Thanks, all! It’s amazing how hard it is to actually figure this number out. I think the main reasons are that
1.) Some people do get multiple tickets in a year
2.) Some people do get warnings for speeding and WOULD have gotten a ticket if they weren’t lucky, so it seems like this should be somehow included in the total, although it’s hard to come up with a way to do this
3.) The number of people who would still be getting tickets if they hadn’t lost their licenses, and how that compares to the number of people who get multiple tickets every year, so would one number cancel the other out? (in theory, anyway)
4.) People who’ve gotten a lot of speeding tickets and who read this question are probably a lot less likely to write a post admitting it, so that would skew perception of the results
5.) etc…
Okay, I’ll tell the truth: I’m the one who has the two speeding tickets in twenty-one years. And zero warnings, so every time I was stopped, I got a ticket. (Would I be looking on Straight Dope for answers to bolster an argument?? Tries to look innocent… it would be interesting to know the median # of tickets, though, and a multimodal measure might be the only really accurate one.) One ticket was on a highway in Nashville, and one was for going 35 in a 25 mph zone in Portland.
Hmm, I’ve been driving for about thirty five years. I have gotten one speeding ticket, and one warning for speeding. I drive fairly aggressively, rarely below the speed limit. So there’s another data point.
One speeding ticket in 42 yrs, an automated camera one for 58 in a 50 zone where I clearly recall locals whizzing past me. But of course they send them out to any out of state plates they catch, and indeed I found it not worth challenging. I don’t strictly stick to speed limits all the time (I recall a thread where I was surprised by the speed-puritans) but I think the track record says I’m pretty good at figuring situations where either I’m not exceeding it enough to get a ticket or if I am cops aren’t around. I’ve never been pulled over by a live cop about speeding, either ticketed or warned.
As others said, I didn’t read carefully enough to see if anyone came up with real stats, the assumption that tickets are evenly distributed across drivers is clearly wrong, though OTOH it couldn’t be a very small % of drivers getting half or more of the tickets like say the % of people committing most of the felonies, not that skewed.
FWIW, one speeding ticket every ten years would seem well within the bounds of “normal” to me. I mean, just that could be caused by bad luck or a moment’s inattention where you don’t notice the speed trap where the limit drops 10 mph. And especially so if your tickets are all out-of-state. For me, I wouldn’t start worrying about a driver until they averaged a speeding ticket a year, and maybe not even then.
If you prioritize not speeding, it would be pretty easy to not get a single ticket in 30 or 40 years or more (like my mother) but if you don’t worry about it, then one in ten years isn’t bad.
I’ve had a couple in the four years I’ve been in Taiwan because they are relatively inexpensive and Taiwan doesn’t have a point system for your drivers license. Naturally, everyone drives crazily here. (Except my wife who believes that a couple of speeding tickets in four years is too much. Let’s not get your sister and my wife together.)
I’ve averaged less than 1 speeding ticket per 20 years of driving.
Of course, this is a poor measure of how good a driver you are. My mother-in-law never had a moving violation in her life, but by all accounts (Mrs. J.'s anyway) was a horrible driver (including the memorable occasion on which she ran over a city worker emerging from an open manhole - luckily, he ducked back down just in time).
One should also take into to consider favoritism/warnings for the comparison. Be it from fraternity of the police (or related), or good looks, smooth talker, or born under a lucky star. As well as negative stuff more likely to land you a ticket (if you are lucky) like driving while black (DWB), confrontational personality, etc…
It also is not necessarily an indicator of if you drive the speed limit. I’ve been warned once but never ticketed for speeding in almost 30 years of driving, and I hardly ever go the actual speed limit unless conditions warrant it (or if I’m trying to hypermile my Prius.) However, I do stick to around 5 over on surface roads and around 10 over on highways except for construction zones.
For sure the intensity of enforcement is highly regional. People who live in speed-trapsville learn to cope. Often the hard way.
When I lived in suburban greater LA it was pretty well known which adjoining suburbs were speed Nazis and which were speed libertarians.
Here now in the greater Miami metroblob you can be going 90 in a 65 zone on the freeway and pass a parked FL Highway Patrol car without a worry. Going a hundred or aggressively weaving between lanes is enough to get him chasing though.
At least in this small sample with a number of people claiming very few or no tickets in long periods, none have said they’ve been pulled over and warned a bunch of times. I suppose some of the suppositions of ‘unfairness’ could be extended to who even gets pulled over, but I wonder if it has a big impact. Type of car might also matter, but some people still think a nice fast car is more likely when in fact a beater might make it more likely, but that might depend the situation or location also.
Like I said I’ve never been pulled over for speeding in 42 yrs, warned or ticket, but it’s not like I never speed, even above the ‘real’ (posted+X) limit. But if I do, I make sure I have a ‘screen’ of somebody going as fast out in front of me, or it’s road/time I know it’s unlikely there will be cops, or there’s no place for them to hide, etc. But it’s all a fuzzy matter of degree. People who get even pulled over 1/yr might speed way more than I do. And I rarely go >posted+X on non-highways, pretty much stick to posted limits on roads with pedestrians, go below the posted limit in my own neighborhood (narrow streets, people can pop out so fast from behind cars and trucks, you can’t absolutely count on never hitting anybody, want it to be slow in the worst case).
41 years driving; 1 parking ticket (dismissed–cop didn’t show or sign ticket), 1 equipment warning (bad headlight at 3AM [made cop laugh when I pounded the fender and light came on]). That’s it.
When people ask for an average, they usually actually want the median. When people answer the question, they usually give the mean. And as said, this is one case where there’s probably a significant difference between the two.
Since the actual data needed to figure this out is (I’d hope) restricted, protected, or possibly not even all recorded I don’t know if you could come up with a factual answer to this. Perhaps a substitute would be to look at the laws we’ve established on the maximum number of tickets/time frame before suspension of a driver’s licence (even though they’ll probably vary :rolleyes:) and use that as a guide for what our society generally considers acceptable or “average”. At least for the purposes of this question that might do.
In Alberta they’ll suspend your licence if you accumulate 15 or more demerit points in a 2-year period; this is the maximum you’ll get away with and you can have your licence suspended longer for doing less if you’re a serious or repeat offender. So start there.
You’ll get 2 points for speeding up to 15km/hour over the limit, 3 points for 15-30km/hr over, and 6 points for 50+km/hr over the limit or racing. So assuming you get points put on your record for nothing but speeding, our Ministry of Transportation considers it unacceptable for a person to get caught and convicted of speeding:
8 times a little over the limit,
5 times significantly over the limit, or
3 times a lot over the limit
… in a 2-year window. So, you might interpret that as a society feeling it’s acceptable to get 4 minor tickets per year, 2 major tickets every year, or 1 stupid ticket every year as long as you pay the fines off. Interpreted over a 20-year period, we’re not going to prevent you from being allowed to use the roads unless you get more than 20 to 80 tickets :eek:(and assuming you have a second job to pay the tens of thousands of dollars worth of fines). I sure hope the median is lower than that!
That’s an excellent approach to the analysis. Bravo.
From a financial POV in addition to the cost of fines you mention there’s the cost of driving insurance. Most insurance co’s have their own ideas of how many tickets of what sort lead to what level of rate increase.
It’d be interesting to have some of our insurance expert weigh in on this aspect.
I suspect the respondents to this thread are largely a self-selecting group. So to buck the trend I’ll go ahead and admit it, I must have over 10 speeding tickets in 20 years of driving. Probably less than 20 though. Most of them will have been within the first 5 or so years of getting my licence, when I still didn’t understand that all you really need to do is just do what everyone else is doing.
But I think you also have to take into account where people tend to drive. If you do most of your driving along the same routes every day your entire life you’re more likely to know how to avoid trouble just due to knowing the area. If you are frequently going through small unfamiliar towns that often have sneaky speed traps aimed at out-of-towners, you may be more susceptible.
And some areas are just going to have stricter attitudes towards enforcement than others. Back in the day my experience driving along 81 in upstate NY, the place was just lousy with state troopers hiding somewhere waiting to nail you.
or, ya know, you could just drive without speeding! its not like the speed limit is a secret, its on those big white signs you see every1/4 mi or so!
mc
It’s amazing how hard it is to actually figure this number out. I think the main reasons are that
(Would I be looking on Straight Dope for answers to bolster an argument?? Tries to look innocent… it would be interesting to know the median # of tickets, though, and a multimodal measure might be the only really accurate one.) One ticket was on a highway in Nashville, and one was for going 35 in a 25 mph zone in Portland.