One-Hundred Twenty-Three Thousand Five Hundred And Six Dollars In Tolls Is A Great Way To Measure An Addiction
Addiction makes you do some crazy things. The son who used his mother’s car to buy drugs, for example, never once paying a toll along the way:
The cash-strapped Port Authority slapped 20 habitual toll evaders with lawsuits yesterday, part of a new crackdown aimed at recouping millions in lost revenue from deadbeat motorists.
. . .
The list of the lead-footed drivers includes [. . .] a mother-and-son duo from Englewood, NJ.
[The son], 52, previously admitted to The Post that he used his 75-year-old mom’s Ford Focus for drug-buying missions into Manhattan.
During those trips, he racked up more than $120,000 in unpaid tolls and fees.
“When you’re addicted like that, you don’t think of the consequences. You have other things on your mind,” he told The Post.
He claims he is in recovery.
His mother, meanwhile, is furious she’s been hit with the hefty toll bill.
“If I could have killed him and gotten away with it, I would have,” said [the mother], a retired data processor.
Let’s tease this out: The toll for the George Washington Bridge — I’m assuming if he’s coming from Englewood, he’s using the GWB — is — and we’ll be conservative and use the peak number — $9.50. The exact figure, $123,506 (from this article), divided by $9.50, is . . . I actually don’t believe this number . . . 13,000. Now they only collect tolls heading eastbound into New York, so that is 13,000 trips to buy drugs. Yup, that sounds like an addiction to me.
Of course the moral of the story is to always buy local.
Posted: March 2nd, 2012 | Filed under: You're Kidding, Right?