New York Tag

The state of New York is one of the 15th least most expensive states to acquire auto insurance and is much cheaper than the national average. According to multiple studies, New Yorkers are consistently ranked in the bottom quartile for paying auto insurance premiums. Buffalo, New York, as the second largest city in the State tends to have higher than average insurance premiums compared to the state average, just like New York City. However, getting the cheapest insurance in Buffalo, New York is possible if you know how to avoidRead More

It has been quite a week at the Ford Motor Co. In the last seven days, the automaker has added more than 700,000 vehicles to its ongoing door latch recall, while opening new probes into three other problems. The latter three campaigns brought the total number of vehicles recalled by the number two domestic automaker to nearly 1.3 million. Interestingly, the increased recall action occurred during the week that National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) Administrator Mark Rosekind was in Detroit meeting with automakers and touring facilities. Rosekind flew toRead More

One of the problems with the libertarian element in many aspects of American culture is the selfish rejection of any regulations or laws that interfere with what’s seen as our essential freedoms. So, for example, even though there’s a small mountain of research evidence showing restricting the speed of vehicles reduces the number of injuries and deaths on our road, politicians and law enforcement officers do not actively enforce the laws as aggressively as they should. People are largely left to drive however they want with little danger of theRead More

Normally people driving their own cars around a town or city feel safe from harassment, but Dan Keys learned the hard way that being a black man behind the wheel of a car can be the wrong place to be. He had just driven his wife to work at a mall when he was stopped by three agents of the New York Taxi and Limousine Commission. They claimed to have seen him dropping of a passenger and collecting money from her. They seized his Lincoln Town Car as an illegalRead More

One of the great unknowns is the number of serving police officers who are known to commit offenses, but are never charged because their colleagues do not investigate or suppress evidence. Without effective and independent supervision, it’s always going to be a temptation to use the office to protect your own or to escape punishment for your own wrongdoing. Except, of course, there are some offenses where it’s difficult to avoid facing a charge. This may be because an alert member of the public manages to catch the offense onRead More

In 2010, Hayley and Diego’s law in Albany was intended to protect cyclists and pedestrians from careless driving. As the law then stood, drivers in New York were only help criminally accountable if the injuries they caused were serious. Unfortunately that law has been ignored so Mayor Bill De Blasio wants to shake up the NYPD and force the issue of tickets on a routine basis. According to his Vision Zero program, any driver who injures a cyclist or pedestrian should be charged with careless driving even though the issuingRead More

There are times when rules matter and they should be enforced no matter what the cost. This is a question of leadership. Discretion is the essence. People need certainty that the rules applied to them will be fair. But if there are going to be incidents when the application of the rules would obviously be unfair, they need to know their managers have the intelligence to look the other way. At the end of the day, it’s the safety of the sick that matters. Meet Stephen Sawyer. He’s twenty-years-old andRead More

Politics is a strange “business”. For large parts of the year, what the politicians and interest groups say is ignored. Most of us don’t really care what the talking heads say because it doesn’t affect our everyday lives. But there are times when we pause and take a breath. The Christmas and New Year holiday period is one of those times. Whether you are a Christian, there’s a century and more tradition involved. We are more receptive to messages about health and family. Because both can be affected by theRead More

Let’s start thinking about this question in a relatively sleepy town called Monticello, New York. The local mayor is called Gordon Jenkins and there are several hours of his behavior on the internet after he was arrested for drunken driving. Not only is he seen verbally assaulting the officers for arresting him and showing him lack of respect by handcuffing him to the wall, he’s also shown pulling a clock from the wall and smashing it on the floor. Although one of his functions as mayor is to appoint theRead More

Under normal circumstances, a police force welcomes new laws with open arms and applies them to the relevant circumstances as and when they arise. That’s what laws are for, after all. So three years ago, Albany created the offense of careless driving. It was called Hayley and Diego’s Law, toddlers who were killed in 2009. You would think the NTPD would apply this law whenever a bicyclist or pedestrian is killed by a driver. Deaths are serious events. So in 2012, 152 cyclists and pedestrians were killed and 14,327 wereRead More