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The Basics |
It pays to avoid a ticket -- or
fight one
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The best advice is
simply not to speed, at least not brazenly. But if you get
nailed, fight it -- because a $50 ticket can cost you
thousands once your insurer gets wind of
it.
By Chris
Solomon
Now is a very
bad time to have a lead foot.
States facing yawning
budget gaps are finding new money by pinching speeders more
frequently -- and pinching them harder, too. Texas lawmakers
recently added $30 to fines for speeding tickets. California
has added a surcharge of between $7 and $20, depending on the
severity of the violation. And the Illinois Legislature is set
to tag an additional $4 to the cost of a minor speeding
ticket.
True, four more bucks won’t change your life,
but the fine is usually the least of your worries. Even one
speeding ticket can begin to turn your name to mud in your
insurer’s eyes. More than one can cost you thousands of
dollars in higher premiums.
Insurance companies say
punishing speeders is well warranted: In one study, California
drivers with one speeding citation in a three-year period had
a crash rate 50% higher, on average, than those with no
infractions -- and the crash rate more than doubled for those
who had two or more tickets, according to the Insurance
Institute for Highway Safety and the Highway Loss Data
Institute, industry-sponsored research groups.
A
ticket from Johnny Law does seem to slow people down, at least
for a bit. A study of Ontario traffic statistics, published in
the British medical journal the Lancet, found that a
conviction for a moving violation cut the risk of a fatal
crash in the following month by 35%. The benefit evaporated by
four months after the conviction. Assigning penalty points to
a driver’s license -- especially for speeding tickets --
reduced the risk of fatal crashes more than convictions
without penalty points.
Keeping your nose clean Still, as
long as running late is an American pastime, people will
speed. And there are ways to protect yourself and your
premiums. First, reduce your likelihood of getting snagged by
the speed gun in these ways:
- Know thyself. Spend $5 to request your driving
record from your state’s Department of Motor Vehicles. Is it
accurate? Could you face a suspension hearing if you get
convicted for one more violation? Then call your insurer.
Find out what a slip-up would mean to your rates.
- Penny-wise = pound foolish. Police will
frequently key on an auto that has problems such as broken
headlights, taped-over taillights or a missing front license
plate. Spend $3 to replace a burned-out license plate bulb
and you may save hundreds of dollars later, says Matisyahu
Wolfberg, a policeman-turned-traffic defense attorney in New
York.
- Stay incognito, Part I. Driving an arrest-me red
sports car doesn’t guarantee you’ll get pulled over, but it
doesn’t help avoid police, say defense attorneys. Ditto --
albeit to a lesser degree -- any expensive car. Consider a
Camry over a Corvette and you may save money in more than
the showroom.
- Stay incognito, Part II. Ignore the general pace
of traffic at your own peril. “You’re a pack animal; don’t
stick out of the pack.” Passing police cars is verboten.
Stay in the right lane when possible.
- Keep your eyes peeled. Scan your rear-view mirror
often while driving. Look for possible spots far ahead where
a patrol car could hide. Also, watch how professional
truckers drive, and slow down when they do; they’ve got far
more experience detecting Smokey.
- Don’t be sticker shocked. Pasting a Police
Benevolent Association sticker to the rear window isn’t a
license to speed. That jig is long up.
Wisecracking bumper stickers -- “Bad Cop; No Donut” -- won’t
endear you to The Man, either.
The traffic stop and its
aftermath You get pulled over anyway. Now what do
you do?
- Be polite. “Most of the time, the motorist has very
little chance. The officer has already has made up his mind,”
says Wolfberg, the former cop. “The only real chance the
driver has is to be nice.” Act peeved and a trooper may give
you the full fine. Some will also flag the citation with a
notation, like “ND” -- a note to a prosecutor or to himself
(in some states, law-enforcement officers act as prosecutors
in traffic court) to give a loudmouth “no deal” in court.
- Don’t admit guilt. “The absolutely fatal question
is, ‘Do you know why I stopped you?’” says attorney Mark
Sutherland, co-author of the book “Traffic Ticket Defense.”
Authorities can use any admission of guilt against you when
you contest the ticket (see below). For other things to
consider during a traffic stop, see hints on the Web site of
the National Motorists Association, a drivers’ rights group
(see the link at left under Related Sites).
- Once home, don’t immediately pay the ticket. Simply
paying the fine, an admission of guilt, could cost you dearly
in insurance rates. Doubt it? Let’s say you’re an experienced
driver in California with a single-car policy and a good
driving record, who is paying the average rates statewide for
liability, collision and comprehensive coverage, $765
annually. If you were a Prudential Financial customer you’d
get a 25% good-driver discount and pay only $574. One speeding
ticket would mean a roughly 27% increase from the base
premium, says Prudential’s Laurita Warner -- a $207 annual
increase, or $621 more over three years. (Surcharges usually
last for three years.)
Get a second minor conviction
and your premium would rise an additional 40%, and you’d also
lose your good-driver discount, says Warner. Suddenly, a
premium that was $574 has ballooned to $1,071. After the third
conviction, expect to pay roughly 63% more than you originally
did, or $1,247. Over three years you would end up paying
$2,020 more than if you’d kept your nose clean, or much more
than the fines themselves. Clearly, getting pinched leaves a
painful scar.
The pain can be even worse if you’re a
teenager or young adult. “Getting even one speeding ticket,
much less two, can cause a dramatic spike in your insurance
rates -- sometimes doubling and even tripling those rates --
and jeopardize your ability to get preferred insurance rates,”
says Karl Newman, president of the Washington Insurance
Council, a consumer education group funded by member insurance
companies in Washington State. “That could require you to
purchase high-risk insurance.”
Luckily, you’ve got
several initial options once busted:
- Ignoring the ticket isn’t one of them. “It used
to be if you obtained a ticket in New York, it didn’t get
back to New Jersey,” but that’s no longer true. Avoid a ticket and a warrant may be issued for your arrest
-- a warrant that appears even on the computer system of
your hometown cops.
- Special state programs. Talk to your state’s DMV
or local traffic court to find out about ways to erase your
ticket. In Rhode Island, for example, if you haven’t had any
vehicle-related violations in three years and then receive a
minor one (for example, for exceeding the speed limit by
less than 20 miles an hour), you can ask that the ticket be
dismissed. It usually is. In some southern states,
authorities will agree to defer judgment, if you don’t get
any more tickets for the next six months.
- Traffic school. Often your best alternative is to
take a six- to eight-hour safety course for drivers.
Policies vary by state, but often a minor speeding
conviction can be wiped from your record and therefore go
unseen by your employer or insurance company. You’ll still
have to pay the fine, plus an additional $50 to $80 in
tuition and other costs, and invest a Saturday. Some states
such as California let drivers take the course online.
Traffic school has its limits, however. In some states, it’s
an option only once every 18 or 24 months. In others, those
caught exceeding the speed limit by more than 15 to 20 mph
may not be eligible, says David Brown, author of the book
“Beat Your 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.”
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.
A pre-emptive
strike Battling in court can be time-consuming and
complicated. Pelletier estimates he invested nearly 50 hours
in the year 2000 to fight his ticket, which he received
driving his motorcycle 47 miles an hour in a 25 mph zone. He
got it dismissed seven months later based on an esoteric legal
definition of a “local street or road.”
In
Pelletier’s eyes, the struggles are worthwhile despite the
time commitment. He has also helped his wife and brother keep
three citations from their records, and his insurance company
recently upgraded him to a “superior” driver, which means he
will pay $70 less in the next six months than he had been
paying. And by keeping his driving record clean he’s ensured
that his next ticket -- if it sticks -- won’t hurt him so much
as it might have.
If you don’t have the time to do all
of this research, consider hiring an attorney who frequently
deals with speeding tickets. Such an attorney will know how to
get the best deal for you and can often appear in court for
you, so you don’t have to take a day off to do so. Fees can
vary from $75 to $750, in part depending on whether they’re
already frequently in the courthouse dealing with such
matters.
The free piece of advice they give, however,
is the same: Confront your speeding ticket, even if it’s your
first, and do your darnedest to make it disappear. After all,
they add, you never know when you’ll get your next one, with
higher premiums close behind.
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