How to Drive to Avoid Speeding Tickets

The only way to be sure you never get a speeding ticket is to never exceed the speed limit, but there are some precautions you can take to minimize your exposure and avoid those dreaded blue lights.

Instructions

Difficulty: Challenging

1. First, understand that as a human being, you are a creature of habit and momentum, so whatever you do once rapidly becomes easier to do again. Occasional minor speeding leads to habitual speeding. Then your mind wanders one day and habit takes over. You forget to pay attention when the limit drops from 55 to 45, and a policeman is waiting for you.
2. Always be conscious and deliberate when you drive. Pay attention to the signs, traffic patterns, how other people are driving, and where you are. Wherever the speed limit drops from 65 to 55, 55 to 45, or 45 to 35, danger lurks. Most speeders struggle to keep their speed at only 10 over the limit. So suddenly the limit drops by 10 and now you’re 20 over. Notice the flow of the traffic. If your speed doesn’t blend in the traffic, and if you’re the one passing everyone else, you’ll attract the attention of the traffic officer, even if everyone else is speeding too. Knowing where you are is especially important in highway driving. Between cities you are less likely to pick up a ticket. An easy place to pick up a traffic citation is right at the city or town limits. In town, a school sign of any kind should be an automatic alarm—by habit.
3. Learn the speed traps. Wherever you see a police car parked once, expect one there again. You can tell if they’re ambushing speeders by how and where they’re parked, so make a mental note to always be extra careful in that vicinity. Even if you don’t know the area, pay attention to sudden changes in grade where your speed will increase going down a long hill or large vegetation in a wide median where police cars can hide easily. Bridges are often danger zones as well, so don’t come off a bridge going more than 10 mph faster than the limit.
4. Look as far ahead as possible and watch the side of the road carefully. Concentrate. Pay attention to what you’re doing. Most speeding tickets result from lack of concentration on driving. You will be surprised how often you can spot police cars ahead if you’re watching. This will allow you time to slow down before he can determine that it was your car he spotted on the radar.
5. If you see a police car too late to slow down before you pass him, hit the brakes as hard as you can without throwing the horizontal plane of the car forward visibly. Then take your foot off the brake before your brake lights are even with his line of sight. It’s amazing how often you will blend in with the other cars if you can knock 10 mph off your speed fast enough.
6. Once you slow down, keep slowing down, i.e., don’t accelerate again. Make sure you slow down evenly and gradually, but get it down under 10 mph over and drop to the speed limit.
7. Look for an opportunity to safely change lanes behind a slower moving group of cars. Stay two seconds behind the car in front of course, and make an attempt to appear deliberate while blending in with the traffic as much as possible. Also, try to quickly and transparently get in front of at least one car so that you can be two seconds ahead of it, not leaving a space for a police car to pull in behind you. This is a very tricky maneuver, but if you know you were speeding and you’re feeling your heart pound and your blood pressure going through the roof of the car, you don’t have anything to lose to force the policeman to work harder. Remember, you don’t know for sure if he clocked you, and he might just be “jiving” on you because he knows you were speeding but can’t prove it--and was looking for another excuse to pull you.
8. Exit from the highway or turn onto another street before he has a chance to pull you over. Naturally you must execute this perfectly with proper signaling and timing so that the cars behind you don’t have to brake suddenly. This doesn’t always work, but it will flush out whether he is after you and provide some relief from your overwhelming anxiety--and it does work sometimes, especially if you executed this evasive action flawlessly.
9. If anyone pulls onto the highway or street behind you, especially if you passed a parked patrol car and suspect that is the car that pulled out, make sure you don’t exceed the speed limit while delivering a textbook driving performance until you’re sure that car is not following you anymore. Particularly at night you often won’t know for sure, so resign yourself to drive slowly until you know for certain—and consider exiting or turning if you can’t be sure any other way.
10. Check your breath. Make sure you don’t forget to breath. Breath deeply and stay calm. Don’t worry about how you’re going to deal with a speeding ticket before you get it. This might turn out all right for you. There are plenty of speeders out there who are much easier to convict than you--after all, you’re innocent until you’re proven guilty in a court of law.