Traffic tickets: necessary evil or the state gouging you?

.


Yes, meter maids are evil and must be destroyed. Sorry, I don’t mean to sound like an anti-government whacko. We’ve got real proof here:

Municipalities have revenue motives for enforcing traffic laws in addition to public‐safety motives because many traffic offenses are punished via fines and the issuing municipality often retains the revenue. Anecdotal evidence supports this revenue motive. We empirically test the revenue motive using a panel of annual data for North Carolina counties from 1990 to 2003. We find that significantly more tickets are issued in the year following a decline in revenue but that the issuance of traffic tickets does not decline in years following revenue increases. Elasticity estimates reveal that a 10 percent decrease in negative revenue growth results in a 6.4 percent increase in the growth rate of traffic tickets. Our results suggest that tickets are used as a revenue‐generation tool rather than solely a means to increase public safety.

Source: “Red Ink in the Rearview Mirror: Local Fiscal Conditions and the Issuance of Traffic Tickets” from The Journal of Law and Economics

Join over 320,000 readers. Get a free weekly update via email here.

Related posts:

New Neuroscience Reveals 4 Rituals That Will Make You Happy

New Harvard Research Reveals A Fun Way To Be More Successful

How To Get People To Like You: 7 Ways From An FBI Behavior Expert

Share

Subscribe to the newsletter