New Report Points to Prevalence of Dangerous Drivers Downtown
“Super speeders”—the fewer than one half of one percent of all New York State drivers who have each been caught 16 times or more in a single calendar year surpassing the speed limit in a school zone, appear to have a particular fondness for Lower Manhattan, according to an analysis by the cycling and pedestrian safety advocacy group Transportation Alternatives.
The community (defined here as State Assembly District 65, consisting of Battery Park City, plus the area of the Financial District south of a line formed by Vesey, Church, and Fulton Streets, along with Broadway, and Beaver and Wall Streets) was the site of 6,318 such violations in 2025, or approximately 17 summonses per day, as documented by speed cameras. This comes to almost half of the total for all 13 Assembly Districts in Manhattan. The borough as a whole logged 14,464 school zone speed infractions in 2025, or roughly 38 per day.
Transportation Alternatives executive director Ben Furnas said, “when New York City’s school zone speed cameras first went online, we learned something about people who exceed the speed limit in New York City. For the vast majority of drivers, getting one or two tickets reforms their behavior for good. But a slim minority of selfish drivers take advantage of the system, terrorizing school zones daily. These reckless drivers speed without regard to penalties, and they’re much more likely to kill someone in a crash.”
A separate analysis, also from Transportation Alternatives, tracked the ten most notorious individual speeders in these zones. One of them, a grey 2024 BMW 760i (with license plate LKM6400), was issued five violations last year at a single local intersection: West and Warren Streets, in front of P.S. 89/I.S. 289. Another, a white 2022 Mercedes-Benz GLE-Class (with license plate LTJ3931), was issued four violations at West Street in front of the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel (a crossing used by students of nearby P.S. 276), plus three more at the intersection of Pearl and Beekman Streets (close to the Peck Slip School). The first of these was cited 134 times last year, paid $20,000 in fines, and owes another $4,430. The second was issued 177 violations, paid no fines, and owes $23,000 in outstanding penalties.
“These Super Speeders blast their cars and trucks through New York City’s neighborhood streets at deadly speeds every day, getting caught hundreds of times a year, undeterred,” Mr. Furnas said, noting that more than 2.5 million people live within a five-minute walk of an intersection where a top-10 super speeder was caught speeding in 2025.
The second Transportation Alternatives report noted that in 2025, “the top ten super speeders in New York State each received an average of 179 speed camera tickets, with the most reckless driver receiving 259.” The worst super speeder in 2025, a black 2023 Audi A6 (with license plate LCM8254), received 259 school zone speed camera tickets in 2025, averaging five per week, and paid more than $63,000 in fines.
The City’s Department of Transportation (DOT) was authorized by “Sammy’s Law” (a 2024 statute named for 12-year-old Sammy Cohen Eckstein, who was killed by a speeding driver when chasing a soccer ball into a Brooklyn street in 2013) to create regional “slow zones.” The first of these was implemented in Lower Manhattan two years ago, where local speed limits were lowered from 25 to 20 miles per hour. Last year, the agency identified five local streets close to public schools where it further reduced the legally permitted speed from 20 to 15 miles per hour. These locations were Battery Place (near P.S./I.S. 276), Warren Street (adjacent to P.S. 89 and I.S. 289), Beekman and Spruce Streets (at the entrances to the Spruce Street School), and Beaver Street (alongside the Lower Manhattan Community Middle School).