Traffic Tickets Are Big Business, Don’t Pay In!

City officials and red light camera operators tout red light cameras as safety tools. But traffic tickets are a multi-billion dollar industry. Study after study has showed that they have virtually nothing to do with highway safety, but they have everything to do with money.

This is why we created Ticket Snipers: To help drivers caught in these unfortunate situations.

It is hard to determine how many tickets are actually issued each year. Many local governments deliberately hide this information so they don’t have to split their revenue with the state. But safe estimates put the total amount of traffic tickets, not including parking tickets, at $3.75 to $7.5 billion dollars. And cities aren’t the only ones making money. If just half of these tickets result in insurance surcharges (typically at least $300 over a period of three years), you can add another 3.75 to 7.5 billion dollars in profit for insurance companies. Insurance companies encourage police to issue more tickets by donating millions of dollars worth of radar and laser guns.

So lets do the math. We’re talking about 7.5 to 15 billion dollars annually from tickets for local governments and insurance companies. And this doesn’t even include the money that traffic schools, attorneys, radar-detector manufacturers, and red light camera operators make.

To keep the money coming in local governments have to do a number of things:

Pass enough laws so that police can stop virtually anybody at any time and come up with a traffic violation, no matter how trivial or concocted it is. These traffic law violations are also frequently used as an excuse to stop, detain, and search persons the police have no other legitimate reason to stop.

Hide the real reason behind traffic tickets by blowing the effects of various violations out of proportion. Where exactly is the “carnage” they are constantly talking about.

Convince citizens that tickets are only given to bad drivers, and that these drivers should pay for the cost of enforcement. This seems logical, right? But safe drivers get tickets all the time.

Keep the ticket prices below the pain threshold that would compel motorists to aggressively contest traffic citations in court. Officials know the sweet spot where drivers will suck it up and pay the fine instead of fighting it in court—which would drain the city of money if it had to defend all of them.

Make it easy to convict those who do fight their tickets by removing as many due process protections as is politically possible.

But there are a few simple changes that can radically alter this unjust system and actually make roads safer:

1. 1. No court or police department should directly benefit from the collection of traffic fines.
   2. No police department should be permitted to rate its officers based on how many tickets they write.
   3. No local government should keep the money from traffic fines. Rather, it should be transferred to the state which will return it using a formula based on population.

Don’t listen when they tell you that the system is fair and just. If you’ve recently received a traffic violation, you don’t have to just pay up. You can fight it with the help of Ticket Snipers.