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The 5 Best and 5 Worst States to Get Caught Speeding

Day after day you're cruising down the highway, doing 5 to 10 mph over the speed limit just like everybody else. And then one night you lose the lotto and get nabbed for speeding.



Traffic citations of every sort are on the rise nationally. State and local legislators don't want to raise taxes and incur the wrath of voters, and the easy alternative is to bring in more money by writing traffic tickets. So, even though ticketing is a particularly lousy form of taxation, the problem isn't going away.



But not all traffic citations are created equal. States can differ wildly on how aggressively they monitor the roads, how harshly they punish speeding offenses, and how hard it is to fight a ticket. We wanted to know the best and worst places in America for getting caught speeding, so we looked at data from the National Motorists Association, which keeps track of the number of speed traps per mile, and at the total number of citations per state, tracked by the National Highway Transportation Association. Combine that with a little anecdotal evidence and we have our five best and five worst states for speeding.



