I wrote about Virginia’s traffic tickets recently.  Well an interesting paper came out regarding the motivation for traffic tickets.  The paper asserts that fundraising has something to do with the frequency of citations.

They examined every warning and citation written by police officers in all of Massachusetts, excluding Boston, during a two-month period in 2001 — over 60,000 in all. Their conclusion wasn’t shocking to an economist: money matters, even in traffic violations. They found a statistical link between a town’s finances and the likelihood that its police officers would issue a speeding ticket. The details are a little sticky, but they show that tickets were issued more often in places that were short on cash, and that out-of-towners received tickets more often than drivers with local addresses.

In Virginia, the new tickets were deliberately created to raise money.  However, the excessive fines can’t even be applied to out of state drivers.  So, in other words, this is no different from a tax, except it’s more expensive to collect the money and individuals are disproportionately screwed over instead of everyone being taxed fairly.   Oh well.