more popular. I love the idea that the mayor said, I don't see how it's going to happen, but he says they're going to convert all of the Uber and Lyft cars to zero emissions in the next like 48 months somehow, I don't know how he's going to do that, but I think of that as good and positive thing. The argument about, you know, car owners have more money than other people, so let's tax them.
Gersh Kuntzman: Then their transit-using neighborhoods you live in. What do you live in? Fort Greene, Bed-Stuy. Crown Heights. Crown Heights.
Errol Louis: I got great transit.
Gersh Kuntzman: I know, but people who own cars in Crown Heights, you go to the census, this is just the U.S. Census, are wealthier than the people in the neighborhood.
Errol Louis: But so what?
Gersh Kuntzman: It's not a tax on them, but it's not a tax on the poorest.
Errol Louis: I mean, if you, if you want to do income redistribution, you know.
Gersh Kuntzman: Yes, I do.
Errol Louis: Okay. So fine. Well, then just go ahead and do it. Let's not weave it into like, should you have a car.
Gersh Kuntzman: You're 100% right in the sense that if we funded transit like we fund the police and the fire and the sanitation. Yes. In other words, with normal tax money, then we wouldn't even be having this argument if we funded properly. Like I said, you are constantly building another architecture on top of the failed architecture to get stuff done.
Errol Louis: My only point is like, look, if you say as an added bonus, we'll take a little extra money from well-to-do New Yorkers, I'm like, Yeah, that's a different argument. That's a difference.
Gersh Kuntzman: I like that.
Errol Louis: That's a different fight.
Gersh Kuntzman: I want to go back to your point about the $150 Uber ride that you mentioned. And this is a really important point that I think people need to realize, owning a car in New York City is very expensive, especially if you do it legitimately by registering it here as opposed to out of state and.
Errol Louis: Insuring it right now so.
Gersh Kuntzman: That once or twice a year where you do have to take that $150 Uber like it hurts in that moment. But over the course of the year, you might spend $1,000 on cabs. Owning the car is costing you a lot more than $1,000, and it's costing your neighbors a lot more in congestion and pollution, etc., etc. So once we start to internalize the cost of car ownership, taking a cab five times a year is a lot cheaper than owning a car all the time. Yeah, do the math though.
Errol Louis: I wish it was only five times.
Gersh Kuntzman: Okay, But you know what I mean.
Errol Louis: Yeah. No, I get you. I mean, look, I feel like I've done this every which way possible. Like I used to ride the subways almost exclusively, even when I owned a car, because that's what made sense.
Gersh Kuntzman: But it also gets around faster.
Errol Louis: Unquestionably. Well, on any given day, you know, full disclosure here, I normally have to come in in like mid to late afternoon because my show is on at seven. On any given day, it almost always makes sense if I really want to get here on time to take the subway. Now, there are days where like I've got a bunch of meal prep with me or I've got like some big binder or something like that and in that case, I'm going to call an Uber, allocate a little bit more time, but drive into the city? No way.
Gersh Kuntzman: But that that's a good instinct.
Errol Louis: But now here's what happens, though, and this is why I support congestion pricing. There have been a couple of times where for complicated reasons, I had to drop my son off, who does go to school in a transit desert called Red Hook.
Gersh Kuntzman: Ok, definitely a transit desert.
Errol Louis: Yeah. And he has to be there on time, so I'll drive him there. And then I had to just like, scoot into the city, pick up something at the studio, get to a story, you know? Anyway, I had to loop into the city during rush hour and found a parking space not far from here in Chelsea. Happened twice, and I was like, “Oh, my God.” You know, I'm thinking to myself, you know, from a policy standpoint, I'm like, If you don't charge me a lot of money, I would do this every day.
Gersh Kuntzman: That's right.
Errol Louis: I would do this every day. And I think the price that's being thrown around around congestion pricing is about the right price signal, I guess the economists would call it. If you're telling me, yeah, you can drive into the city every day it’s going to cost you, you know, like 40 or 50 bucks. And I'm like, no, I got another plan. I don't think I'd take the situation.
Gersh Kuntzman: I don't think they're talking about that high. But because they only want to charge you once, you can go in and out of the office. True. But nonetheless, I talked to an economist who said that $90 would be the right price simply because you're not just charging the driver, you're charging the driver for all of the costs associated with that driving, the congestion it causes for the other drivers, the pollution, the road violence, etc. Now, it's never going to be $90. I don't even think it'll be the $23 they're talking about. I think at the end of the day, the politicians will not show great courage and it'll be like $8, $9, and it won't reduce traffic that much and it will be seen just as a revenue grab and that's going to undermine it.
Errol Louis: Well, let's be optimistic here. I don't know what the right price signal is. I mean, like, look, I get up and do the dance with move my car from one side of the street to the other side of the street three times a week so that the street sweeper can come by, even though it almost never comes. I do all of that rather than get like I think it's like a $45 ticket, right? And I got 45 bucks. It's not that big of a deal, but I don't like the ticket. I don't want the ticket. I don't want the hassle. I don't want to have to do it. And so I'll get up and I'll move the car. And so, you know, at a surprisingly, I mean, that's the lesson of all of these things, right? A surprisingly small amount can actually trigger a response, you know, for the same reason that people will drive an extra six blocks just because there's a gas station metal charge and $0.05 less.
Gersh Kuntzman: That's right. Yeah. They call it like price elasticity.
Errol Louis: Yes.
Gersh Kuntzman: Which is the fancy way of saying that basically you make your decisions. I mean, it was true with cigarette taxes. You know, Mike Bloomberg put in this fairly massive cigarette tax at the time. I mean a pack of cigarettes used to be cheap and smoking went down. Now is not the same thing about congestion pricing. Isn't that the same thing about liquor taxes? That's right. Or all the things that we want to discourage people from doing.
Errol Louis: Although interesting were reaching an outer limit when it comes to cigarettes, I just read a long piece in the Wall Street Journal about how New York is about to, you know, throw another $1.50 or something on top of what's already the highest cigarette tax in the country. And at this point, upwards of 50% of all cigarettes. There are some numbers, there's some data that suggests upwards of 50% of all cigarettes sold in New York City right now are bootleg. They're off the books. They're out of state.
Gersh Kuntzman: Well, that's the covered plate equivalent for cigarettes. And so that's another concern that people have about congestion pricing is if we don't solve the covered plate problem, you're going to lose, you know, 7% of the total revenue and that'll get into real money.
Errol Louis: By the way, with the covered plates, I mean, even a what looks like a clear plastic cover is illegal in New York because it bounces the light off. If you're trying to do the speed cameras or the toll cameras.
Gersh Kuntzman: That’s the theory. But actually, sometimes I see a covered plate, a clear plastic one. I take a picture of it with a flash, without a flash from different angles. It doesn't seem to actually help people avoid being spotted by the cameras. The ones that do are those opaque ones that you see sold on Amazon, which shouldn't be sold on Amazon because they are illegal in New York and they do work.
Errol Louis: Well, let me. If actually, you know what I see in my notes here, stuff I did not know about Gersh Kuntzman.
Gersh Kuntzman: Oh, come on.
Errol Louis: I've known you for many years.
Gersh Kuntzman: The award-winning, money-losing producer.
Errol Louis: All right, well.
Gersh Kuntzman: I am a money-losing, off-off-Broadway producer. I just want to be clear about that. “Murder at the Food Co-op” was a hit and lost money, “SUV, the Musical” was a hit and lost money. So if you want to go back, those are all on online.
Errol Louis: The food co-op, I assume, is a reference to the Park Slope.
Gersh Kuntzman: Of course. Yeah. Yeah. I actually am a member of the Park Slope Food Co-Op but have no shame there. People think of it as a liberal woke produce bastion, you know, guilty as charged. That's fine by me.
Errol Louis: You know, I actually tried to join.
Gersh Kuntzman: What happened?
Errol Louis: I used to be very active. You remember my credit union days? I was big in the cooperative movement. I was. I was, I was psyched. I was into it. I called up and I was like, you know, how do I join? And when they read me the rules, they're like, you know, you got to be here at six. And we locked the doors at 6:15 and all of this stuff. And I was like, Wait a second, comrade. Yeah, I I'm just looking for some cheap produce.
Gersh Kuntzman: Here. You got to be part of the community. You got to work your shift, right?
Errol Louis: You know, they caught at me the wrong phase of life. I was transitioning from somebody who had more time than money to somebody who had slightly more money than time. And I was like, I can't do work shifts. You got to be kidding me. You know, I enjoy it.
Gersh Kuntzman: I meet everybody in the neighborhood, it's fun, you know, then they love Criminal Mischief. They, that they all sing the song to me now. It's just great. You know, It's really gets in your head. You can't let it go. And by the way, if you want to listen to 'Criminal Mischief', you just go to Spotify. Jimmy and the Jaywalkers is the band. I'll plug it myself and you can listen to Criminal Mischief and all the other hits.
Errol Louis: So it's your song, right?
Gersh Kuntzman: It is my song. Okay. So just so you know where that started, the reason it's called Criminal Mischief is the lawyer, Adam White, got arrested for doing what I do, uncovering a plate. All he did was uncover a plate. Right? Unfortunately, the guy who whose plate he was uncovering was sitting in the car and called the cops. And this guy was himself cop adjacent. He's a security officer in some town in Nassau. So the cops responded. They arrested Adam White and charged him with, of all things, criminal mischief in the third degree, which is basically graffiti charge. So that gave me the idea. First of all, I had to write a stupid little folk song about it, like Dylan would do about, you know, Hattie Carroll or whatever, which is a joke also. But then I got so excited about the song, I thought, wait a minute, maybe I could get arrested for criminal mischief. And then that would be its own story that the rest of the media would have to do and then pay attention to this issue. So like, like everything else, it started as a, as a cry in the wilderness, if you will, you know? And it worked. It took off.
Errol Louis: Oh, yeah. Well, look, you look for our purposes, it means we can go out with this song, right? Anthony, I'm looking at my producer here. Right here. There are no royalty issues. You can just tell a lawyer like.
Gersh Kuntzman: We can just, as royalty issues. I will. I will get.
Errol Louis: Oh, pay you, give him a cup of coffee.
Gersh Kuntzman: No, no, we get it. I get royalties. I've made $3.13 on royalties for that song. Oh, it's on Spotify. It's on YouTube, which is the weirdest thing to get a check for, like $0.88 every month. Okay, So, yeah, if you want to play him out, you play out with Criminal Mischief.
Errol Louis: We've got we've got some jelly beans in the green room. You can have that as part of your payment.
Gersh Kuntzman: But bought and paid for as always.
Errol Louis: Well, look, I hope we can reconvene at some point and talk about serious efforts to deal with a problem that is much worse, persistent, and thornier than I ever imagined. I thought I was going to write a couple of columns in the Daily News, shame a couple of people. The local precinct commander would be like, I don't need this hassle. He's bringing it up with the mayor, which I did repeatedly, de Blasio. And you know, absolutely nothing. The stubborn persistence of corruption is a topic for another time.
Gersh Kuntzman: You need a hit song. That's right. We'll get you a song. You got a good voice.
Errol Louis: Hey, you know what? Let's talk about that. All right. Thanks a whole lot, Gersh. We'll talk again soon.
Gersh Kuntzman: Always happy to be here.
Errol Louis: That's going to do it for this episode of You Decide. As always, thanks for listening. I'd love to hear your thoughts about this conversation or any of the others. You can find me on Twitter at Errol Louis or leave a message for me at 212-379-3440. You can also email us at Yourstoryny1@Charter.com. And if you're looking for more analysis of New York politics, you should subscribe to and listen to my colleagues’ podcast. It's called “Off Topic/Om Politics” and it's hosted by political reporters Zach Fink, Courtney Gross, and Juan Manuel Benitez. Those episodes come out every Friday. I'll be back next week. Thanks so much for listening.
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NY1’s Errol Louis has been interviewing powerful politicians and cultural icons for years, but it’s when the TV cameras are turned off that things really get interesting. From career highlights, to personal moments, to stories that have never been told, join Errol each week for intimate conversations with the people who are shaping the future of New York and beyond. Listen to "You Decide with Errol Louis" every Wednesday, wherever you listen to podcasts.
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