Hey all,
So here’s the background of this question. I was having a discussion… argument… you know… with my sister about how often people normally get speeding tickets. (Much 'I’M THE ONLY PERSON ON EARTH WHO DRIVES THE SPEED LIMIT!") insistence was involved. 
Without saying who was on which side of the argument, one of us believes that getting **two **speeding tickets in twenty-one years of driving isn’t so bad and isn’t outside the average. The other wants proof and is a very argumentative sister. 
I would have thought it would be a lot easier to find this answer, but the info I’ve found tends to deal with what percentage of drivers will get a ticket this year, which cars are most likely to be ticketed, which states are the most likely, etc. Can one of the smart people here settle that question?? What’s the average number of tickets per driver per year/ten years/twenty years/etc?
Here you go. One every ten years is low
There is something wrong with those numbers:
Average number of people per day that receive a speeding ticket 112,000
Total annual number of people who receive speeding tickets 41,000,000
Dividing that out: that comes to 366 days in a year. While 366 vs (365 or 365.25) could be rounding errors it ignores one major point: there are a substantial number of people who get multiple tickets in a year. So there are significantly fewer than 41 million people who receive speeding tickets in a year.
Thanks, but something smells fishy about those numbers:
It looks to me like they took the number of people per day and multiplied by 366 to get the number of people per year (and then calculated the percentage of drivers who will get speeding tickets based on this). But this assumes that those 41,000,000 tickets are all going to different people—i.e. nobody’s getting more than one speeding ticket per year.
On preview, I see I’m ninja’ed by PastTense!
My lifetime of driving about 1,000,000 miles I have gotten 3 speeding tickets. None in my home state of Ca. where 97% of my driving was done. This is over about 50 years.
I’ve had two speeding tickets in 34 years of driving and I think I’ve been pulled over three other times where I was given a warning.
This is, surprisingly, a difficult number to find a statistic for. As for anecdotes, I don’t think I’ve gotten one in the last ten years, but extend that a year or two, and there’s two that I’ve gotten: one by camera (Buffalo area, blowing the 10 or 15mph speed limit on the EZPass lanes–we have those here in Illinois, too, but they’re not policed like that) and one somewhere in Ohio on the way to Buffalo, properly pulled over by police. So two in a week there.
I once had gotten 2 speeding tickets within 12 hours. Yeah, I was 19. But in my defense, Porsche, there is no substitute.
Even if we accept these numbers, this is a situation where average isn’t a very useful figure. The average is likely skewed by the few people who receive a large number of speeding tickets. In other words, almost everybody is below average. What we want to know here is the median. (Though I think that’s a much more difficult number to find out.)
Average can mean any of those things (mean, median, mode.) I agree with you that it should be clarified. I interpret the question to be asking more for the median definition of “average,” but would happy to hear the “mean” definition of average if it suits their argument. 
That’s probably counting each ticket as a separate instance. Just the same way that the US has had 45 presidents, even though only 44 people have filled the office.
Whenever you find the word “average” used without a definition or a qualifier, 99.9999% of the time, the mean is what is meant.
I disagree, but we’ll disagree. Much of the time, in my experience, when asking for a clarification of the question, the median is actually meant. Certainly not as little as 0.0001% of the time. I’d guess somewhere around a quarter of the time, the person is actually interested in the median, but doesn’t know the distinction.
Another problem with finding the statistic as asked is that it will vary a lot by the age range covered by the 10-year span. Drivers typically rack up more tickets between the age of 16-26 than the same driver will between 30-40. (Cite: me. I’ve received 4 moving violations in my life, the first 2 coming within 2 years of getting my license, the third 6 years later at age 26. Then I went over 20 years before getting my 4th almost 5 years ago. The last 3 were speeding. The first was a rolling stop.)
NHTSA statistics show all drivers receiving tickets at a rate of 17.3 per hundred drivers, but ages 16-19 years are ticketed at over double that rate. 52.7% of those teen citations are for speeding.
Also, most states impose of ceiling on the number of tickets one can get in a time frame before losing one’s license, which will keep the number somewhat low. In California, it’s roughly 1 every 6 months, although things like severity of violation and attending traffic school can shift the number in different directions.
I haven’t gotten a speeding ticket in 15 years, even though I think the local 25MPH limit is ludicrously low, and drive accordingly.
The last time I was stopped, for a reason I don’t remember, the cop took one look at me and said, “Oh, you’re the agent who sold my house! How ya’ll doin’?” and let me go after a friendly handshake.
Small towns are awesome.
I haven’t been ticketed for speeding in at least 11 years.
I’ve done a poll on this (sample size=1).
I, in 30 years of driving, have never gotten a speeding ticket (sort of). Doesn’t mean I’ve never sped, of course. I drive over the speed limit all the time but only a moderate amount. I base it on how much everyone else is speeding and try to keep 5 MPH or so slower than the fastest cars which still leaves me at around 7 MPH over the limit on a freeway.
I “sort of” got a speeding ticket ONCE. But the idiot cop also cited me for not wearing a seat-belt. I was incredulous because he only saw that I wasn’t belted once he approached my car. I had taken it off so I could get my wallet out of my front pocket!!!
I was so mad about that that I made a point of showing up at court to contest the seat-belt violation (not the speeding) and the cop didn’t show up so I was acquitted on both counts.
ETA: Fun fact-- I’ve also never gotten a parking ticket except when working as a television photographer. You get tickets all the time when you’re covering news but the TV station pays for them.
In 50 years of driving, I’ve had two speeding tickets.
I’ve be driving now for 52 years. I’ve received 1 speeding ticket plus 1 for not comping to a complete stop before turning right on red.
1 speeding ticket and 1 for running a red light. I did a California stop, slowing down, looking and proceeding.
I haven’t done that again. Not worth it.
I agree the 41,000,000 number is sorta bogus, but there are pretty strict limits on how many tickets one person can amass per year. So it might really be 30 or 25 million people getting 1.5 tickets apiece average. But it’s not 5 million people getting 8 tickets apiece average.
Me?
Age 16 to 30, roughly 3 per year. I called it “the fast driving tax”.
Age 30 to 55, roughly 1 per 3 years.
Since moving to FL 3 years ago and driving crazier than I did as a teen: zero.
AFAI can tell, around here they figure the only enforcement needed is people being stuck in traffic jams due to an accident caused by somebody else’s insane driving. Survival of the fittest and all that. 