New York
MADD looking for New York Drunk Driving Law To Become National Wednesday, November 16th, 2011
New York calls it Leandra’s Law and Mothers Against Drunk Driving wants every state to adopt it.
The anti-drunk driving group MADD will call today for every state to follow New York’s lead and implement a version of the law which automatically makes it a felony to drive drunk with a child in the car.
Today MADD officials will be unveiling in Washington DC a report on drunk driving laws. New York’s Leandra’s Law will be part of that report.
“We consider it the gold standard of child endangerment laws,” MADD National President Jan Withers said.
Leandra’s Law was enacted in 2009 and named for 11 year old Leandra Rosado, who was killed in a drunken driving accident on the Henry Hudson Parkway in Manhattan.
The law also mandates the installation of an ignition interlock device (essentially a Breathalyzer) on the car of anyone convicted of a misdemeanor or felony DWI.
According to MADD, more than 1,400 people have been arrested in New York on Leandra’s Law offenses since it’s been in place.
Only three others states – Arizona, Texas and Oklahoma – have similar laws.
In addition to today’s report in DC, MADD offices in each state will be pressing local officials to adopt their own versions of Leandra’s Law.
NY Speeding Ticket Email Hoax Friday, July 8th, 2011
If you get an email which seems to be from the New York State Police and has the subject line “Uniform Traffic Ticket”, don’t open the attached zip file. The email did not originate from the State Police or other agency and the zip file most likely contains a computer virus and is definitely not a speeding ticket.
Even if you know this is not a speeding ticket, please don’t open the attachment out of curiosity or any other reason.
Here’s what the email looks like:
From: Police agency
Subject: UNIFORM TRAFFIC TICKET
Attachment: Ticket.zip – 12k
New York State – Department of Motor Vehicles
UNIFORM TRAFFIC TICKET
POLICE AGENCY
NEW YORK STATE POLICE
Local Police Code
THE PERSON DESCRIBED ABOVE IS CHARGED AS FOLLOWS
Time 7:25am
Date of Offense 07/02/2011
IN VIOLATION OF NYS V AND T LAW
TO PLEAD, PRINT OUT THE ENCLOSED TICKET AND SEND IT TO TOWN COURT, CHATAM HALL., PO BOX 117
Greenburgh Town Court (NY) Collecting On Old Traffic Tickets Thursday, June 2nd, 2011
The new court administrator of the Greenburgh Town Court in New York recently found 100,000 old traffic tickets hidden away within the court. Most remain open and go back as far as the 1990s.
If it is an unresolved case, the court will now notify the NYS DMV to alert the motorist in question that he or she better come in by a specific date or risk getting suspended. Contrary to what many believe, the statute of limitations isn’t applicable to this type of scenario and these tickets don’t just expire.
This is turning into a windfall for the Town of Greenburgh and a source of confusion and frustration for many motorists.
Thus far in 2011, the town has collected $162,002 in fines and surcharges for old tickets. Ultimately, revenue from these forgotten cases could be in the millions of dollars.
Many who are receiving notices either find it takes too long to wait and try to contest the old summonses in a suddenly very busy court or are annoyed because they are certain the ticket was paid years ago but have no proof anymore.
If you have been notified about an outstanding issue in the Greenburgh Town Court or have another traffic ticket or related issue in the area, feel free to contact a TicketHELP attorney for a free consultation.
NY Move Over Law Traffic Tickets Friday, April 29th, 2011
New York has a new Vehicle and Traffic Law this year–The NY “Move Over Law”.
It went into effect on Jan 1, 2011. The purpose is to protect emergency workers on the side of roadways by requiring motorists to:
- On all roadways, reduce speed when approaching an emergency vehicle on the side of the road.
- On larger roadways (Parkways, Controlled Access Highways, roadways with multiple lanes), reduce speed and move from the lane immediately adjacent to the emergency vehicle as soon as it’s safe to do so.
New York traffic attorneys are starting to see tickets issued for this violation. There are reports of ticket blitzes specifically aimed at motorists who fail to switch lanes while approaching an emergency vehicle engaged on the side of the road.
The video should be pretty self explanatory:
NY Traffic Court Friday, March 18th, 2011
NY traffic courts are not all the same.
There are essentially two categories of traffic court in NY. The TVB and everything else.
Read more about the differences between one type of NY traffic court and the other.
Cell Phone Tickets In NY Now Come With 2 Points Friday, February 18th, 2011
As of February 16th, 2011 cell phone tickets issued in NY will carry two points if a driver is ultimately convicted.
DMV set forth their reasoning for changing the summons from a no point violation to a point violation. The key factors raised were:
- Without points, motorists were not subjected to the points based penalties (surcharges at 6 points; suspension at 11 points) that are in place to penalize and serve as a deterrent to persistent violators.
- Distracted driving is a serious issue. Numerous studies have confirmed that distracted driving, such as driving while talking on a cell phone, significantly contributes to accidents and fatalities on the highways. AAA reports that each day distracted driving is a contributing factor in 4,000 to 8,000 crashes on our nation’s highways and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) reports that nationwide in 2008 5,870 people died (representing 16% of all highway fatalities) and an estimated 515,000 were injured due to distracted driving.
- A Carnegie Mellon Institute study concludes that driving while using a cell phone reduces the amount of brain activity associated with driving by 37%. This study seems to suggest that hands free cell phone use isn’t even the solution (perhaps a complet ban of driving and cell phone use altogether?), but DMV nevertheless cited it as part of the reason for their rule change.Whatever the reasoning, expect both an increase in the number of summonses issued and an increase in the percentage of summons challenged in NY traffic courts in 2011.
Submitted by NY Traffic Ticket Lawyer Scott Feifer.
Read more here: 2 Points For NY Cell Phone Traffic Tickets
New NY driving law to protect emergency workers Thursday, January 13th, 2011
Effective Jan 1, 2010, all motorists approaching a parked authorized emergency vehicle with emergency lights flashing are required to “move over” or “slow down” on all highways and roadways in New York State.
The law is known as the “Ambrose-Searles Move Over Act.”
If convicted in NY, the violation will carry two points.
The NY State Senate offers the following points as the justification for the new law:
- It is enacted to protect emergency personnel and emergency vehicles that are parked on highways or roadways in the performance of their duties
- New York State Trooper Robert Ambrose was fatally injured during a routine traffic stop on the New York State Thruway in Yonkers, New York on December 23, 2002.
- Onondaga County Deputy Sheriff Glenn M. Searles was assisting a motorist whose vehicle had gone off the highway when a second car lost control and struck Deputy Searles, fatally pinning him against his patrol car on November 29, 2003.
- Motorists must be aware that the presence of a police or other emergency vehicle indicates a potentially dangerous situation.
Drivers should keep the following in mind:
- Be careful when approaching an emergency vehicle with emergency lights flashing.
- Reduce speed when approaching the emergency vehicle.
- When multiple lanes are available, move from the lane immediately adjacent to the emergency vehicle as soon as it’s safe to do so.
Submitted by NY traffic attorney Scott Feifer
Do quotas exist? Yes. Are they bad? Not necessarily. Friday, September 17th, 2010
The New York Times recently reported a story about a clandestine recording made at a Brooklyn, NY police station which, the story set forth, finally put to rest any questions about the existence of traffic ticket quotas.
Great story other than the fact that we really didn’t have any questions about this. Quotas, or whatever you want to call them, do exist. The recording only reinforced what we already knew.
As a traffic attorney, I get questions/comments about ticket quotas all the time. Mostly “do they exist” questions and “he only gave me the ticket because it was the end of the month, he was filling his quota” type comments. Here are some thoughts:
There’s no specific quota or number that an officer must reach. However, if an officer is sent out to do traffic enforcement and comes back with zero tickets issued, is his supervisor satisfied with the job? What about one ticket? Five tickets? Bottom line is there’s some “performance” level which brings either a “bad job”, “acceptable job” or “great job” response from a supervising officer. Consider somewhere between “acceptable” and “great” to be the so called “quota”.
Officers have been candid with me in the past about the existence of some expected performance level. I’ve never heard an officer mention anything about an end of the month rush. I do not believe extra tickets are issued just because it was the end of the month.
And what if extra tickets were issued because it was the end of the month or because a supervisor went on a rampage about issuing more tickets? There really is no inherent problem with this. This would only be a problem if, for example, an officer was expected to write 10 tickets during a period where only 7 violations were committed and he therefore wrote three bogus summonses to satisfy his boss. In NYC, there are thousands of violations of varying severity committed every hour. A “quota” seems more an expectation that an officer will actually pay attention, expend some energy and write some tickets when he sees violations moreso than a call to write X number of tickets whether you observe a violation or not.
Officers issuing more tickets in response to violations they observe because they’ve been asked to work harder is not a story. The real “quota” story will be when an officer admits to making up violations and issuing bad tickets because he was “forced” to out of fear for his job. Just consider that in a typical day at least 10% of the drivers in an urban area likely commit at least a single violation, whether it’s a fail to signal or not wearing a seatbelt or even driving a few mph over the limit. Now consider that way fewer than 10% of all the drivers on a road in a given day will get issued a ticket and it’s pretty easy to see that there are plenty of legitimate violations to go around.
Submitted by Scott Feifer
NY teens learn about dangers of texting and driving Saturday, December 12th, 2009
As part of a nationwide awareness campaign about the dangers of texting and distracted driving, teens in Suffolk County and Nassau County NY recently pledged to not text and pay attention while driving.
Students in Bethpage and Babylon took park in Allstate’s “X the TXT” campaign. The campaign compares texting while driving to to driving with your eyes closed. The timing of the campaign is no coincidence–the holiday season is one of the deadliest times for teen drivers.
Learning to drive today is not like it was 25 years ago. Where the only distraction used to be turning a dial to the left and right until one of 3 stations you liked came in clearly, drivers today must avoid the distractions of smartphones that can text, email, etc, satellite radios that scroll information across the screen and GPS units which talk and continually update on it’s screen. Moreover, hybrids and other energy efficient vehicles will soon be here and will bring more complications and things to monitor on a typical dashboard.
New York recently enacted a law specifically prohibiting texting while driving. Federal statistics show distracted driving was to blame for nearly 6,000 deaths and 500,000 injuries in 2008, though it is unclear how many were the result of texting in particular.
Allstate’s program sounds like a good one–getting drivers into the habit of paying attention from the time they start driving is a step in the right direction.
Submitted by Scott Feifer
NYC Traffic Tickets
Feifer & Greenberg, LLP
NYTicketHELP.com
