Speeding Tickets

Remember, the point of speeding tickets is to raise money. Stop the flow of money, and you stop the speeding tickets.

So, here's the Number One Most Effective Way to make the cops stop giving speeding tickets. Just take your ticket to court. There are two reasons for doing this:

• You might get to drop the ticket.
  In the best-case-scenario, the officer who gave you the ticket won't show up to court. If that happens, there is no witness. If there is no witness, there is no prosecution. If there is no prosecution, there is no case. So, if the officer doesn't show up, you get to walk.
• If you get stuck paying, the police lose money.

And, if everyone did this, or even half of the people who get tickets, the whole speeding ticket system would collapse. It's easily explained with a bit of math:

• The average ticket is around $100.
• The cops I've talked to claim to catch an average of 15 speeders per day. That's $1500 in tickets, per officer, per day!
• If you have good questions, you can keep your court trial going for several hours. Let's say three hours, plus it takes maybe half an hour each way to get to and from the trial.
• So, you can waste half of a workday in court.
• A police officer probably makes $15 - $30 per hour. Last time I asked, the range was $22 - $28. I'll estimate $25.
• So, it can cost the police $100 or so for the officer to go to court.
• The judge probably gets paid roughly the same amount. So, the cost of your trial could be between $100 and $300, maybe even more.
• In the 4 hours the cop wastes in court, he/she probably could have caught 6-8 speeders. That's $600-$800 lost.
• So, the net loss of defending one ticket can be $500-$1000. Even if you lose in court, you cost the police quite a bit of money.

If a significant portion of speeders did this, it would no longer make economic sense. The police would be forced to stop giving speeding tickets. But few people realize this. The only way to make this happen is to educate people about it. Tell your friends. Put up a web page about it. Offer to advise people who have gotten a ticket.