There’s pretty much only one thing standing between New York City and total barbarism. It’s not the cops, the courts or Carnegie Hall. The city’s single greatest civilizing force is the New York State Department of Motor Vehicles form MV-15. The MV-15 allows you, the average, anonymous citizen, to access the driving records and personal information of any motorist with New York license plates.

Libertarians can say what they want about the slippery slope of privacy rights. We are already close to the bottom of the slope when it comes to motor vehicle carnage. Reckless, careless or just plain idiot drivers are, by many measures, the single biggest threat that New Yorkers face on a daily basis, more dangerous than either street crime or terrorism. In 2004, there were 190,000 car crashes in New York City, a staggering 520 per day. In these crashes 287 motorists and 179 pedestrians were killed, and about 15,000 injured. And 2004 was a good year. Nationwide, about 45,000 Americans are killed in car wrecks annually, the equivalent of a couple of fully loaded jumbo jets going down each week.

If the subway or any other public transportation system failed this badly and this often, it would be shut down immediately. Yet, motorists continue to cruise New York City’s streets with almost total impunity. The NYPD rarely stops anyone for moving violations (unless they’re on a bicycle). And if you kill someone with your car, as long as you’re not drunk or driving with a suspended license, the cops will likely chalk it up as an “accident.” The media will barely bother reporting it.

I can’t even use the word “accident” anymore when I talk or write about motor vehicle deaths. Calling it an accident assumes, usually before the facts are in, that the wreck was no one’s fault. Sure, lots of crashes truly are horrible accidents. But if you spilled milk dozens of times a day in somewhat predictable ways, would you continue to call it an accident every time? I’ve taken to calling them “crashes” or “incidents.”

When I first came to New York after graduating from college I remember sometimes thinking that it was kind of amazing that people weren’t more often pushing each other in front of moving trains or lobbing bricks off of rooftops. The opportunities to wreck havoc are so abundant in New York. Yet, by and large, people don’t. It can’t only be fear of punishment or a narcoleptic, TV-induced consumer trance that prevents this fractious and diverse city from breaking down into total mayhem. A tacit social contract governs life in New York City. It is a testament to how far New York City has come in the last dozen years that, today, the most frequent and egregious violator of this social contract is the guy in the souped-up SUV, tearing down the street, leaning on his horn, trying to make the next traffic light no matter what the risk or cost to the people outside his vehicle.

We have pretty much come to assume that the motor vehicle’s destructive dominance of public space and motorists' sociopathic behavior is the natural order of things. A century ago, New Yorkers assumed cholera epidemics, tenement fires, and child labor were inevitable and unavoidable products of big city life. It took years of work by highly organized, politically powerful, morally-driven progressive reformers to cure the city of those ills. Likewise, it will take years of work to repair the damage caused by our near-religious devotion to automobility.

In the meantime, there is no reason why you have to let the guy in the SUV get away with it. MV-15 his ass. When you see a motorist do something dangerous or socially repugnant on a crowded New York City street, take note of his license plate number. When you get home, google “New York State DMV form MV-15.” Fill out the form. Getting the driver's name, address, phone number and complete driving records will cost you $12, and because you’re dealing with the ineptitude of New York State government, it will take something like 3 to 5 weeks to arrive at your door. It's worth wait.

Once you have that information your creativity is the only limit to what you can do with it. Was the guy’s car alarm going off in front of your house all night? Give him a phone call at 3:30 a.m. every morning for a week and let him know that someone is trying to break into his vehicle (Don't forget to turn off your caller ID tag!). Was he blasting his horn needlessly or driving like a maniac through your neighborhood? Write him an anonymous letter and make sure he understands that his public behavior has been noted and, yeah, you know where he lives. Be polite and civil, don’t say anything you’d be embarrassed to have come back to you, and don’t do anything violent or illegal. But go ahead and use that MV-15. Let the motorhead know that the social contract that makes New York City function is still intact. Out in public he may be hidden behind tinted windows, reclined in plush bucket seats and cocooned within 4,500 pounds of metal. But let him know that he is still being held accountable for his behavior. And there will be consequences.

12:53 PM | Link |