[Borodog]

The system of traffic enforcement in the United States (and I'll wager anywhere that has as vigorous a system as the ours) is little more than a giant revenue generation racket. It's a wonderful racket because it can easily be sold to the public as being beneficial.

You can easily understand that it's a scam by looking at how traffic enforcement often works. Patrol cars are often unmarked, often hide in shadows, behind trees and roadside signs, etc, so that they may surprise unwitting motorists. If the point of speed enforcement were truly to slow down the average speed of the traffic, the patrol cars would be extremely conspicuous, constantly lit up like Christmas trees so that motorists would know they were there and a ticket could be imminent. Clearly, the object is not to reduce the speed of traffic, but to snag 1 car in thousands so that their $300 to $800 per hour of revenue can be generated.

Furthermore, once you get to traffic court, you can again see that reducing speeding is not the object. Tickets are routinely "pled down" so that the drivers' insurance rates (and hence their ability to stay on the road, speeding, and generating revenue) is least likely to be affected, while of course the fines and court costs remain the same.

Quotas and "ticket drives" are common in law enforcement. Work zone signage often goes up weeks (sometimes months) before construction projects begin and after they end, in order to extend the duration that increased fines can be made.

Even the construction of highways is designed to maximize enforcement revenue. Lanes are made wider and wider with the justification that this makes them safer. In actuality the wider the lane, the safer the driver feels psychologically, and the faster the average driver will drive. Meanwhile the higher speeds increase the frequency of accidents and their severity (because the energy of a collision goes as the square of the speed).

Traffic enforcement is probably the archetypical local government revenue racket. I've talked with several police officers who openly admit it.