Paper Plates, Bike Advocates, and the Billion Dollar Insurance Scheme

Car ownership in NYC is much higher than reported and the proof is on paper, plates.

Welcome to CogDis on Kloudview, this is a column that explores the differences or cognitive dissonance between media driven popular perception and what’s actually happening in NYC from an outerborough perspective. 

Last week a NYPD operation resulted in dozens of cars with fake paper plates being seized. One was even hand drawn, poorly, you be the judge.

License plate watching in NYC can be a very productive and fun game. On any given day you’re able to spot plates from at least ten states and if you’re lucky maybe even a foreign country - Canada. Or better yet you might even spot the marker and cardboard DIY plate. Below I give a brief and totally unscientific guide to help with your license plate watching.

Here are states’ plates you’ll likely see on any given day in NYC:

The usual suspects - NJ, PA, and CT. The tri state area which is really a quad state area. NJ + NY +  PA or CT = tri state area 

The East Coast regulars - Maryland, Vermont, Delaware, and Massachusetts. These states are still relatively close to the city and border one of the states in the tri state area; you'd normally expect to see these in NYC.

The kind of far but still close enoughs - North Carolina, Ohio,  and Virginia. I haven’t seen much plates from West Virginia in NYC. The combination of these 4 states form a band that defines the Northeast. If you’re to the west or south of these states you’re definitely in the Midwest or the South. It’s somewhat reasonable to see these in plates in the city every now and again.

The where did you come from? group - Florida, California, and Texas. AKA The most I’m not from here and I’m totally from here plate you can have. 

The foreign nationals - Ontario and Quebec. Maybe they’re on vacation. Maybe they live here. Wonder what insurance rates are like in a small town in Quebec. 

The cornucopia of plates isn’t because we have so many drivers from so many states on vacation. It’s because insurance costs are exorbitant, second only to Michigan . Registration and other processes are byzantine within NYS. It took me less than a block’s walk in my Flatbush neighborhood to see all the plates listed above. I even omitted some that I saw - Alabama and New Hampshire.  

This list is in no way exhaustive of every plate you will see but it’s a starting point for the many plates you will see on the streets of NYC. It’s important because there are several ideas that emanate from the bike advocacy and aligned groups that need to be done away with. And policy needs to come down from Albany and possibly the Fed in regard to the widespread fraud.   

Your typical bike/open street/pedestrian advocate from a silk stocking district will invariably rattle off some car ownership rates as reasoning for whatever new proposal they have in mind. For example from the article linked above, “Most households in New York City, about 56 percent, don’t own cars. But if you’ve ever attended a community board meeting about redesigning a street, you might have come away thinking that car storage…” This number is clearly incorrect as they do not account for the mass of cars that aren’t registered in this state, it’s just a repetition of NYC’s or NYS’ registration numbers.

Meanwhile, on a recent drive along Kings Highway it appeared paper plates and hard plates from out of state dominate the road. Every resident of the city that takes to the road or even crosses it has something to say about Florida drivers, yet some of them have never set foot in Florida, the opinion is based solely on cars they’ve seen in NYC sporting plates from the Sunshine State. That means that asshole from Florida is most likely an asshole from NYC, deep down we all know this universal truth, it’s just a hard pill to swallow. 

Another hard one to swallow - there are far more cars on the road in NYC than listed.

Car ownership in NYC is much higher than reported and the proof is on paper, plates.

Insurance and registration fraud is commonplace, normal almost when it comes to to car ownership in NYC. Well before the proliferation of paper plates that came with the lockdown, New Jersey and Florida plates for NYC residents were not considered out of the ordinary. A walk in any residential neighborhood of the city will show this to be true. Look to the driveways. Look to the parking lots. Or pick any block at random. Jersey, PA, Florida license plates side by side with NY, sometimes even outnumbering the Empire State.