Sometimes Wu remembers how his family, Chinese immigrants who lived through the Cultural Revolution, balked when he told them he was going to start ratting out lawbreakers in New York City. But for a chance at making nearly $90 for a minute of his time, he found he could push their skepticism to the bottom of his consciousness.
The source of the money was the city itself, thanks to the Citizens Air Complaint Program, which allows members of the public to claim a reward by sending in videos of buses and trucks that idle illegally. The statutory limit for leaving your engine running is three minutes. But on a block with a school, that drops to 60 seconds, which is what has now drawn Wu several times to this particular block in Manhattan that’s being poisoned by the pooling diesel exhaust of nearly a dozen yellow school buses. Wearing a mask to filter out the acrid tang of sulfates and carbon soot, Wu uses his phone’s camera to capture the license plates and company markings on the buses, then a nearby address, then the school’s façade. I’ve known him to hide his phone in an empty cardboard box with a cutout, or in a shower caddy as if he were innocently ambling toward a t’ai chi session, or to thrust it discreetly through some bushes, but today he braces it in front of himself awkwardly in a pantomime of texting, so the school staff notice and call the cops on him.
Back in 2019, after Wu finished his master’s degree in engineering management at Dartmouth, he dreamed of ascending to the storied, cushy heights of product management. But those aspirations got derailed by the pandemic and his father’s death, and he settled for an indifferent marketing job at a tech start-up. Then, in March 2022, he came across an article about a man who had cleared about $64,000 in a year by submitting idling complaints. Wu began running his own numbers: How many videos could he count on recording if he spent, say, six hours a day at it? And how much of the submission process could he automate or outsource? If he did this full time, he realized, his annual take could eventually reach the mid–six figures.
By that summer, Wu had set up a back office in India and hired four contractors to handle the more tedious aspects of file processing and data entry for the CACP submission portal: the better to free him up to scour the grody streets. And so on an afternoon when his grad-school cohort are off somewhere destroying the world for McKinsey, Wu is lecturing two bored female patrol officers about pollution and asthma rates and the public’s right to clean air. The cops scoff and tell him these buses are a problem all over; what can you possibly accomplish by bothering the good people on this block? The director of the school chimes in with some deranged claims that this is all somehow a violation of both HIPAA and FERPA. The cops shuffle menacingly, though they have no lawful basis to make Wu leave. The other school staff mutter, “Why can’t they just go somewhere else?”
I have been lumped in with Wu by association, and that’s fair enough: I have taken the subway today because I know that if I bike, I will be delayed by endless increments of three minutes — or one minute if there’s a school! — and wind up unsalvageably late. I know better than to try for lunch beforehand with Wu, because the weather is nice, which means we will sit outside, which means we will both lapse into silence and take up a posture of meerkat alertness at the hum of a lingering truck engine.
Our standoff with NYPD has the feel of a proxy war: It’s the Department of Environmental Protection and, ultimately, the mayor’s office who are the real adversaries — because the city, having enacted the curious regime of citizen enforcement, now appears intent on thwarting the citizens who actually do it, seemingly to benefit no one other than the polluters. In its latest salvo, the Adams administration has concocted new legislation, to be debated later this month, that would halve citizen rewards and broadly undermine the program.
After half an hour with the cops, Wu has had enough; he asks if he’s free to go; he departs. I am the one left on the sidewalk, still arguing.
The first of us was George. Now 74 and retired from his job as a mortgage banker, George experienced a revelation during the Iraq War: He looked around the city and saw all these numbskulls mindlessly burning through the very oil that had helped fuel America’s world-historic misadventure. So he started going around, on his own time, politely confronting and chiding the operators of those vehicles. Sometimes he handed them informational cards; sometimes they shut off their engines; sometimes they told him to fuck off — way off, “back to China” off. One stretch-limo chauffeur he accosted turned out to be an undercover cop. “He told me, ‘You know, you’re onto something — there’s a law against idling,’” George recalls. “‘But I don’t know what it is.’” Eventually, George found Section 24-182 of the New York City Administrative Code, which the City Council enacted in 1971 to allow individuals to report — and be rewarded for reporting — a whole range of offenses under the new Air Pollution Control Code, including idling. (The Commerce and Industry Association of New York issued a memorandum in response, warning that the citizen-complaint provision “would encourage … a multiplicity of suits brought by opportunists and crackpots.”) The law then stagnated in obscurity for nearly half a century.
George began lobbying the City Council to publicize and streamline the complaint process, and in 2018 it passed legislation doing so. The year before, the city had received a total of 26 citizen idling complaints, but in 2019, the first full year of the Citizens Air Complaint Program, there were around 9,000; in 2020 and 2021, with the pandemic’s disruptions, the numbers stayed roughly level, then rose again to 48,000 in 2022 and 83,000 in 2023. To date, the resulting fines have brought the city $50 million in revenue.
Most of these complaints have come from people like George — which is to say, we are almost all aggressive male nerds. We are birders of internal-combustion engines; we are sneakerheads of snitching. We are litigious; we are scolds. We are completists, lovers of order, keepers of spreadsheets, holders of grudges. We have turned a passion for complaining into a Weird Side Hustle.
Our plurality occupation is, inevitably, lawyer, and so our most active members — connected by group chats, email lists, and offline meetups — include patent, insurance, and environmental attorneys and a Fed. Those of us who lack a J.D. often possess, as a consolation qualification, a high-functioning disorder of the DSM-5 F40–48 cluster. There is Patrick, a German pediatrician; Dietmar, a nuclear-power activist (also German); Mike, a recently retired NYPD detective; and Streeter, a corporate dropout like Wu. Around the margins, there are some wild cards, like the citizen complainant who recently served two years in federal prison for his mail-order kratom business.
When at a party I mention the idling program and my interlocutor turns out to be thoroughly acquainted with it yet not a participant, I discover he is the eponymous creator of the HBO show How To With John Wilson, whose eccentric charm is grounded in exactingly observed, pathologically catalogued videos of New York’s streets. If you are trying to picture the modal male idling reporter and you are familiar with John Wilson, you can stop trying.
Although the CACP seems like a deceptively straightforward proposition — record a video, submit the video, wait for the DEP to issue a summons, wait to see if the fine gets paid, collect your reward — it is not. Once you have overcome the barriers that shield the program from the outside world, you discover fresh opacity and barriers within: the constantly changing rules and legal precedents; the variegated forms of city agency mis-, mal-, and nonfeasance; the clunkiness and creakiness of the DEP’s complaint-submission system. Casual, infrequent dabbling in the program isn’t really an option. To use the system, you must master the system. And if you are a master of the system, the only way to go is big time.
I don’t want to tread on the sensitive topic of others’ money, so I’ll tell you about mine: In 2023, I was responsible for about 2,150 of those 83,000 complaints, which was probably the most of anyone with a small child and a (notional) job but less than a third of what the top two or three filers did. Even though I am an inveterate spaz and doing this part time, historical data and some fuzzy math suggest my 2023 complaints will eventually be worth upwards of $150,000. (The fines themselves are $350, $440, and $600 for a first, second, or third offense, with the corresponding “default” judgments if a respondent no-shows set at $1,000, $1,500, and $2,000. The citizen complainant gets 25 percent of each fine, which can take years to come in.)
There is a symmetry that produces this peculiar form of self-interested activism: Those of us who wound up doing this because we are activist tattlers became enamored of the money our zeal incidentally produces, and those of us who joined solely for the money became legitimately passionate about the environmental stakes.
Those stakes, of course, are undeniable. The compounds in vehicle exhaust cause respiratory, cardiac, metabolic, and neurological problems, especially in the young and the old and the already sick. To that gaseous stew, which is harder to mitigate in this dense city, idling contributes something like 130,000 tons every year. And the ticker-tape parade of summonses has spurred compliance. Sights unimaginable two years ago are now commonplace: half a dozen utility-company vans lined up on a cold day, all silent. A major Amazon contractor’s box trucks that used to run all day long in Manhattan, then, practically overnight, never again, apparently following a chewing-out at dispatch over thousands of summonses. The carbon reduction may be pocket change in global terms, yet it allows us complainants far more impact than most individuals could ever claim.
Still, the DEP has groused from early on that it was being forced to deal with too many complaints — and none of the resulting revenue gets earmarked for its budget. The department’s main remit is managing New York’s vast water resources and infrastructure as well as its sewers, not staking out ambitious positions on air pollution and emissions; it is, if you will, more Chinatown than Inconvenient Truth. The department’s own vehicles can be found idling, with a kind of defiant irony, all over the city (government entities pay no fines). To this kind of institutional culture — lethargic, reactionary, statist, more sympathetic to car enjoyers than to poisoned children — the Air Complaint Program was an annoying side show, which made it ripe for political meddling.
Palpating my bike’s tires between his thumb and forefinger, the gentle Herr Doktor Patrick delivers a diagnosis of overinflation, which I would tend to argue with, until I start following him. He rides not in straight lines down, you know, the road (now 60, Patrick till recently clocked up to 70 miles a day) but up over and back down curbs, and also against traffic, and through parked cars and crowded sidewalks and the cursing of pedestrians.
This is a January day last year, just after the federal Coronavirus Relief Fund wound down, so early on we stop for the swan song of a LabQ COVID-testing van sandwiched between a park and a school in Carroll Gardens. This van typically idles the whole day long, but they know Patrick and his game by now — their drivers all around town have his photo — and he’s made them paranoid: “They check their blind spot every 30 seconds,” he says. “I’ve gotten them hundreds of times.” The previous summer, an ice-cream-truck operator on the same block (coincidentally the uncle of the LabQ driver) would raise the alarm (or sound the jingle — illegal while stationary) at Patrick’s approach, so Patrick invited others of us to try to sneak up on the van in his stead. “Why do they do it?” he wants to know. “Why do they do it just for some stupid company they work for that’s poisoning them?”
Patrick clearly enjoys the challenge more than he’ll admit, but today there is no joy: It’s off. We head toward Downtown Brooklyn, coasting through intersections to steal long glances down residential blocks for telltale taillights or the paint jobs of serial scofflaws — Con Ed cornflower, Amazon slate — Patrick nipping up to the sidewalk with predatory feline grace to pounce on a promising-looking target.
Skipping the food wholesalers making deliveries on Court Street (because Patrick’s summonses have already stopped their idling), we are rewarded with a gimme outside Macy’s: a clamorous Brink’s armored car disharmonizing with the sound of the O’Jays’ “Cry Together” warbling from an outdoor speaker (illegally — Noise Code 24-244[b]). Patrick drops onto a bench and invites me to join him, nonchalantly draping his phone arm over the side like we are just a couple of normal pals hanging out in the empty cold. The armored-truck guys are, as ever, defiantly oblivious and pathetic with op-sec (if anyone ever wants to do a heist, ask me for suggestions). As we near the three-minute threshold, I realize the Brink’s has drawn the interest of a second videographer; I direct Patrick’s attention to a middle-aged Chinese man in a black KN95 mask. He and Patrick salute — previously acquainted — and he bows slightly toward me.
“I am Larry.”
Ah, the famous Larry, from the Idle Warriors Google Group! “I’m Rafil.”
“The famous Rafil, how are you?”
“We’re really stumbling over each other,” Patrick says. He checks his phone. Streeter has texted a shorthand that indicates he already hit the LabQ over at Albee Square West.
Being a citizen complainant profoundly, irreversibly transforms your relationship to the city at street level. And the first thing you notice is that everyone is idling: the gas and electric utilities, the crappy cable-internet monopoly, the other crappy monopoly the next neighborhood over, the beer distributors, the florists, the tour buses (double-decker hop-off and single-decker intercity), the school buses, the prom limos (legally speaking, buses), the locksmith and plumbing and tech support vans (legally speaking, trucks), the Mitzvah Tank (also violating 24-244[b], but determining whether it’s a bus or a truck would probably require removal to the Lubavitchers’ beth din), some kind of bus or truck purportedly filled with strippers (the DEP tossed this one back to me to self-prosecute, with no sexy results), the Planters Nutmobile, the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile, the tankers carrying flour and sweetener and fuel oil and used fryer oil and porta-potty slurry, the diesel-powered service vans that come to fix the Teslas, the paving trucks and crane trucks and trucks carrying other trucks (which are, even while strapped in place, sometimes also idling), the passenger cars against which a humble citizen can’t write complaints but which are, all the same, breaking the law and poisoning the air.
Vehicle operators are growing more alert by the day. In our first hour out, a school-bus driver shuts off after (maybe?) spotting Patrick, who then perches his phone, insanely, atop the back wheel of a whisper-quiet double-parked elevator-repair van whose driver then pockets the phone, but when asked nicely gives it back with an innocent grin, saying, “I thought it was mine.” Patrick’s phone has wound up in the trash next to Barclays Center and seized by Amazon workers, sometimes along with his bike (they eventually made their peace with Patrick, or “male Karen,” as they call him, and had him guest-star in a TikTok). He cheerfully shares the resulting videos with the group with explanatory glosses such as “I am an idiot” or “Everything seemed quiet and peaceful, then suddenly I was surrounded by eight people.” It astonishes me that after two years of this, he still has his original iPhone and his original teeth.
Outside the Trader Joe’s at City Point Mall, we ride off in defeat to the taunts of a moving crew: “Don’t y’all want no more pictures?” they croon. “You are not on the phone, bro!” a Con Ed worker shouts at Patrick. “I’m leavin’, brother, I’m leavin’ right now. Come on! You got me already on Montague Street so many times!” pleads a plumber. “Suck my dick too!” says Amazon ambiguously. But being a celebrity sometimes invites a friendlier response: “Pay me $10 and I’ll turn it back on!” teases a driver he’s never met before. “What’s up, doc?” salutes another.
One reason Patrick gets ensnared more than any other highly productive complainant I know may be that he positively exudes Basic Bitch Citizen Reporter: white, male, middle-aged, on a bike, outdoorsy casual (today: Patagonia puffer vest, cargo pants, hiking boots). His N95, which used to help him stay anonymous, and which he continues wearing because of concerns about exhaust particulates, has become such an unusual accessory as to be utterly conspicuous.
Streeter, at the landmark of having passed 10,000 complaints, could still count the number of times he had exchanged words with a driver on two hands, but what Wu refers to as “Patrick’s high-octane drama” seems a daily occurrence. I now see why.
In playing the same game, Patrick and I have developed diametrically opposed styles: Where he often does a full circle of the vehicle, getting right up on the engine, or props his phone in the gutter for phenomenal sound, or knocks on school-bus doors to ask drivers if there are any children onboard, or clambers up the backs of box trucks to pull down the shutter door where a license plate is hiding (when I ventured to try this, my helpers in Wu’s Indian back office complimented me for being like Mr. Patrick), I take great pains to avoid detection and conflict. I have buried myself inside my apartment with a cinematographer friend’s camcorder so I could capture the diesel exhaust of dump trucks a hundred yards away, disguised myself as an Amazon worker so I could sit invisibly on the hoods of vehicles on Ninth Avenue, made accidental friends with road crews by showing up and reassuringly not recording them for days on end. I barely held myself back from asking condo residents — as if I were Brassaï schlepping his camera upstairs to knock on strangers’ doors in Paris — whether I could borrow their balconies safely overlooking a hot construction site.
I rarely see Patrick put effort into misdirection: He handles and holds his phone purposefully and lurks like a creep, and if he’s caught, he doesn’t bother acting innocent — we’re off to the next stop, perhaps after a few choice words. These avoidable, incidental provocations might just be irresistible for a genuine scold. Patrick, who routinely berates public officials about New York’s double-normal childhood asthma rates, certainly is one. If drivers ask point-blank why he’s recording, he’ll often say, with bloodless gesetzestreuer matter-of-factness, “You’re idling.” No mercy, no exceptions. A mango van offers him a free box of mangoes, and he accepts and thanks them profusely. He submits the video anyway.
Two months after my excursion with Patrick, as fair March weather begins to register in the lower incidence of idling engines, I bike to meet Mike the Cop for one of those endless lunches only two at-loose-ends men can have, stopping en route to pick up some self-prosecution forms from the DEP. The department is supposed to rule on your submission within 45 days and accept, disqualify, or kick it back to you to pursue on your own. For the last category, it sadistically compels you to travel to furthest Queens, next to the LIE between Rego Park and Corona.
Entering the lobby, I see Brad getting a thick stack of blank summonses from DEP Debbie (everyone likes Debbie). Nearly every day for a month and a half, Brad has been hitting a single Applebee’s just past Utopia for commercial noise violations. I had actually encountered Brad (a pseudonym) before Idling World: He writes a blog the exact description of which would make him immediately identifiable, so he has asked me not to share it — he’s received anonymous stick-figure-cartoon death threats over his self-prosecuted noise complaints (not from Applebee’s, he says, but likely “the Mister Softee community”) — but you’ll have the right idea if you imagine that Brad, say, personally examines and painstakingly posts about the direction of travel of every airport baggage belt in the world. I invite him to join me and Mike for lunch, but when he finds out I didn’t have time to nab the COVID van outside the Queens Center Mall, he takes his leave.
At a Cuban restaurant near Roosevelt Avenue, I offer Mike the door-facing seat (cop’s prerogative), and he starts bullshitting with the establishment’s multi-decade-faithful patrons; though this is his first time here, he is very much at home. As a Queens boy, first and foremost, but also as an old hand in this neighborhood from his first assignment out of the NYPD academy, when he was a transit cop. He’d start off the 8 p.m.–to–4 a.m. shift at Times Square, and they’d tell him what train he’d be on for the night, alone for hours, sometimes especially alone since his radio wouldn’t work in the tunnels, but Mike liked the long stretches of solitude, and in particular he loved the 7 train, which brought him through this part of Queens. One late night in those early years, one stop away from here, a flight attendant getting off her shift was walking down the stairs from the platform as Mike was walking up, and five weeks later they were married. Now, 30 years on, in a detective’s youthful retirement, he has wound up with loads of empty time, a skill set suited to idling, and a vibe that’s an absolute liability for it. I thought I was going to get to write jokes about how conspicuous Mike is, but he gets the drop on me. “I look like a cop,” he says. “I just look like a cop. If you’re doing something bad and you look at me …”
Eh, I’m going to do it anyway: Mike looks like an older Ethan Hawke (which is to say, these days, Ethan Hawke) if one time when Ethan Hawke pulled over with his family on Canal Street to buy some knockoff sunglasses, all the sellers fled at the sight of him, the whole block, so that he just wandered the deserted stalls looking in vain for someone to pay. But to our collective benefit, Mike’s background has given him a special standing to remonstrate with the DEP: A year earlier, when DEP Labs cooked up a weird new restriction requiring idling-complaint videos to capture all four sides of a vehicle, Mike, in his words, “went fuckin’ nuts.” He told them this innovation was neither practical nor useful: It was dangerous for citizens and total overkill from an evidentiary standpoint. He got a face-to-face with the commissioner himself, pressed his point, and added that the department was also refusing to accept visible exhaust in lieu of engine noise. The DEP backed down on both. (The department said it had no record of this encounter.) Whenever the DEP entertains an idling exemption request from an armored-car company that acts as if its employees are extras in Heat, Mike comes out swinging: These guys don’t need to leave their engines running to “make a break for it”; the targets of robberies are the crewmembers outside the vehicles — and oh, by the way, I know all about this because a while back it was my job to investigate major robberies; here’s a picture of me receiving a commendation for it. (The company in question got a variance anyway after promising to electrify their fleet.)
The DEP routinely pulls crap like this, and Mike steadfastly turns up for the fight, whether it means waiting for hours to testify before the City Council or being one of just four people on a DEP Zoom meeting, offering up for public consumption at least one of us who isn’t another shrill pointy-headed professional. (I end up in more of these proceedings than I would like because I add a little color, though in truth I am just three white lawyers in a trench coat.) “Depahtment of Enabling Polludahs,” Mike solemnly and frequently intones with the unalloyed sincerity of McGruff the Crime Dog.
Mike had heard from someone close to the DEP brass that the administration’s goal was simply to ensure that “you can’t make money from it anymore.” The day before our lunch, Mike attended a meeting of the citizens’ working committee, an ad hoc arrangement wherein he and various other of our salt-and-pepper eminences convened with the DEP every few months to push for good changes and stymie bad ones, and while a lot of it was bullshit as usual, Mike tells me, lately he couldn’t quite shake a foreboding that some greater disaster was near at hand. He detected, in particular, a whiff of paranoia and suppressed intrigue coming from the city: Alyssa Preston, an agency lawyer, had muttered darkly about “certain individuals who were acting with malice and bad intentions” to defraud the program.
Mike and I both assumed this talk was mostly hype. It’s less work to go find an extra idler than to fake a submission (e.g., by fudging metadata to double-dip on the same video?). But still we wondered at the possibilities: Maybe someone was playing a different game altogether — maybe someone in Great Neck or Hoboken was recording big companies’ vehicles wagering the corporate offices would mindlessly pay the fines or generating endless variant videos through AI. Or maybe Patrick took up the Con Ed driver’s joking offer to turn his engine back on for $10! One of our lawyers already had tipped off the DEP to a guy in Hell’s Kitchen who’d set up a business offering cash up front for videos, which he’d then submit as his own (the DEP tweaked its form to prohibit this). These nameless parties, said Preston, were about to be prosecuted under the Air Code for false statements, and if a “pattern” emerged, they’d be referred for criminal prosecution.
It would be very bad if this all became pretext for smothering the program, but it would also be very bad if any actual fraud went unaddressed. If they know about these people, Mike said, if any of it’s real, we should support the DEP. I agreed: “Prosecute ’em.”
It turned out one of the mysterious fraudsters was me. Having helped revive an obscure, long-dormant section of the Air Code, I found myself charged under another obscure, long-dormant section of the Air Code: 24-112, Making a False or Misleading Statement to the DEP. I had done no such thing — though I had apparently failed to notice an engine shutoff in one of my videos. But I started to see what the city’s game was once I pulled the summonses and rang up my fellow “bad actors”: Patrick had accidentally submitted some of Wu’s videos, owing to a mixup on the part of Wu’s Team India contractors; a retired CPA named Kevin, whom I hadn’t known previously, had submitted a video captured by his wife, with whom he always records as a team; and a Swedish app developer’s very first submission had run afoul of a website time-zone glitch that various users (including me) had repeatedly warned the DEP to fix.
Only two people had been prosecuted under 24-112 in a decade and a half, one of them an idling complainant named Hunter, whom the DEP charged a few months before the rest of us. Hunter — I mean this in both neutral, descriptive terms and also with a degree of affection — is an asshole. This can be a kind of gift, allowing him to cut through well-meaning or obfuscatory bullshit straight to the chase. It can also be something others experience as un-gift-like. Because Hunter was constantly suing the DEP and other agencies in small-claims and big-claims court, and lambasting officials for their despotism, I wondered whether the obviously lame charges were just cover for a retaliatory attack on this one abrasive litigant. He caught a second charge along with mine, and I tried to discern whether there might be other beefs playing out. I had, I realized, recently notified the DEP at a public hearing that I was reporting this story, and my hope was that the department had not intentionally prosecuted a journalist who was writing something presumably critical of it — partly because its having done so by accident is just objectively funny.
The maximum fine for our alleged crimes was $1,400, and the hearings began early last May. Patrick quickly beat his charges. The Swede was also vindicated. Hunter’s second case will wait for the final disposition of his first, which he had lost and is appealing. Kevin’s proceedings continue to drag out, as do mine. (My legal fees are currently looking to cost me in the neighborhood of 40 complaints.) The DEP sent real lawyers rather than the workaday summons writers to try the cases; the one who turned up at my most recent day in court used to moonlight in the CACP himself.
Some of these shenanigans felt personal. When Mike turned up for an appointment at the DEP’s offices to collect some forms, an official accused him of “flashing a badge” to get in and sicced three rent-a-cops on him. But such scuffles were part of a larger, indiscriminate shift in policy.
It didn’t matter how careful or proper any of us were; to the city, we were all Hunter, and it wanted us all gone. The anti-pollution program was a more acute concern than the actual pollution. (The DEP denied this is the case: “DEP thinks that the program is very effective as it empowers citizens to aid in the enforcement of the idling law.”) Idling complaints are a low-stakes version of America’s peculiar and varied private rights of action, which allow ordinary citizens to enforce laws themselves, and while serving up a complaint to the DEP is a lot easier than, say, trying to sue someone for performing an abortion, like all such laws, it can undermine the government’s prerogative of deciding how much enforcement is too much for its comfort.
The department discontinued its regular meetings with the working group, stripping away the veneer of collaboration. It began reducing the protections for schools and refused to enforce a similar one-minute law for parks. It began using anti-commonsensical tests to determine whether a truck is really a truck and a bus a bus. (In a statement, the DEP defended its handling of the program, which it said was “still relatively young.” Because the number of complaints “has grown exponentially,” the department says, it has had to “continually make adjustments in order to process the evidence and ensure that only cases that are likely to succeed before an independent hearing officer are pursued.”)
In the least-surprising twist, we responded, starting last summer, by suing. Dietmar sued. Streeter sued for the second time. Hunter sued for the nth time. When LabQ, which owed millions in idling fines, sued the DEP and the DEP seemed willing to throw in the towel, we intervened on the side of the DEP. But this lawfare was asymmetric. The agency seemed to be saying: “If you want to waste your own time and money suing us to prove us wrong, go ahead. We have the unlimited capacity of the City Law Department to defend us, and state-court judges will likely just rubber-stamp our briefs, so then you’ll have follow through to the appellate stage to win, and in the meantime we will retroactively toss all the pending complaints that are the very subject of the lawsuit. And in the long run, well, we’ll come up with our own laws and sneak them past the drowsy emperor.”
This was the corollary to George’s original triumph: You could come up with your own idealistic bill and doggedly shop it around to sympathetic legislators and let the zombies of municipal government make it the law of the land, but it was just as easy for the zombies to tear it apart.
Over the past year, as the number of participants in the CACP has grown, the sense of close community has been dissipating. I noticed myself trying to cling to the core group in novel ways. For one, I now tried to engage with Wu on anything but shop talk, enjoying the contact high of his chipper unworldliness, assiduously editing his Hinge profile so it’d sound less like his LinkedIn. Andrew (another idler and, tragically, a lawyer), perhaps responding to the same urge to preserve the tight-knit scene, tried setting him up with improbably worldly women. Wu appreciated our fraternal attentions, though he flatly asserted it was not possible to be “real” friends with idling weirdos.
Many of the new participants in the program, as it happened, were a product of our own deliberate efforts. We started trying to cultivate a broader coalition, breaking the monopoly on highly credentialed white guys: I recruited three women (!); Mike recruited his son’s girlfriend; Mike and I made friends with Ximena, a union carpenter in Sunnyside who approached idling as part of her recovery from a workplace injury; I volunteered with a nonprofit in Hunts Point, helping to train young people in the South Bronx — which has some of the country’s worst air and just a tiny fraction of the city’s idling complaints — to start enforcing in their own community and watched a special, familiar consternation bloom on their faces as I kept answering reasonable questions with “Because that’s the way it is.” The hope was that this could become anyone’s Weird Side Hustle, so the whole program might one day collapse under the weight of its own success.
We welcomed the newbies to our fold, but the numbers were destined to grow with or without us. Our happy-hour meetups — replete with tech clinics and gag awards — no longer include the majority of players in the game. Unknown whales now swim among us. We spot them once in a while, black-on-black uniforms and studiously diverted gazes, but most of them remain solo operators, likely unaware of the political liabilities the rising volume of complaints has created.
In September, the City Council will consider the pro-idling bill (or at least anti-anti-idling bill) written by the Adams administration (which forgot to remove its fingerprints from the metadata) and introduced by Environment Committee chair James Gennaro, which would reduce citizen awards and grant the DEP the power to punish participants whose conduct it deems insufficiently “decorous.” We spend a lot of time these days contemplating the gutting of the CACP. And while that prospect sharpens my regret at never having gone all in like Wu and Streeter, even for half a year, I suspect my choice was a healthy one.
The CACP’s proposition, for me, turned out to be “Help the environment and also get angry, waste lots of time, and slowly descend into madness.” Idling reformed me in some uncomfortable ways, down to the feverish contours of my dreams, where I wander in sun-bleached Giorgio de Chirico landscapes and unattended trucks rumble like mindless menacing dogs. Having taken to engaging in fake phone conversations while recording, I found myself reflexively babbling these scripts and improvisations while wandering around the gym, the grocery store, the house, with no earbuds in: telling my mother she should choose her own damn doctor; conducting a make-believe “hip-hop tour” of my neighborhood for YouTube. At times the compulsion pushed me toward farce. (Fellas! If your lady is pregnant, please do not argue, when approaching the ultrasound clinic for a 16-week scan, “So it’ll be 16 weeks and three minutes,” and perhaps do not, when saving money by personally transporting a large tank filled with liquid nitrogen and all your remaining cryogenically suspended spawn across midtown, stop on Fifth Avenue to record a moving-and-storage truck.)
As I was beginning to game out contingencies for the party’s end, I met up for lunch with a college classmate visiting from Los Angeles, where, as befits a fratty Ivy League paleoliberal and ruthless microeconomic rationalist, he oversees a half-billion-dollar residential-property empire. He was suitably charmed by my tales of sundry kookiness and gold lying in the streets. But, zhuzhing his entrepreneur hat, he pitched me on a different idea: If I enjoyed seeking out the opportunities arising from internally contradictory local laws and regulations, making money, engaging in recreational litigation, and being smarter than other people, he asked, why not try real estate? He knew I’d found office life tedious and stressful, he knew I never would have wound up in banking or big law, but surely his kind of work was better than a tenuous part-time job where your sclerotic, capricious “boss” would maliciously prosecute you for perjury?
Whether through such rational appeals or some other influence, my passions cooled a little. Late this spring, I noticed it had become possible for me to walk down the street without finding myself several blocks off my route and pretending to have an argument with an imaginary friend. The noiseless new Amazon EV vans fill me with neither satisfaction nor disappointment. It would be nice, I started to think, to have hobbies again, to spend two days immersed in some carpentry or metalworking project, or read a friend’s new novel, or write a novel, or get dressed without regard for whether my phone case blends in. I have now been licensed as a citizen tree pruner, backstopping the work of another city agency, though the volunteerism and horticulture may wind up being little more than a new way to get in fights with strangers.
Maybe the salad days of idling are numbered. But until they are gone, you can find me and Wu and Mike the Cop and Dr. Patrick and the rest of the gang out here on these mean, now somewhat less disgusting, streets. You’re welcome to join us. We’ll silly-walk through the background of your video if we see you in the field. We’ll teach you what we know.