The latest on traffic tickets for revenue

[WorkingOnIt]

No surprise

Speeding 'cushion' may dwindle due to recession

"Researchers from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis and the University of Arkansas-Little Rock found that a 10% decrease in revenue growth caused a 6.4% increase the following year in the growth rate of traffic tickets.
...
Police in Canton, Ohio, for example, issued 2,011 traffic tickets in January — more than four times the 452 tickets issued in January 2009, according to Police Chief Dean McKimm. He says a decrease in crime ... has freed officers to do more traffic enforcement. McKimm says the additional revenue from traffic citations allows his understaffed department to hire more officers. "We're not writing tickets at lower (speed) thresholds," he says."

Rationality can still survive - the article says Virginia, Texas, Iowa and Indiana have raised some maximum speed limits in the last couple years.