NYC NOW - Evening Roundup: Report Finds Bronx has the Most Ghost Plates in NYC , Unicycle Festival Kicks Off, Inequality in Brooklyn, and Troubles on Interstate-80

Episode Date: August 28, 2025

A new City Council report finds the borough with the most ghost plates is the Bronx. The illegal plates are tied to speeding vehicles that break traffic laws. The 16th annual Unicycle Festival comes to the city. A new report highlights the inequalities between Brooklyn neighborhoods when it comes to parks, transit and schools. And finally, WNYC’s Michael Hill discuses what caused multiple sink holes to develop on a troubled stretch of highway in northern New Jersey.

New report finds the Bronx has the most ghost plates in the city. 16th annual Unicycle Festival kicks off, inequality in Brooklyn, and troubles on Interstate 80. From WNYC, this is NYC now. I'm transportation reporter Stephen Nesson, filling in for Jene Pierre. We've all seen them, cars with missing, obscured, or apparently fake license plates. A New York City Council report finds these so-called ghost cars without plates,

or with out-of-state plates that don't match their registrations have significantly more violations for speeding in school zones and blocking fire hydrants. Councilmember Gail Brewer says it's also a problem for the city's finances. The issue is that there are obviously a lot of people who don't pay their tickets, and so it's added up to be quite a bit of money. A previous analysis by the city comptroller estimated the annual revenue loss due to ghost cars

to be more than $100 million. Local and state officials say they've stepped up enforcement in recent months, but Brewer says more targeted efforts are needed. The 16th annual NYC Unicycle Festival started this week. WNYC's Alec Hamilton has the details. The first two days are for the hardcore, with a long ride each day through traffic. But over the weekend, the offerings are for anyone who wants to give it a spin.

Keith Nelson co-founded the Bendlestiff family circus, which produces the festival. He says activities at Hudson River Parks, Pier 76, are free and include a Learn to Ride area and games. This year, I think we have unicycle basketball, unicycle sumo. We may have unicycle hockey. Unicycle sumo. Basically, the object is to push your opponent either out of the ring or their foot hits the ground. Helmets are strongly encouraged. Nelson says people tend to land on their feet. A new report from Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Renoso highlights the stark differences among the borough's neighborhoods, not always in a good way. WNYC's Arun Van Gogh has more. The report is packed with intra-borrow factoids like this one. Bushwick

had a 27% rate of failed rat inspections in 2024, or 169 times as bad as Canarsie. The report known as the 2025 comprehensive plan for Brooklyn is meant to highlight inequities. Some neighborhoods like Williamsburg and Carroll Gardens are blessed with more parks, transit, and schools than others, like Red Hook or Coney Island. The borough president says these disparities should guide development decisions far more than they typically do. And he's urging other boroughs to come up with their own plans to address inequality. Up next, a series of... of sinkholes opened up on New Jersey's I-80. It took months to repair, but could it happen again? More on that after the break.

A troubled stretch of highway in northern New Jersey is up and running again after several massive sinkholes opened up in the road. It took six months of work to fail. fix the problems, but what exactly caused them? And could it lead to future trouble for Garden State commuters? WNYC's Michael Hill went underground with Morning Edition producer Veronica Del Valle to learn more. Even on a sunny day, the Sterling Hill Mining Museum in Ogdensburg, New Jersey, is cold and damp. It goes deep underground, highlighting a part of the state's history. Many have forgotten or may not even know about it. So we have 35 miles of tunnel here if you were to walk everything.

There's about 25 different levels, and it goes down about 2,700 feet deep. Bill Crawth is a retired geotechnical engineer, who is an expert on underground structures. He essentially runs this place, which includes a vast network of tunnels carved into marble with veins of zinc as deep as nine football fields. These tunnels help explain the problems that plague nearby interstate 8. for months. Has anybody heard about the sinkholes on Route 80? Yeah.

Oh, yeah. Trouble started back in December, 2024, when a sinkhole, the length of a school bus, opened up on the shoulder of the highway right after Christmas Day. Then another hole, the size of a small bedroom, appeared near the median in February. A third depression, as tall as a giraffe, opened up in March. Crew spent six months repairing the highway. Lanes were closed in both directions, and drivers had to reckon with extensive rebounding. State officials say the sinkholes were caused by collapsing mine shafts deep underground,

just like the ones at the Stirling Hill Mining Museum. So this was built in the 1950s by New Jersey Zink. This was their last big push, and so this goes down. It goes down at this angle because that's the angle that the ore veins go. You could see some banding in there is parallel to that. They follow the money. And this mine was far from the only one in New Jersey. The State Department of Environmental Protection has records of nearly 600 local mines, dating back to the 1600s.

At the Sterling Hill mine, Crawl says the Dutch mistook rich zinc deposits for iron. The height of local mining came in World War II. The military relied on the zinc here mixed with copper to make brass for bullets. You can't beat zinc-based brass for ammunition. still use it today. But almost all New Jersey's underground mines closed between the 1950s and 80s. Crawl says that's because the industry faces lesser scrutiny abroad. Now, why is this not an active mine? Why is someone not mining the elements that are here? Because it's what we talk about every single day. We lost our manufacturing base. We'll do it in other countries where they can

use children labor, no environmental standards, a lot cheaper. Pross says the company that owned the Stirling Hill mine went to great lengths to make sure it would be safe long after it closed. So our mine is supported by this very strong marble. This rock is stronger than concrete. There are only a couple of places where the New Jersey Zinn Company was nervous. This was one of them. We have a lot of water percolating through here, so that could weaken the marble.

and they put these steel beams and columns in with reinforced concrete. So this is how you make a very long-term solution to worrying about things collapsing. But he says that's not the case for a lot of mines across the state. Many are held up by simple wooden timbers that eventually rot and fail. Other mines have no structural support at all. Marcia Geldit Murphy is the former president of the American Society of Civil Engineers. were allowed to simply walk away in many cases, they may have to close the entrance to the mine or the shaft of the mine so that people couldn't wander in. But other than that,

there wasn't any stringent requirements for what they had to do to abandon the mine. Without supports, the mine shafts can collapse deep underground, causing massive voids under the road. That's when the sinkholes form. But Gellert Murphy says, There is some good news. Mines, we know where they are. Like I said, they were mapped pretty well because people had a stake in these mines and they wanted to claim them. Thorough mapping means it's easy to keep an eye on these mines and make sure the ground around them is safe. We basically can use sonar and radar and electrical pulses to understand where the voids are under the surface and we can map them really, really, actually.

accurately. The New Jersey Department of Transportation says this kind of technology is now installed along Interstate 80. Sensors in the asphalt can detect early signs of below-ground movement, while other sensors will monitor the surface. Deeper underground devices will monitor long-term soil stability. Of the 58 abandoned mines in the Garden State, the state DOT says about 3% or about 17 mines may be near a state highway. A department spokesperson says it's evaluating a few of those mine locations to determine if there are any issues. Back in Ogdensburg, no one is more relieved that the sink holes are finally fixed than local commuters who had endured months of detours and delays. Jim Fornier is at Harry's convenience, which is not too far from

Interstate 80. My wife works in Denville one day a week, Friday, so I have to get up around that. The normally 30-minute drive turned into an hour's long headache. Fournier is excited to have things back to normal. But the sinkhole is a real pain in the butt. Thank you, Harry. Thank you, Harry. Thanks for listening to NYC now from WNYC. I'm Stephen Nesson. We'll be back tomorrow.