How this was built — and how to check it.

1 · What this is

The NYC Car Tax is an independent civic-data analysis of New York City's public parking and camera-violation records. It assembles the city's own published figures — fines issued, fines unpaid, placard counts, ghost-plate losses — alongside a live, reader-driven lookup of any license plate's public ticket file. Its thesis is simple and checkable: the city issues over a billion dollars in fines a year, while several categories of vehicle — diplomatic, official, and defaced-plate — face little or no collection. The reader can verify every number against the linked primary sources.

2 · Data sources

Citywide dollar and count totals (fines issued, fines unpaid, placards, ghost-plate losses) come from named city reports — NYC Dept. of Finance, the Independent Budget Office, the Comptroller, the Dept. of Investigation, and the City Council — each cited in the source ledger below.

3 · Pull date & freshness

Per-plate aggregates shown on the page are a snapshot pulled October 22, 2026. The reader-facing plate lookup is live: it queries NYC Open Data in real time from the reader's own browser, so any figure can be independently re-pulled at any moment. We deliberately do not date the main page — the underlying records update continuously, and the lookup is always current.

4 · How we classify "the Untouchables"

Plates are grouped only by their public plate-type codes in NYC Open Data — never by owner:

• Diplomatic — state code DP.
• City Council — license type NYC, the "New York Council" class in the DMV's registration class table: the official plates issued to New York City Council members. Numbered plates only. About 1,445 other plates in the dataset carry this code on one or two tickets each and look like ordinary passenger plates whose type was mis-keyed by the issuing agent; they are excluded from every figure on the page.
• Judges — license type SUP, the DMV's "Supreme Court Justice" class. (The table's other judicial classes, JSC Appellate Division, JCA Court of Appeals and JCL Court of Claims, hold too few tickets to rank.)
• Press — license type SRN, the "NYP" series. These are New York Press plates, issued by the NYS DMV to full-time news-gathering employees; an applicant who works in New York City must show an NYPD working press identification card. In the DMV's registration class table, SRN also covers court, judge and district-attorney plates and Television. Correction, Oct. 22, 2026: earlier versions of this page labeled this group "NYPD / official". That was wrong — these are press plates, not police vehicles. No figures changed.
• Commercial — license type COM.

5 · Known data caveats

Stated plainly, because credibility is the point:

• issue_date is a TEXT column (MM/DD/YYYY), so it must never be server-sorted — a lexicographic sort mis-orders dates. We parse and sort dates client-side.
• The dataset contains a small number of garbage dates in 2097–2099, which we filter out.
• license_type is recorded as "999" on most camera tickets, so plate-type filtering relies on the other public codes above where camera rows are involved.
• Short numbered official plates such as 40 or 320 also exist in other plate classes (volunteer ambulance, medical, State Assembly), so the Council and judge files on the page are filtered by license_type. The open lookup box is not: you type a plate, not a class, so it returns every row for that plate and state.
• Full dataset-wide group-bys time out without a Socrata application token, so the diplomatic ranking is built by paginating and aggregating per plate; the per-plate aggregate is the authoritative figure.

6 · Privacy

7 · Not affiliated with NYC

This is an independent civic-data project funded by Carmula, a licensed Queens car-buyer. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or speaking for the City of New York or any of its agencies. The data stands on its own; every figure can be re-pulled from the linked primary sources below.

8 · Source ledger

Every figure that appears in the piece, with its primary source, a verbatim quote, and a direct link. Derived figures show their arithmetic; illustrative values are labeled as such. No secondary-source numbers are used as primaries.

9 · Contact / use this data

Questions, corrections, or requests for the underlying pull scripts: notifyneal@gmail.com. The press & embed kit has copy-paste stat blocks and free-to-reuse chart embeds — no permission needed, attribution appreciated.