In 2020, rock star Billy Idol and then-Mayor de Blasio launched the $1 million “Billy Never Idles” campaign to promote the Citizen’s Air Complaint Program (CACP), which lets New Yorkers submit videos of commercial vehicles violating the City’s anti-idling laws. The City uses the footage to issue fines between $350 to $2,000, and participants – known as “Idling Warriors” – collect 25% of each ticket the City wins.
That $1 million campaign has paid off, as the number of summonses from Idling Warriors has increased ten-fold. The top Idling Warriors have racked up hundreds of thousands of dollars in bounties, and the City now collects tens of millions annually through the program.
The New York City Council enacted Local Law No. 49 in 1971, limiting vehicle idling to 3 minutes. Buses were banned from idling at terminal points along an established route when the temperature was above 40°F. Later amendments cut the idling limit to 1 minute near certain schools and parks and launched the CACP bounty program.
Policymakers have not thoroughly considered the legality or wisdom of totally outsourcing enforcement to financially-motivated private citizens. In 2023, 99.7% of anti-idling summonses came from the CACP. Similar delegations of enforcement power to private citizens have been scrutinized by the courts because a central premise of the Constitution is the maintenance of structural checks against the arbitrary exercise of executive power. The City’s air inspectors are public employees who meet civil-service qualifications and follow agency training, supervision, and internal discipline rules; in other words, they are accountable to the public. The Idling Warriors, meanwhile, watch a short instructional video as training, check a box to affirm that they are telling the truth, and submit a three-minute clip for cash rewards.
The profit incentive created by the bounty program distorts enforcement priorities and leads to arbitrary enforcement. For instance, the bus-operating subsidiaries and affiliates of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) are not subject to any civil penalties, so the Idling Warriors focus exclusively on the smaller number of buses operated by private companies. The buses owned by private companies are just as much “mass transportation” as are the buses owned by the MTA. Private companies often operate the same bus models as the MTA. Yet, bounty hunters focus only on the private companies.
MTA and private bus drivers allow their buses to idle for the same reason – the buses are designed to have their engines running when the bus is in service. For example, the engine powers the bus’s climate control and air filtration systems. Bus walls are thinly insulated, and the windows do not open. Yet, the anti-idling law often does not allow climate control systems to operate while the bus is parked, standing or stopped. Typical is an appellate decision from earlier this year, DEP v. Astoria Transport Corp, where the city’s Department of Environmental Protection argued that “there is no idling exemption for passenger safety,” and the bus company was fined for operating its bus climate control system.
Federal law is more sensible than the City’s anti-idling law. For instance, federal regulations, applicable to all regular route bus operations subject to federal jurisdiction, other than commuter service, requires that bus companies maintain a “reasonable temperature” on each bus. Prior versions of this regulation specified the interior bus temperature must be between 60°F and 80°F. Unlike the city, the federal government views the health and safety of bus passengers as paramount.
The Constitution’s supremacy clause establishes that federal law overrides conflicting state or local laws. The City’s anti-idling ordinance conflicts with the federal requirement, discussed above, to maintain reasonable temperatures on buses. Therefore, the City should permit these bus companies to operate climate control systems as needed to ensure passengers’ health and safety.
Furthermore, the CACP is so unfairly administered that it leads to fundamental due process questions. The videos are often incomplete and unreliable. Bus companies cannot cross-examine the complainants. The City takes more than a year to issue the summonses, which makes it difficult or impossible to find records that could provide a defense. These are basic elements of due process that the City could fix, but it has chosen not to.
The City’s administration of this bounty program is an open invitation to fleet owners to form a class action to challenge the CACP as an unconstitutional delegation of enforcement authority and denial of due process. If the scheme is invalidated, the City may owe tens of millions of dollars in refunds for fines, creating a budget liability. In addition, federal agencies could threaten to withhold or condition transportation and air-quality funds until defects in the enforcement program are resolved —particularly under an administration willing to use funding as leverage—unless New York City either imposes strong guardrails or winds the program down.
It is time for the industries adversely affected by this law to – which has turned out to be more about “green dollars” than “greening the environment” – to let out a “Rebel Yell” and hit the pause button. Whether its lawsuits, legislation and/or media awareness, we must put-up guardrails to prevent abuses that are exacerbating the affordability crisis that the bus and trucking industries are facing. I once high-fived Billy Idol in the first row at one of his concerts, but I am not sure what I would do if I saw him again. If Billy knew how his program has been administered and abused, he would likely just go “Dancing with Himself” and withdraw his good name from this catastrophic program.
