A simple task that has apparently made thousands of thoughts disappear

Good morning. It’s Tuesday. Today we’ll look at why 44,000 New Yorkers just had their driver’s licenses suspended. We’ll also look at a court settlement that paved the way for more recreational cannabis dispensaries to open.

Have you renewed your driver’s license in New York during the Covid-19 pandemic? If so, you could be one of the 44,000 people whose licenses have been suspended as of Friday. You also risk a fine of up to $500.

When the pandemic was at its worst, Department of Motor Vehicles offices, like much of the world, were closed, so the department allowed drivers to renew their licenses without the required eye test.

Those who took advantage of the offer, which applied to licenses expiring between March 2020 and August 2021, had to “self-certify” that they met the vision requirement. Don’t stand in a line, don’t stare at an eye chart on the wall and don’t read the letters to someone behind a counter at a RDW office.

But many people apparently did not read the fine print accompanying the self-certification, which stated that vision test results had to be submitted within a year.

The department eventually announced that the deadline for submitting vision test results would be Nov. 26, more than a year after DMV offices reopened and the self-certification program ended.

The DMV says it has sent out reminders with a warning: those who missed the deadline their licenses would be automatically suspended on December 1. The department also sent an email message to the drivers for whom they had email addresses and called those for whom they had phone numbers. She also posted a warning on her website.

About 560,000 drivers received reminders as of February 2021; by April this year, around 400,000 people had met the requirement for a vision test.

But thousands of other people waited or ignored the reminders. About 17,700 New York City drivers were among those who had their licenses suspended Friday after failing to submit a vision test.

About 5,216 were from Brooklyn, the most from any county in the state. Also on the suspended list: nearly 4,900 drivers from Queens, nearly 3,800 from Manhattan, nearly 2,700 from the Bronx and nearly 1,100 from Staten Island. Nearly 3,900 from Suffolk County were also suspended on Dec. 1, as were just over 3,200 from Nassau County and nearly 2,400 from Westchester County.

Anyone driving with a suspended license faces fines of $200 to $500, and up to 30 days in jail. To help prevent this, the DMV’s website has a list of vision providers approved to perform the test. The department said it took about five days to process a test once it was submitted.

One provider, Cleared to Drive, was founded during the pandemic and remains so the only one approved for online vision testing. Dr. Kerinna McDonald, an optometrist in Jackson Heights, Queens, got the idea in April 2020 while taking a continuing education course online after being furloughed from the Manhattan practice where she had been working.

“The course was about things like ‘here we are in the pandemic’ and ‘here are some things you can do for your patients,’” she recalled. “They said, ‘Check the visual acuity.’ I said, ‘New York DMV, I could do that.’

She and her husband, Greg McDonald, figured out how to compensate for different screen sizes so that the eye graph would be the same whether someone was looking at a mobile phone or a desktop monitor.

Then she said, ‘we’re asking your shoe size.’ The software uses that to tell the test taker how many steps he or she needs to take from the cell phone or monitor to be as far from the screen as from an eye chart at a DMV or doctor’s office. She said Cleared to Drive had expanded to a 20-person operation and was adding 1,000 drivers a week as the December 1 deadline approached.

Weather

Expect cloud cover to increase as the day progresses, with temperatures reaching the mid-40s. In the evenings it will drop to the mid 30s.

ALTERNATE PARKING

In effect until Friday (Immaculate Conception).

More recreational cannabis dispensaries are expected to open in New York now that a ban preventing the state from processing certain license applications has been lifted.

Judge Kevin Bryant of the State Supreme Court in Kingston, N.Y., lifted the ban last week, nearly four months after he imposed it. He did so as part of a deal to settle two lawsuits filed against the state by people and companies who said they were illegally barred from applying for the first licenses to legally sell marijuana without a medical referral.

The state reserved those first licenses for people with marijuana-related convictions or their immediate family members, and some nonprofits.

Dispensaries were slow to open as the state fought the lawsuits and wavered on its promise to provide licensees with turnkey stores and loans to cover start-up costs. Last week, only 27 licensees had opened stores or started delivering. Another 436 were held up by Judge Bryant’s ban.

Osbert Orduña, the CEO and co-owner of Cannabis Place, a delivery service based in Queens, said the company was forced to postpone plans to open a brick-and-mortar store. Now, he said, the owners expect to open a pharmacy in Middle Village this month.

My colleague Ashley Southall says the lack of stores has been the biggest problem in introducing recreational marijuana to New York. Sales surpassed $100 million in November, but most of the state’s inventory remains unsold.

As part of the settlements, four veterans who alleged they had been discriminated against received retail licenses and classification as social equity licensees, making them eligible for compensation discounts and financial assistance, training and other assistance from the state. The state also agreed to create a program to increase veterans’ participation in the cannabis industry.

A separate agreement involving a coalition led by medical cannabis companies binds regulators to a timeline for reviewing and approving the companies’ applications to enter the recreational market as wholesalers and retailers.

The coalition also included several people who received nothing in the settlement. Among them was Taneka Morris, a professional chef and event producer, who said she joined the coalition despite her reluctance to align herself with medical cannabis companies.

She said her motivation was that the state’s requirements for the first retail licenses excluded many people she believed deserved the opportunity.

In October, regulators opened a new round of permits to anyone who wanted to apply. She said she was considering it.

METROPOLITAN diary

Party of 10

Dear Diary:

My husband and I got married one morning in 2009 at Manhattan City Hall. A few people had to go to work after the ceremony. The rest of us, feeling hungry, went to a Belgian restaurant on West Broadway that has since closed.

The place wasn’t really set up for a party of 10 people, but the staff made do and pushed some tables together to accommodate us.

There was only one small table that we didn’t use in the end. There was a man in his thirties working on a laptop.

We placed our orders and started taking pictures of each other. The man working on his laptop asked if we wanted a photo of the entire group.

We thanked him for his offer and he took a few pictures. Then we went back to celebrating and he turned back to his computer.

He left at some point after our food arrived, and I can’t remember if we said goodbye.

When we finished and my father asked for the check, the waitress told us not to worry. The man with the laptop had already paid the bill.

– Ana Cristina dos Santos Morais

Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send your entries here And read more Metropolitan Diary here.