By charging a $150 average for a traffic ticket? If you cut too quickly into a lane when accelerating onto the interstate highway (roll over a yellow line), that's $98 around here. Municipalities have to make money, but some of the strange traffic tickets are designed to make money, not necessarily improve safety. End of the month is a bad time to drive.
$150 for a traffic ticket is so far from extortion that I'm having a hard time even finding a way to explain the lunacy of this statement.
Changing lanes or entering the highway so quickly that you're cutting over extra lines shows a general lack of control over your vehicle. If you can't maintain full control of your vehicle while pulling out onto a highway, you do deserve a ticket, and probably shouldn't be driving on the highway.
I have a 45 minute commute each way, and 35-40 of those minutes are spent on the highway. I'm able to get on and off the highway without cutting people off, looping into the next lane, or even accelerating unnecessarily. You know what my secret is? I plan ahead and leave early enough to get where I'm going without being a menace to my fellow commuters. (On a side note, driving at a measured pace and avoiding unnecessarily hard acceleration also saves you money by reducing fuel costs)
My wife also has a 45 minute commute, but in the opposite direction. I worry every time my wife heads to work that some idiot who feels the need to fly on and off the highway and whip from one lane to another (the kind of person who thinks that traffic tickets for reckless driving are "extortion") will do so just a little too close, and she won't make it home.
There's a very small town called Amity, not too far from where my wife works. Everybody in the area knows about Amity. They know about Amity, because it's a tiny wide spot in the highway, but they pull people over for doing 2mph over the limit. They write people tickets regularly for doing as little as 3 of 4 mph over. When people talk about Amity, they always make comments about how the cops just do it to make money for the small town, how unfair it is, etc. However, I can't recall a single fatal accident on that stretch of highway in the last 10 or 15 years. You get 5 miles outside of Amity, and there's a fatality on that highway every other week.
Yes, they make a lot of money for their small town by writing traffic ticket for violations you could get away with right in front of a cop in a lot of places, but you can also walk across the street in Amity without the slightest worry. Their town is safer.
