New York City is locking in nearly $1 billion to keep its traffic cameras rolling, while thousands of drivers with temporary paper plates keep cruising past those same cameras without getting a single ticket.
The Department of Transportation has renewed a five-year contract worth about $998 million with Verra Mobility, the company that runs the city’s automated enforcement cameras. The deal keeps Verra in charge of red-light, speed, and bus-lane camera programs, even as a long-running loophole leaves cars with temporary tags effectively immune from camera-issued summonses. That gap has cost the city tens of millions in unissued fines and remains a serious blind spot for Vision Zero supporters.
In a press release, Verra Mobility said the contract, effective Jan. 1, 2026, will keep the company operating the existing automated programs while upgrading aging hardware and helping support future expansions. The company framed the agreement as the latest chapter in a decades-long partnership with the city on automated enforcement.
Temp tags remain unticketable
Here is the catch: the cameras can usually read the numbers on temporary paper tags, but the city cannot turn those images into mailed violations. States generally do not provide registration lookups for dealer or paper tags, so there is nowhere for the summonses to go.
As reported by Streetsblog New York City, counterfeit tags and pandemic-era temporary-tag scams helped swell the problem, creating a ready-made loophole for drivers who would rather not see a ticket show up in the mail.
The scale of the hole
Data compiled by analyst Jehiah Czebotar and the city’s quarterly unreadable-plate reports spell out just how big that hole is. Vehicles with temporary tags triggered cameras 52,003 times in July 2024, about 6.84 percent of all camera activations that month. By December 2025, that number was still 12,775 triggers, or roughly 3.2 percent.
Across 2024 and 2025, those records show more than 766,000 camera triggers tied to vehicles with temporary tags. If every one of those incidents had produced the standard $50 fine, the tally would clear $38 million. That is a lot of free passes. See the independent compilation on Jehiah's reports and the NYC DOT automated-enforcement data page for the underlying files.
City and contractor respond
City officials say the giant contract and planned upgrades are supposed to help close the unreadable-plate gap. The request for proposals for the deal specifically instructed vendors to build interfaces with state DMVs and national look-up services in order to crack down on so-called ghost plates.
Verra has described the agreement as a safety upgrade, not a ticket mill. The Mayor’s Office has stressed that Verra is paid a flat fee and does not get a cut of fines, and that DOT staff, not the contractor, review camera captures before violations are issued, according to the city’s announcement. For background on the procurement and the planned expansion, see the Mayor's Office and the NYC DOT data feeds page.
Advocates want follow-through
Advocates say the promises on paper will not matter unless Verra and DOT actually build those data links and state agencies agree to share registration records for temporary tags. Until that happens, they argue, the system effectively rewards people who know how to game it.
“Ghost plates reward drivers who break the law, and put New Yorkers in danger by eroding the integrity of our automated enforcement system,” Transportation Alternatives executive director Ben Furnas told Streetsblog New York City.
For now, New Yorkers will see more cameras and a renewed relationship with the same vendor, while drivers using temporary tags often still slip through the cracks. The open question is whether the technical and intergovernmental fixes the city demanded in the RFP actually materialize, or whether lawmakers will need to tighten the rules around temporary tags to finally shut down the ghost-plate loophole.
