Traffic tickets are a pervasive and perennial component of life in the United States. Why? Because the traffic ticket system justifies, supports, and rationalizes a multi-billion dollar slice of the national economy.

 

Let's dispense with one fallacy right up front. Traffic tickets have virtually nothing to with highway safety. I want to emphasize that traffic tickets and traffic law enforcement are not synonymous, and the first should not be considered a necessary component of the latter.

 

State and local governments learned long ago that traffic ticket financial sanctions have little deterrent effect on motorists. Some might argue that fines could be increased to the level that motorists would be sufficiently intimidated to obey the law. In reality, large fines increase motorist resistance to paying high fines and instead, they demand a trial. Trials take all the profit out of the system.

 

Eventually the "point system" was developed wherein a chronic violator would lose his or her drivers license if sufficient points were accumulated. It's the points, not the typical fine, that catches the average drivers attention.

 

As the hackneyed saying goes, "it doesn't take a rocket scientist" to figure out why the traffic ticket system has survived all these years, despite the fact that it does nothing to improve highway safety. The obvious answer is "money." But, the reasons go deeper than just putting extra cash in government coffers.

 

Traffic tickets virtually fund many court systems. Traffic tickets justify the existence of entire police agencies (state highway patrols). Traffic tickets are the measurement criteria for enforcement budget requests and personnel performance ratings. Traffic tickets are used as an excuse to raise the insurance rates for otherwise safe drivers to the cumulative total of billions of dollars each year. And, in some instances, traffic tickets virtually fund local units of government.

 

When you begin to grasp the full magnitude of the public and private vested interests that depend on ripping off motorists through traffic tickets, you begin to understand why this blatantly immoral and unethical system persists and expands.

 

No one knows how many traffic tickets are actually issued. Many local units of government deliberately mask this information so they don't have to split their traffic ticket revenue with the state. Not including parking tickets (another grand scam), we can only estimate that somewhere between 25 and 50 million traffic tickets are issued each year. Anecdotal information we receive in our office suggests that tickets average about $150.00. This means that the up front cost nationally is between $3.75 billion and $7.5 billion dollars. If just half of these tickets result in insurance surcharges (typically $300 over a period of three years), you can add another $3.75 to $7.5 billion dollars to the gouging attributable to traffic tickets.

 

It should be noted that we haven't even considered the money siphoned off for "traffic schools," attorneys' fees, and avoidance devices like radar detectors and scanners.

 

On the upper side, we're talking about a $15 billion-dollar annual income stream just from fines and insurance surcharges. That's more money than a fair number of states take in from all taxes combined!

 

The manipulators and benefactors of the traffic ticket system operate under a few basic tenets:

<typolist type="1">

Pass enough laws so that anybody can be stopped anytime and be given a ticket for a traffic violation.

Exaggerate, stigmatize, distort, and otherwise blow out of proportion the effects of various traffic violations.

Maintain a public relations campaign that claims traffic tickets are only given to bad drivers, that these drivers should pay for the cost of enforcement, and that it's only logical that the police and courts should be funded from traffic ticket receipts.

Keep the ticket prices below the pain threshold that would compel motorists to aggressively contest traffic citations in court.

Remove as many due process protections for traffic law offenders as is politically possible.

</typolist>

 

That the press and more legitimate political interests do not recognize or acknowledge the obvious conflicts of interest is perplexing. The police enforce laws that result in direct benefits to police agencies and personnel. Judges weigh decisions where a finding of "guilty" financially rewards the court and courthouse personnel. And, local units of government deliberately institute enforcement practices with the clear intention of extorting money from travelers to support local government services and to reward government employees. Yet none of these readily documented episodes raises a single red flag?

 

This system of legalized extortion can be eliminated if the driving public demands change. No court or police department should retain or directly benefit from the collection of traffic fines. No police department should be permitted to rate or evaluate its officers on the basis of citations issued. No local unit of government should retain traffic fines. The money collected in local courts should be transferred to the state and returned via a local aid formula based on population.

 

These few simple administrative changes would largely remove the legislatively-sanctioned graft and corruption inherent in the traffic ticket system. Maybe it's time for the government to be held to the same "conflict-of-interest" standards it imposes on the private sector?

 

By James J. Baxter, NMA President

Source