Idle Vice

There may be some reason beyond the sphere of my knowledge, but I’ve never understood what’s so hard about turning off the motor of a vehicle if you aren’t imminently planning to drive away. And knowing that idling trucks spew some ugly, smelly fumes into the air that some of us like to breath, I’m not particularly sympathetic. When NYC passed an ordinance prohibiting trucks from idling for more than three minutes, it seemed like a beneficial law, reducing air pollution and putting no serious burden on the driver.

But enforcing such a law is another matter.

A white-paneled truck sat motionless and idling in Midtown on a recent morning, its driver wrapped up in his phone and oblivious to what was happening outside…

After exactly three minutes and 10 seconds, Mr. Slapikas — a lifelong New Yorker who lives a few miles away in Queens — snapped the phone shut, tapped the screen of his watch and walked away. If everything goes as it should, he just earned $87.50, and maybe more, for those few minutes of time, and the company that owns the truck will receive a fine of at least $350 that it never saw coming. But for now, Mr. Slapikas is off down the block, a bounty hunter jauntily seeking his next target.

Cops can’t be everywhere, and so the city enlisted what might be called “bounty hunters,” citizens who could spend three minutes of their time taking a video of an idling truck with company name visible so a fine could be levied. And the hunter would get his bounty, a quarter of the fine. And given the regularity of trucks idling in midtown Manhattan, it’s a living, thought not without risk.

This is a scene from the city’s benign-sounding but often raucous Citizens Air Complaint Program, a public health campaign that invites — and pays — people to report trucks that are parked and idling for more than three minutes, or one minute if outside a school. Those who report collect 25 percent of any fine against a truck by submitting a video just over 3 minutes in length that shows the engine is running and the name of the company on the door.

The program has vastly increased the number of complaints of idling trucks sent to the city, from just a handful before its creation in 2018 to more than 12,000 last year. Some of those complaints turn menacing when truck drivers react.

For the citizen bounty hunter, there’s the risk of harm from an angry truck driver. After all, the fine has to get paid, and neither the driver nor his company (which will blame the driver) are expected to be happy about it. Then there’s the risk that it doesn’t last the full three minutes, in which case the bounty hunter wasted his time. And lastly, there’s the risk that the City doesn’t pay off for reasons that may be real or imagined. Hard as it is to imagine, the City can be arbitrary at times.

For every fine it issues, the city’s Department of Environmental Protection, which runs the program, seems to wave away others for reasons that, to the reporters, seem arbitrary: The name of the company is not legible on the truck door, even though the license plate would reveal the owner. The truck’s engine isn’t clearly audible on the video, even if smoke can be seen coming out of the exhaust pipe.

Not that anyone should feel particularly sympathetic to the truck drivers who leave their trucks idling without reason, or the bounty hunters who spend their time recording these trucks without certainty that they will be paid their bounty, but turning the public into the government’s paid snitch, even for a cause you support, even for a cause that takes so little to avoid, is still disconcerting. If you thought “see something, say something,” was an invitation for mischief, adding a not-insignificant financial incentive to the mix creates a culture of ratting out your fellow citizen for a buck.

On the one hand, we became enamored of truckers when the pandemic broke and we needed food and the occasional roll of toilet paper on the supermarket shelf. We stayed home while they delivered, and they were our heroes. Did they let their trucks idle then? They weren’t getting rich delivering the food we needed, but they did the job we desperately needed of them. Are they now such bad guys that we need to pay people to rat the out?

But then, it’s not as if they can’t easily avoid the problem by just turning off their ignition. Is that too much to ask?

Crafting laws and programs that encourage one citizen to rat on another has proven to be a very effective enforcement mechanism. People like money. If it was just about pollution, there is nothing to stop someone from asking the driver to turn off his truck, reminding him that it’s against the law. Granted, the driver may not respond with empathy and kindness, but then they aren’t necessarily thrilled at being filmed either.

We’ve seen similar initiatives, such as compliance with public access requirements under the ADA, where people with disabilities and their pal,  the lawyer, filed dozens of complaints or suits against stores that have a few steps to get in, not because they ever went in or wanted to go in, but because they can make good money off the enforcement. And it’s a mere baby step to the Texas SB8 enforcement mechanism of any random person suing for abortion-related conduct.

Is it an unfortunate necessity to turn neighbors into rats for pay to enforce salutary laws, or are we developing a snitch culture where people seek out ways to turn in the people upon whom we rely for petty grievances by playing on their desire for easy money? Do we really want to shift the mantra from “snitches get stiches” to “snitches get riches”?