"The average cost of a traffic ticket, including court fees, is
roughly $150. You'll pay roughly $300 more in the next three years on
higher insurance fees. If you fight the ticket, then add on the cost
to hire a lawyer. And of course, you'll have to factor in lost time
from work to plead your case. "
http://money.cnn.com/2002/05/22/news/q_speed_cost/
Source from Article is the National Motorists Association
Exact data is difficult to find...
However, I did find some information on beating a ticket...
Should you go to court?
If the above options aren?t available, go to court. Court doesn?t have
to be a Perry Mason experience. Simply asking for your day in traffic
court can save you money. Count the ways:
Showing up is half the battle. Only about 3% of all tickets are
contested, estimates Brown, which means even a few people showing up
to challenge a ticket can jam the system. ?A lot of times the courts
will change the ticket for you, to encourage you not to go to court?
-- sometimes reducing a moving violation to a lesser charge that your
insurance company won?t penalize you for, says Eric Skrum, spokesman
for the National Motorists Association.
Cop no-shows. If you show up on your assigned date, defense attorneys
say that in 20% to 25% of cases the ticket-writing officer won't. If
the officer is required to show up (jurisdictions have different
rules), no appearance usually means the ticket is thrown out. No-shows
by police happen even more in summer, when even they take vacations.
Errors matter (sometimes). While courts will often excuse minor errors
on a ticket -- a misspelled name, a quibble over whether your Jag is
ochre or orange -- if the officer cites the wrong statute on the
ticket, or grossly misidentifies the highway or your make of car, you
may to get your ticket dismissed, says Skrum. It?s often best to keep
mum about the gaffe until you go to court, however, and reveal the
mistake after the officer has recounted the wrong information.
An 'A' for effort. If you do get all the way to a magistrate or
traffic commissioner, any reasonable objection you have to the ticket
is likely to at least reduce the amount of the fine, and perhaps
change it to an infraction that won?t hurt your rates. ?You?ve got to
fight every ticket, because the only thing anyone will ever know is
what you reduced it to. The accusation will be lost in the
courthouse,? says Raskob.
The above, ?soft? approach often works, but some people prefer to
aggressively contest the ticket, which they usually do with at least
some success. When Michael Pelletier, a 32-year-old computer systems
engineer in the Bay Area, got a ticket a few years ago, he rented the
nine-pound (!) legal defense kit from the National Motorists
Association. (The rental cost of the packet, which is tailored to the
requester?s state, is $50 per month, with a discount for NMA members.)
?The only thing I did was crank the legal crank,? says Pelletier. That
meant asking for continuances and requesting records -- proof of when
the officer?s radar gun was last calibrated and when the officer was
trained in its use -- in hopes of finding a flaw in the authorities?
case, or simply wearing them down until they offered a deal.
http://moneycentral.msn.com/content/Insurance/Insureyourcar/P51288.asp?Printer |
