Don’t even try it. He’s heard them all. Late for work? You should’ve left earlier. You really have to get to a bathroom? Oh jeez, he’ll write the ticket as quickly as he can. You think your speedometer is broken? His radar gun definitely isn’t. When you see those flashing lights in the rearview mirror, you may as well just as accept the inevitable.
Check out this motion graphic from CJ Pony Parts showing some pretty fascinating statistics about speeding tickets, including what cars get the most tickets, what states have the highest prices, and more:
112,000 out of the 196,000,000 drivers in the United States get tickets each day. That might not seem like too big of a number relatively speaking, but consider the fact that 20.6% of all drivers get a ticket every year and you start to realize that fewer people get away with “being late to work” than you might think. When you realize the yearly total of people that police manage to snag for speeding every year exceeds the total population of California, you might think twice about cutting some time out of your daily commute.
Sure, speeding isn’t advisable in the sense that you risk causing irreversible physical and psychological harm for yourself, your passengers and the unlucky drivers you careen into when you’re going too fast to safely maneuver your vehicle, but getting caught speeding by the police hurts your wallet as well.
The average cost of a speeding ticket isn’t not being able to stop blaming yourself for the death of your best friend and a beautiful family you only met in a snarled knot of metal and gore that haunts your dreams. But it is $152.
$152 is no paltry sum. You don’t leave $152 in the pocket of a winter coat and not tear up your house looking for it. $152 is the average bill for a family of four’s groceries. If you’re really living on the edge, your family could theoretically go hungry for a week if you get slapped with a speeding ticket.
If you’re convinced traffic accidents only happen to other people, don’t fear death, but for some reason still fear speeding tickets, then you should avoid Virginia. They give, on average, the highest fine for exceeding the speed limit: $1,350. Don’t speed in Virginia.Seriously. That’s over nine weeks of groceries, all for an attempt to try to get to a location a few minutes earlier. They could also put you in jail. There is nothing to talk about in jail except why you are in jail. You don’t want to have to say you’re there because you were “late for work.” Again, they are not messing around in Virginia.
Georgia, North Carolina, New Hampshire, Illinois, and Nevada all have tickets that could cost you $1,000. If you must speed,Tennessee is the place to be. They only have a $50 fine for speeding there. So if you’re a twenty year old man who is in the habit of driving 16 mph or more over the speed limit – the most likely demographic to get ticketed – try to stick to Tennessee and try to think of some more unique excuses.
