Good morning. It’s Tuesday. We’ll find out about cameras that not only keep watch on traffic, they listen to how loud it is. We’ll also get details on why some prominent supporters of school integration in New York are concerned that City Hall hasn’t followed up officials’ rhetoric with a plan.
New York City has roughly 2,200 speed cameras that photograph the license plates of vehicles that break the speed limit in school zones by more than 10 miles per hour. The city also has a dozen cameras that keep an ear on the streets as well as an eye — noise cameras that listen for loud cars and snap photographs of their license plates. They also listen for loud music and honking horns. And, like the speed cameras, they snap photographs of offenders’ license plates. Some privacy advocates worry that they could hear more than noise from cars. At first, during a pilot program in 2021 and June 2022, the noise cameras were programmed to pick up only engine and muffler noise, that distinctive, deep bass note that can sometimes sound almost like a gunshot. Then, in 2023, the city expanded enforcement from the cameras to include music and horns. The city’s Department of Environmental Protection, which oversees the noise cameras, says that the cameras are activated by sounds above 85 decibels, the threshold set by the city’s noise code. That is the level of a noisy restaurant, according to the Hearing Health Foundation, which calls sounds above 70 decibels harmful — five decibels quieter than a hair dryer and 15 decibels softer than an approaching subway. A jackhammer measures 130 decibels. The fines for muffler noise start at $800 and can go as high as $2,625. For what the city calls “nonemergency horn honking,” the minimum penalty is $350. The maximum is $3,000. Drivers issued summonses for too-loud music face fines of $140 to $1,050. For the city, the fines add up: Using the noise cameras, D.E.P. issued 1,691 summonses with fines totaling $1.47 million last year. Only about 20 percent of the money has been collected. As of Sept. 29, the agency had issued 1,026 noise camera violations. A measure passed by the City Council in 2023 called for at least five cameras in each borough by 2025, but a D.E.P. spokesman said money to buy them — at about $40,000 each — had not been appropriated. The summonses for violations recorded by noise cameras and by speed cameras, which are maintained by the city’s Department of Transportation, are prepared in the same way. Camera footage is reviewed by a technician at the appropriate agency who confirms that the vehicle in question was either making too much noise or going too fast. If the technician concludes that there was a violation, software reads the license plate, finds the owner in motor vehicle records and sends a violation. The penalty for a speed camera violation is $50, which the Transportation Department notes is less than a speeding ticket from a police officer. ‘A microphone is a microphone’For privacy advocates, the noise cameras raise concerns about whether their microphones could hear more than they were intended to. “Noise pollution is of course a major issue in New York City,” said Will Owen, a spokesman for the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, a civil rights and privacy group. “But a microphone is a microphone, and at the end of the day, that’s what these are. If you install a noise camera, it could be used to listen to just about anything in the vicinity.” After five years of noise cameras, at least one recipient of a summons has appealed it. Anthony Aquilino, an insurance company owner who was cited in 2024 as he drove his Lamborghini in Manhattan, lost an administrative hearing, challenged the decision in State Supreme Court and lost — and has taken the case to the Appellate Division. “If you’re revving your engine, if you’re playing loud music, that’s a nuisance,” he said. But he said there is nothing he could do about his car, a 2018 Lamborghini Huracán Performante, a model more powerful than the ordinary Huracán that typically comes with a 630-horsepower engine. “My car is going to be loud no matter what,” Aquilino said. “I can’t change it. I should get some break because of that.” WEATHER Expect a sunny day with temperatures near 65. Tonight will be clear with a low around 49. ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING In effect until Oct. 12 (Columbus Day/Indigenous Peoples’ Day). QUOTE OF THE DAY “The world changed while I was gone. The grass is a different color. The street signs are different. There are no subway tokens anymore. It’s a whole different world from what it was. There’s a bit of Joseph Campbell in it, right? The hero’s journey.” — LL Cool J, on his years in California for “NCIS: Los Angeles.” He has returned in New York for a spinoff of one of television’s most enduring franchises, “NCIS: New York.” The latest New York news
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Mayor Zohran Mamdani and his schools chancellor, Kamar Samuels, have put a priority on school integration. Mamdani called segregated schools a crisis during his campaign year. Samuels, in jobs he held before Mamdani appointed him to the city’s top education post, merged and closed schools to bolster integration. But prominent supporters of integration say that their initial optimism is giving way to alarm. My colleague Matthew Haag says that leading integration proponents and people close to the school system are concerned that the Mamdani administration has laid out detailed plans on issues like housing and universal child care. After 10 months in office, Mamdani’s administration has not followed up on the rhetoric about integration with specifics. Nyah Berg, the executive director of New York Appleseed, a group that supports integrated schools, said that she was not “at the point of disappointment.” But she said that she was reminded of past efforts that had stalled when officials did not move beyond talking about the need for integration. “We are gravely concerned that this is not moving forward,” said Berg, who served on the mayor’s youth and education transition committee. The topic of segregated schools dominated conversation in education circles and far beyond last month after a New York Times Magazine reporter, Nikole Hannah-Jones, wrote about wrestling with her choice to send her daughter to a high-poverty elementary school in Brooklyn that was almost entirely Black and Latino. New York Appleseed has scheduled a town-hall-style event with Hannah-Jones and Samuels for Oct. 20. METROPOLITAN DIARY Duffel bag quandary
Dear Diary: A decade ago, I was on one of my many solo, soul-searching trips to New York in my mid-20s. Boarding the 1 train one night, I took an open seat close to the door at one end of the car. A moment after I sat down, someone flung a duffel bag onto the train, where it landed at my feet. The bag’s owner ran down the platform. A millennial child of the Plains and the “see something, say something” era, I knew in my bones that this bag was bad news. I had a quick decision to make: Do I fling the bag back onto the platform or do I accept the fate this bag brings and allow the doors to close with it and me still inside? As the announcement came on to stand clear of the closing doors, I realized this was my moment. I was going to save myself. I simply had to. But as I began to reach for the bag, its owner entered the train breathlessly at the other end of the car. He was a subway performer of course. And after getting to my end of the car, he used his bag at my feet to solicit tips for his show. As a millennial child of the Plains, I had no cash to give him. — Greg Loeffler Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Tell us your New York story here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B. Davaughnia Wilson and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at nytoday@nytimes.com. Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox.
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