At least it was wearing its seat belt.
A driver was caught in a Brooklyn HOV lane with a dummy, which he had dressed up in sunglasses, a sweat shirt, hat and pants, police say.
“Great effort,” a police source told The Post of the New Jersey man’s apparent attempt to fool highway cops.
The driver, whose name and age were not released, was coming from the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge Tuesday morning when he was stopped by an NYPD officer near the Gowanus Expressway ramp, according to cops.
The officer approached the car and spotted the phony passenger buckled into the back seat — and issued the driver a summons for disobeying a traffic device.
Solo drivers are prohibited from traveling in high-occupancy vehicle lanes, and there are multiple signs along the Gowanus Expressway stating it.
“It’s funny,” another source said. “Ridiculous actually. It just means you move faster in the HOV lane. Traffic’s terrible in the city.”
Two points will be added to the man’s license, and he will be required to pay a $55 fee, with an added $88 surcharge, police and sources said.
He’s not the first New Yorker to try to play highway cops for dummies.
In May, James Britt, 34, of Centereach, LI, got a summons after he was caught driving his 2002 Saturn sedan on the Long Island Expressway with a sunglasses-wearing mannequin in the front passenger seat.
The mannequin, clad in a baseball cap and jeans, was tied to the seat with a blue hoodie.
And it’s not just New Yorkers.
A hearse driver pulled over in a Las Vegas HOV lane tried to claim his “passenger” was in the back — dead and in a body bag.
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“As I get up to the window, I see he’s wearing a polo shirt with a funeral home logo on it,” Nevada Highway Patrol Trooper Travis Smaka recalled of the July 1 traffic stop.
“He immediately tells me he’s got the remains of a person in the vehicle behind him.”
Unfortunately for the driver, a vehicle occupant must be alive to be considered a passenger.
In 2001, Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez took carpool cruising to another level when he hired a day laborer to be his “professional passenger.”
Additional reporting by Tina Moore