Newsday Tuesday

HOV cheaters have a special, and dark, place in the hearts of area commuters. As motorists sit in stop-and-go traffic or pick up strangers to meet the minimum number of riders to use the free-flowing HOV lanes, cheaters blithely fly by in the restricted lanes. Alone.

"Sometimes when you commute, you do some crazy, crazy things when you see all those red lights in front of you," said Aleta Joy Williams, a daily cheater who has racked up 10 HOV violations [...] "You need to be at a certain place at a certain time, and you are willing to do whatever it takes to get to where you need to."

Karen Marie Livingston, [...] got six tickets during years of cheating, the last one a whopper. "I decided to stop when I had to tell my husband I got a $1,000 ticket," she said. "I cried for a week. But I couldn't blame anyone but myself. When you get a $1,000 ticket, it's a come-to-Jesus moment."

During her cheating days, [Karen Marie Livingston] would sometimes take hooded coats and arrange them on the seats so it looked as if there were three people in the car. Sometimes that worked. She also talked her way out of four tickets. "I played one as a dumb female. Another time, I said I was pregnant and sick. The officer understood because his wife was pregnant."

Cheaters hurt the system by clogging the lanes and making those who make the extra effort to play by the rules feel like suckers. Thousands of drivers a day pick up slugs, commuters who accept free rides from drivers looking to add passengers to qualify for the HOV lanes.

Ricci Angresano, with six convictions, said the enforcement and penalties made him change his ways. [...] Asked why he didn't take Metro, he said that he tried it but that it was difficult to get a seat on the commute home. And then there were all the germs. "Everybody's stacked up like sardines, coughing and sneezing and touching the poles," he said. "Then they turn up the heat in winter, and the germs just multiply."

Jonathan Krasnov [...] cheated every morning on I-95/395 for 11 years, or about 2,200 trips. He received six tickets in that time. [...] He stopped only because he received a $500 ticket after the fines went up. "You get to the point where you are so desperate you can't take it anymore," Krasnov said.