Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie is the one man in Albany blocking adoption of a bill that is sure to save lives. He needs to get out the way for the Stop Super Speeders bill that is backed by the state Senate and Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins and Gov. Hochul and Mayor Mamdani. Being the odd man out here will cost lives.
Speed this to passage. The legislation, written by Brooklyn Sen. Andrew Gounardes, would require that vehicles repeatedly caught — which is six or more tickets in a 12-month period — by automatic speed traffic cameras be required to install speed-limiting devices. It impacts only the small minority of drivers who are egregious repeat offenders.
Driving a car is not a fundamental right, it’s a privilege granted to operate a 2-ton machine that could in a split-second maim or kill . Abusing that privilege means that the privilege is limited. Lawyers and doctors can lose their licenses to practice, insider traders can be barred from the financial industry, public officials stripped of committee assignments, and dangerous speeding drivers should have their bad habit curbed.
Limiting the velocity of repeat-speeding vehicles is, let’s remember, already a compromise position. Other proposals include the impoundment of vehicles that have been caught repeatedly violating the law. This stops short of that, allowing drivers to continue using their vehicles even when they’ve demonstrably used them recklessly, merely preventing them from continuing to cavalierly endanger the public.
We already have a similar system in place, with the only distinction being that it affects vehicles driven by people with histories of driving under the influence, who must blow into an integrated breathalyzer system to start their vehicles. Those who are caught routinely speeding in school zones are not any less dangerous than those who drive drunk.
Last week, Streetsblog reported on Staten Island-based NYPD Officer James Giovansanti, who had racked up a staggering 547 camera speeding tickets on his personal vehicle since 2022, including 187 in 2025 alone. Someone who has made speeding so routine as to get a ticket on average every 2½ days over an entire year is not going to stop on their own. It’s really only a matter of time until such drivers end up seriously hurting themselves or others, as a pure statistical matter.
That’s why the legislation has such broad support, including not only the Senate, the governor and the mayor, but multiple district attorneys, the National Transportation Safety Board and more 170 other organizations that have expressed their support. One person notably not on that list is Heastie, who is reportedly working to derail the popular bill behind the scenes even as most of his colleagues seem to understand its necessity.
Could it be Heastie alone knows something that shows that it’s just fine for super speeders to keep their super speeding going? Doubtful. Unfortunately, too many people and families have already had to experience the horror of injury or death at the hands of negligent drivers, including Heastie’s own constituents in the Bronx. Our leaders owe it to all of us to do their utmost to prevent this fate from befalling anyone else. Limiting the ability of routine speeders to gun it is frankly the least we could do.