By Steven Symes 
New York City has been waging all-out war on so-called “ghost cars.” The term is supposed to sound scary, but really it’s referring to cars with fake, obscured, or altered license plates. We’ve even covered how old license plates from other states which were supposed to have been destroyed have turned up on cars in the big city.
Multiple pileups involving dozens of cars shut down a New Orleans bridge.
City officials held yet another press conference recently to remind the media and in turn the public how serious of a threat ghost cars are. They emphasized it wasn’t just about lost revenue for the city and state (which surely is an issue) but about combatting violent crime.
The practice is mostly to help drivers avoid the expensive tolls in NYC, dodge the speed enforcement cameras, even duck the upcoming controversial congestion pricing during peak driving times. However, criminals use ghost cars so the plate readers and network of traffic cameras can’t trace their movements, alerting police to their presence.
In other areas, and we imagine in NYC as well, criminals will also use a stolen car to commit violent offenses like armed robberies and shootings. But we guess officials feel ghost cars are still used enough in those sorts of crimes that they need to be the focus of increased enforcement.
ABC7 NY says over the last three years police in the Big Apple have removed 73,000 ghost cars from public roads. That sounds like a lot, but according to the government, there are about 2 million cars in the big city.
In that same report, ABC7 tried drawing a tenuous tie between ghost cars and ghost guns. It all sounds so scary if you don’t really understand the details, because “ghost cars” have been a thing since license plates first came into popular usage. The only thing that’s changed now is the use of automatic plate readers and traffic cameras, giving criminals as well as people who think the tolls are too expensive even more incentive to game the system.
Back in September, Mayor Eric Adams announced a new interagency task force created specifically for catching ghost cars. In an official city press release, the mayor even joked that the new task force members are “real-life ghost busters.” We couldn’t make this up if we tried.
We get this is a serious and growing issue, but the term “ghost cars” is just so cheesy we wish government officials would come up with something less childish. They won’t and instead are leaning into the cheese, which sadly is watering down the real message.
Image via Eyewitness News ABC7NY/YouTube