Across the country, drivers are learning that the most expensive tickets often come from the most ordinary moments: a sudden speed drop, a dangling air freshener, a window tint that looks a shade too dark. Police say these stops are about safety, but the patterns reveal a set of everyday traps that reliably generate citations and, in some towns, a steady stream of revenue. I set out to map the most common of these pressure points and how they are changing as lawmakers and courts push for more transparency on the side of the road.
From small municipalities that lean heavily on fines to big states rewriting the rules on traffic stops, the same themes keep surfacing: low-level violations, aggressive enforcement, and drivers who often do not realize how vulnerable they are until the blue lights flash behind them.
Where the speed limit suddenly drops
Ask defense lawyers where drivers get nailed most often and they point first to the places where the speed limit plunges with little warning. In and around Richmond, attorneys describe classic setups where a highway limit falls quickly as it approaches a town line or a stretch with a history of crashes, and officers wait just beyond the new sign to clock anyone who has not slowed in time. One Richmond practitioner notes that There are different kinds of these speed traps, including zones built around a documented history of high speed issues, which gives police a ready-made safety rationale for heavy enforcement.
Local governments have powerful incentives to keep those zones active. In Colorado, the tiny town of Morrison became a national example of how a jurisdiction can lean on traffic fines, with one investigation finding that a large share of the town’s budget came from tickets written on a short stretch of road. A 9NEWS poll, conducted Tuesday in that case, showed that a majority of viewers admitted they had been pulled over in one of these “ticket trap” corridors, underscoring how routine the practice had become, and that same reporting highlighted how the town depended on a significant percentage of revenue based on tickets, a pattern detailed in the poll and revenue analysis.
When traffic enforcement becomes a funding stream
Once you zoom out from a single town, the financial logic of aggressive ticketing becomes even clearer. In parts of Georgia, small municipalities have been documented collecting such a large share of their budgets from speeding fines that critics accuse them of “policing for profit.” One detailed review of these communities noted that what one person calls a speed trap, another calls traffic enforcement, and that Of course, one person’s speed trap is another person’s safety measure, but it also quoted Police departments defending the practice as necessary while residents questioned whether officers were really focused on safety or simply padding city coffers…