The truth about tickets

[unixronin]

As the Chicago Tribune reports, a new study at George Mason University (Fairfax, Virginia) confirms what you've always suspected about speeding tickets.  The study is based on citation data from 350 Massachusetts municipalities.

Among the study's findings:

• If you have out-of-state plates, you're nearly twice as likely to get a ticket.
• The further you live from the jurisdiction where the ticket will be heard, the more likely you are to be cited, and the higher the fine is likely to be.
• You're 28% more likely to be ticketed if you're pulled over in a jurisdiction where the voters just rejected a property tax increase.
• Being young and female has a good chance of getting you out of a ticket.

Stratmann said that when he began looking at the data he hoped to find, despite anecdotal information to the contrary, that justice was blind.  But "what we found is that, in fact, people are not treated remotely equally under the law," he said.

Makowsky got the idea for the research after his Virginia-registered car was stopped for speeding in Massachusetts.

"A state trooper stopped me for going 75 m.p.h. in a 65 zone.  I was in the right lane because everybody was passing me on the left," said Makowsky, 29.

Comments

[ithildae.livejournal.com]

And this is a surprise to?

I remember getting ticketed for speeding riding my Bicycle in a little town in Illinois. Talk about a strange feeling.

[arasirsul.livejournal.com]

The third one is the really interesting one to me: Almost everywhere I've lived (sure, not statistically sound, but what the heck) has had statutes on the books that don't allow quotas and other laws that try to make it sound like traffic enforcement isn't just revenue enhancement.

28% is a pretty big figure in a world where they _claim_ that traffic enforcement isn't solely done for revenue enhancement...

The others don't surprise me at all-- the first two just make sense for the arresting officer; he gets credit for a stop and a fine and doesn't even have to make the court date for it; the last one, well, young females get a number of breaks in this world, fair or not...

-F

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Having statutes is one thing. Obeying them is sometimes quite another ....

[laurarey.livejournal.com]

And then there is my husband....who toured the easter half of the US last year on his motorcycle, and got pulled over twice. Once for speeding and once for flipping a u-turn, on a dam, in front of a roadblock.

His charm is unnerving. By the end of the conversation with the cops at the roadblock, he had them posing with him on the damn and taking his picture.

Un-frakin-believable.