What is a bad driver?
There is a journalist, here in New York City, whom I’ve followed and admired for the past decade. They have written, and contributed to, many enjoyable and interesting stories. They are talented, popular, and professionally successful. And, like many of their media peers, they operate a Twitter feed where they promote their work, crack jokes, and share wry observations about life in the big city.
One of the journalist’s longest-running comedic bits consists of bragging about driving a car in the city, about violating various laws with that car, about their desire to make the city more accommodating to cars. They have joked about parking in front of fire hydrants and driving around without the right inspection stickers. In one post, they joked about receiving a ticket for speeding.
I have been fascinated by the tension between this journalist’s remarkable accomplishments and their stated driving habits. Why would someone blessed with so much talent and success also engage, or purport to engage, in such straightforwardly antisocial behavior?
The situation raises a couple of interrelated questions: How did the journalist become this way? What does it even mean to be a bad driver in New York? And just how bad of a driver is this particular journalist?
How the journalist arrived at the strange intersection of personal prosperity and vehicular lawbreaking is a story for someone else to write. And the question of what constitutes a bad New York driver is difficult to answer without a concrete example to examine. That leaves us with the last question: Just how poorly does the journalist drive?
Based on the journalist’s posts, I already knew their car’s make, model, and year. New York City’s property database, ACRIS, told me the journalist had semi-recently purchased property in the city. With that address in hand, I hopped on the subway and, thirty minutes later, began to comb the journalist’s neighborhood for their parked car. Within forty-five minutes, I found it.
The (legally) parked vehicle was the correct make, model, and year. Its rear license plate holder advertised a car dealership based near the city where the journalist attended college. Beneath the plate holder was a bumper sticker from a lifestyle brand that the journalist talks about all the time. Through the back window, I could see two objects that were consistent with the journalist’s biography.
Behind the windshield, on top of the dashboard, lay a vehicle inspection report that had been printed out at an automobile shop seventeen days prior. The report said the car had passed its safety test but failed its emissions test:
Emissions result:
Readiness: Fail
Monitor EVAP: Not Ready
Monitor Secondary Air: Not ready
“PLEASE BE ADVISED,” the report continued, “Your vehicle’s on-board computer system is not ready to be tested. The on-board computer system is not ready to make a determination regarding the condition of the pollution control system on the vehicle.” In the report’s left margin, someone had scribbled in pencil: “Please have mercy! Dealing with inspection.” This detail matched the journalist’s posts about their car.
I then ran the journalist’s license plate through How’s My Driving NY, a website created by the programmer Brian Howald to aggregate violation data generated by local traffic police and fixed speed cameras.
Between 2019 and 2021, the journalist paid five tickets written by traffic cops: three for failing to display an up-to-date registration or inspection sticker, and two for failing to move the car for street cleaning. Between 2022 and 2024, the journalist paid seventeen tickets: seven for missing stickers, five for parking in front of a fire hydrant, four for street cleaning, two for speeding, and one for violating posted parking rules. One of the speeding tickets lined up exactly with an incident that the journalist described on Twitter.
Here is a table of the journalist’s tickets:
So is the journalist a bad driver? I have heard the charitable argument that New York is such a difficult city for drivers that it is effectively impossible to avoid violating the law, every single day. I do not find this convincing. It is also unclear why an improperly registered car that is unable to pass an emissions inspection should be driven on any street of any city. The whole idea behind routine vehicular inspections is to make driving safer. And the addition of two speeding tickets suggests to me that the journalist really ought to take remedial driving lessons before driving again in New York City.
But perhaps I am wrong and the journalist is in fact one of the city’s better drivers. This goes to the heart of the mystery: Is being a bad driver a relative status or an absolute one? What is the threshold at which someone should stop driving?
If you have thoughts on this mystery, there are two ways to contact me:
Email: trotterblog1@gmail.com
Signal: trotter.02
You can also yell at me on Twitter here: @jktrotter