GWB Carpool Activists Honored By Fort Lee GOP

A small group of George Washington Bridge carpoolers who recently took on the Port Authority over the right to pick up passengers near the tollbooths as they have been doing for years—and apparently won—were honored for their efforts Tuesday by the United Republican Club of Fort Lee at the local GOP group’s monthly meeting.

“The Fort Lee GOP is honored to be the first to recognize these citizens and to say ‘Bravo’ to them,” said club president David Cohen. “And I hope that the honors don’t stop here.”

He added, “People have described what’s going on down at the bridge as a cat and mouse game between the Port Authority and average citizens.”

“To me this is not a cat and mouse story,” Cohen said. “This is a modern day David and Goliath story. This is about the tensions between the government and average citizens trying to economize in a horrible economy.”

The citizens Cohen referred to were Fort Lee resident Leonor Javier, who to demand a place to legally pick up passengers after the Port Authority—shortly after toll hikes went into effect—started ticketing drivers heading for the tollbooths in Fort Lee for violations like illegally taking on passengers or stopping at a bus stop, and Kudret Topyan, an economics professor and recent resident of Fort Lee who recorded hundreds of hours of video from the window of his 14th-floor Bridge Plaza North apartment, which overlooks the tollbooths and what he called “this famous bus stop,” and then took things a step further.

Javier and Topyan, who were both featured in a Wall Street Journal article in June about carpooling at the GWB, were presented with certificates of appreciation that Cohen also referred to as “citizens' action awards.”

“At the beginning, we had about 16 or 17 people, but eventually people got discouraged and they started dropping out, paying the tickets and just moving on,” said Javier, who started the grassroots group, along with fellow commuters from Fort Lee and neighboring towns, because of what they saw as an “illegal” crackdown on the longstanding practice that allows commuters to take advantage of what the Port Authority touts as the “largest toll discount” at its bridges and tunnels.

“But we didn’t give up,” Javier added, referring to herself, Marilyn Hamburg and May Chin, who were also mentioned in the WSJ article and were also in attendance at the Fort Lee VFW, along with Topyan, on Tuesday.

“After the Wall Street Journal published this story on the first page, a lot of things changed,” Topyan said. “I really appreciate that I was invited here, but I don’t want to take the credit entirely.”

What changed after the article came out was that New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie to the crackdown.

But Topyan, who was not part of Javier’s group, said his original intention in videotaping the area “24/7” was “totally academic.”

He said he wanted to find out how many people were carpooling and “how important it was for Fort Lee residents,” and that he ended up with about 250 hours of footage.

“I tried to find out how frequent and how important that is during the weekdays and the weekends,” he said. “When I realized that there was this ticketing going on, I didn’t understand what was the offense, what was the ordinance, what was the violation.”

Topyan’s initial curiosity turned to action when he decided to try it himself with every intention of getting caught.

After asking some police officers what the people in his video recordings were being ticketed for and getting “confusing and conflicting” answers, Topyan got in his car, picked up two people and, sure enough, got a ticket.

“So this way I had firsthand information,” Topyan said.

Armed with that information, he went to court to fight the $54 ticket, spending five hours there, refusing to strike a deal to have the charges reduced, asking for a trial and eventually getting the ticket dismissed.

“I will never forget the last sentence of the judge,” Topyan said:

“Well, I am dismissing this ticket right now, but if you do it again, I’m going to find you guilty because the Port Authority doesn’t like that, and we try to discourage that.”

The entire process, Topyan said, took about eight months, but he insists he never did anything wrong; he’s more than happy to recite the ordinance for which he was cited.

“Letting off or taking on persons; that’s the citation that I got,” he said, continuing by reading the ordinance.

“No operator of a vehicle shall stop the vehicle on the highway for the purpose of letting off or taking on a person other than at the curb or side of the road or highway,” Topyan read. “In addition to that, it says you are permitted to stop your vehicle to pick up or discharge a passenger in a bus stop as long as you do not block a bus. So that’s the law.”

He added, “I didn’t violate the law, but I was given this citation.”

Javier said she and her group, in spite of being told repeatedly that they were fighting a losing battle, were simply standing up against “a very bad injustice,” and that because they stayed firm in their resolve, they “actually won the fight.”

Javier went through the court process herself and, after an ordeal of her own, ultimately had her tickets dismissed. But she said that was not a victory; it was a disappointment.

“I wanted to face [a judge] and fight for the tickets because I had done my research,” Javier said, adding that the attention the Wall Street Journal article drew to the issue was, at least, a positive thing.

“Not that many people knew about [carpooling]—how it works—from my understanding,” Javier said. “Because a lot of people didn’t even know what we were talking about. Now at least it came out, and more people know how to utilize the system.”

That system works like this:

You register for the Port Authority’s Carpool Plan—essentially a special E-ZPass account—and you can cross the bridge for just $3.50 if you have three or more people in your car and use a staffed “Cash-E-ZPass” lane so a toll collector can verify the number of people in your car.

Commuters who use cash currently pay $12, and that price is expected to go up to $15 over the next couple of years.

Port Authority police spokesman Al Della Fave previously of ticketing carpoolers, saying Port Authority police had indeed been issuing summonses for unsafe lane changes and for picking up passengers at the bus stop, which he said can cause a backup into traffic lanes.

“Besides breaking whatever law it might be, the unsafe lane change or the bus stop, just note too that we don’t condone picking up complete and utter strangers into your vehicle,” Della Fave said. “You may be putting yourself in danger.”

But he also said, “We want to resolve the issue too.”

Asked Tuesday how she felt about the potential safety issue, Javier said, “That’s a concern that some people may have, but this is something that I’ve been doing for 20 years, and there was never an issue, at least not with me.”

Topyan pointed out the obvious advantages of carpooling, which he called “a desirable thing” but also “the best kept secret,” including reducing pollution and highway congestion.

“What was happening in front of me was wrong, and when we see something wrong, it’s very easy to [ignore],” Topyan said. “But you need the help of the press; you need the help of others. You need to make it known.”

Cohen said the issue is not a partisan one, although he couldn’t resist saying he is “skeptical” about whether Fort Lee’s governing body will follow suit and recognize the carpoolers.

“This is a citizens’ issue,” Cohen said. “It’s about regular citizens speaking truth to power.”

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