| Like many
young adults, I was about nineteen, when it seemed that over a three month
period I could not back out of my driveway without one of the city’s
finest flashing a red light behind me. Of course it wasn’t long before the
DMV sent a letter inviting me to attend a hearing in my honor. They wanted me
to tell them why they shouldn’t take my license and burn it.
Since I always paid the tickets
and never made a fuss by the side of the road I had a fair chance of walking
out of the hearing room relatively unscathed. Which ultimately I did. There was
a moment though when one of the hearing referees asked, “What are you
going to do if we take your license?”
Politely, but honestly, I told
him that I would feel just awful about driving without one. I had no idea a
person could turn that shade of purple from the collar up and was mesmerized by
his inability to speak when one of the other referees told me to go home and to
drive carefully. Obviously that was then and this is now.
The whole concept of traffic
tickets has changed to reflect a serious source of funding for municipalities.
Chicago for instance, brings about $100-million to the budget, Los Angeles over
$150-million and New York on the high side of $350-million annually.
Then there is the eager
attention insurance companies are paying to our driving habits. The reason is
that your rates go up by about $300 per year because of tickets or a minor
accident. Since a citation stays on your driving record for three years that
equates to about $1000 per ticketed driver over a three year period. In
California about ten million citations are issued every year. Since it
doesn’t cost them any more to insure us if we have a citation it’s
nothing less than a profit windfall approaching $10-billion for the insurance
company.
Considering the cost involved
and the fact that numerous studies have shown that many tickets are unfounded
and undeserved, wouldn’t it make sense for anyone receiving a traffic
citation to take a stand and fight in court? Yet about ninety percent of all
Americans just pay the ticket without complaint and simply suffer the costly
insurance consequences in silence.
Enter MoneyDots® show guest
Alex Carroll, author of the best selling, Beat the Cops, The Guide to Fighting
Your Traffic Ticket and Winning. Carrolls position is that anyone can do what
he did when he was faced with losing his job as a courier or making most of his
ten citations go away. He learned to go to court and fight.
After thoroughly educating
himself on how the legal system works with regard to traffic enforcement, the
difference between parking and repair tickets vs. moving violations, and how to
get past the red tape he was able to successfully dispense with eight out of
the ten.
Looking around the courtroom at
some very confused or frightened people he decided that a book outlining the
basics of the research he had just completed was definitely needed by the
uninitiated.
Apparently he was right because
the book has been the topic of over nine hundred interviews around the
nation.
There is a surprising amount of
reliable information packed into this hundred-page blockbuster written by
someone under thirty. He even talks about which cars do and don’t attract
the attention of a laser or radar.
Here are a few of the
topics:
- Do you need a lawyer?
- What to say and do at the time you are
stopped.
- The options and strategies of fighting a
ticket.
- Who is obliged to appear in court?
- Officer vacation schedules and where to look
for them.
- The difference between laser and radar and
how to fight each one.
- How to fight Air Patrol or tag team tickets.
- Courts are not as intimidating as you think.
Carroll became a spokesperson
for the National Motorists Association and joined their battle against
photo-radar traffic enforcement. It may just be that you will never have to pay
a ticket issued by mail based on a photo taken of your car because of this
battle.
My hat is off to Alex Carroll
for his painstaking research, even if it was self-serving at the time he
started.
The bottom line is that he has
single handedly saved thousands of people around the country hundreds of
thousands of dollars in fines and insurance surcharges.
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