Now that 2015 is drawing to a close, the time is right to continue what has become an Observer tradition: looking back at the year that was and marveling at the incredible number of traffic tickets North Texas municipalities handed out to drivers.

The methodology is simple. Texas' Office of Court Administration keeps all kinds of data on the state's judicial system, including month-by-month breakdowns of the number of non-parking traffic misdemeanors — i.e., traffic tickets — filed in every municipal court in the state. Taking a year's worth of traffic cases from municipal courts in North Texas' four most populous counties — Dallas, Denton, Collin and Tarrant — and dividing by total population of each city, we get the number of traffic tickets per capita.

The resulting list provides a pretty good feel for how aggressively various police departments go after speeders, though it's not perfect. After last year's list ran, a spokesman for the town of Addison wrote the Observer to quibble with our methodology; doing a simple head-count of residents without considering daytime population could skew figures for an employment hub like Addison. This also doesn't account for traffic volumes or the relative awfulness of each town's drivers. To avoid comparing a big urban department like Dallas, where cops have many responsibilities more pressing than traffic enforcement, with a small, not-so-urban place like Westlake (which actually pays to use Keller's police force), which does not. So we've split the incredibly long list of North Texas municipalities into two lists, with a population of 20,000 as the somewhat arbitrary dividing line.

The big takeaway: If you are driving and you come to a place whose name ends in "-lake," turn around. Southlake is once again the big-city ticket capital of North Texas. Its even ritzier neighbor, Westlake, is the biggest ticket generator among the smaller cities, churning out a whopping 5.3 tickets for each of its 1,171 residents. Northlake police slacked off in 2015, seeing their ticket volume drop from a torrid 4.05 tickets per person to a paltry 1.3. One assumes that they will pick up their pace in the new year.

The other takeaway is that, all in all, North Texas police departments wrote significantly fewer traffic tickets last year (barely 1 million) than they did the year before (more than 1.2 million). That's still a lot of tickets, but just think of it as 200,000 fewer people who had to endure the misery of traffic court.

Big Cities (20,000+ Population)

City Tickets Pop. (2014) Tickets/Person % change from 2013 Southlake 15476 27755 0.56 -2% Euless 23467 52649 0.45 -6% Farmers Branch 12977 30261 0.43 -20% Hurst 15492 38140 0.41 -14% Colleyville 9360 23928 0.39 -10% Grapevine 16925 48671 0.35 -25% Corinth 7095 20432 0.35 4% Carrollton 42484 124501 0.34 -23% Benbrook 7111 21234 0.33 -6% Richardson 31264 103752 0.30 -11% Saginaw 6100 20840 0.29 -28% North Richland Hills 19254 65835 0.29 16% Haltom City 11208 43259 0.26 -27% Coppell 9977 40021 0.25 49% Bedford 11080 46979 0.24 -27% Arlington 82627 365438 0.23 -21% Balch Springs 5227 23728 0.22 -61% Denton 21755 122742 0.18 -12% Garland 39836 232305 0.17 -12% Irving 37270 224859 0.17 -21% Grand Prairie 28821 181135 0.16 -44% Fort Worth 117719 778513 0.15 -20% Duncanville 6050 39315 0.15 -15% University Park 3424 23761 0.14 -10% Burleson 5195 36690 0.14 -27% Rowlett 7952 57532 0.14 9% Lancaster 5199 37731 0.14 17% Allen 11413 84246 0.14 -30% Flower Mound 8954 67630 0.13 -6% Desoto 6602 50837 0.13 -14% Cedar Hill 6012 46414 0.13 -10% Mesquite 18079 142552 0.13 -35% Frisco 15267 130499 0.12 -12% Dallas 143149 1240985 0.12 -6% Plano 27621 271166 0.10 -18% McKinney 12063 144066 0.08 -25% Sachse 1813 21790 0.08 13% Mansfield 4823 59757 0.08 -52% The Colony 5282 38690 0.14 -55% Wylie 1453 43531 0.03 -5%

Small cities (fewer than 20,000)