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Nobody enjoys getting a speeding ticket. We all know those certain spots where police sit along the interstate or behind a sign in the center of town, and we carefully watch our speed so as not to attract the dreaded flashing red and blue lights. But, sometimes, it happens. You’ve been pulled over and are receiving a ticket courtesy of the long arm of the law. Trust that you’re not alone—a new study helps to show which state’s police writes the most speeding tickets, making up a huge portion of the 9.1 million issued across the U.S. last year.
A Honda dealership in Yonkers, New York collected data on speeding tickets issued across 48 states from 2011 through 2017 (Arkansas and Louisiana) were excluded. The first dataset contains the names of the states which hand out the most overall speeding tickets:
- California
- New York
- Florida
- Georgia
- North Carolina
Unsurprisingly, the top three states (California, New York, and Florida) all have a minimum fining speed of one mile per hour over the posted limit.
As you can probably imagine, the states which lead the pack happen to be among the highest populated in the nation. It might make more sense to compare by headcount rather than tallying the total number of tickets. Fortunately, the researchers thought of this as well, naming these five states as the highest concentration of speeding tickets per person:
- Wyoming
- South Carolina
- Oregon
- Georgia
- Washington
A similar study was conducted by Insurify last year using a different data collection method, observing the history of 1.3 million auto insurance applicants from across the U.S. While the data did not line up directly, South Carolina, Washington, and Wyoming both appeared in the top-10 positions of each dataset.
In all, out of the 224.1 million licensed drivers in America, roughly one in 25 individuals were recorded to have a speeding ticket (ignoring duplicate offenders).
The moral of the story? Slow down.
