Speeding Tickets By State: Where Are Drivers Most Likely To Be Ticketed?

The 4th of July is one of the busiest traffic days of the year and nothing can ruin a vacation more quickly than an undeserved traffic ticket.

Information on how many traffic tickets are issued in each state is hard to come by because most localities — especially ticket-happy speed trap towns — are reluctant to publicize their ticketing prowess.

That means that getting drivers the information they need to protect themselves from unjust tickets requires a little creativity.

The National Motorists Association to the rescue?

Luckily, the National Motorists Association (www.motorists.org) — a motorists rights group that has been helping drivers fight traffic tickets for over 25 years — has come up with a way to give 4th of July travelers some insight on which states most likely to ticket drivers.

How did the NMA generate these rankings?

The rankings below were generated by analyzing ticket-related search queries such as "speeding ticket" and "traffic tickets" over time using Google’s Insights for Search — a public tool that shows search trends across the United States.

Without further ado, the rankings:

After crunching the numbers, the National Motorists Association found that the state most likely to hand out a traffic ticket is Florida, followed closely by Georgia and Nevada. The state where drivers are least likely to get a traffic ticket is Montana.

Here is the full list of states:

(ranked from most likely to ticket drivers to least likely)

1) Florida

2 tie) Georgia

2 tie) Nevada

4) Texas

5) Alabama

6) Missouri

7) New York

8) North Carolina

9) District of Columbia

10) New Jersey

11) Louisiana

12) Arizona

13) Mississippi

14) California

15) Maryland

16) Iowa

17) Washington

18) Oklahoma

19) South Carolina

20) Indiana

21) Tennessee

22) Illinois

23) Ohio

24) Kansas

25) Michigan

26) Colorado

27) Delaware

28 tie) Minnesota

28 tie) Virginia

30) Massachusetts

31) Pennsylvania

32) Connecticut

33) Arkansas

34) Wisconsin

35) Vermont

36) Kentucky

37) New Hampshire

38) Hawaii

39) Rhode Island

40) Utah

41) Oregon

42) New Mexico

43) Nebraska

44) Idaho

45) West Virginia

46) Maine

47) Alaska

48) South Dakota

49) North Dakota

50) Wyoming

51) Montana

Obviously, these rankings aren’t perfect (search queries can be impacted by a number of different factors), but the National Motorists Association has found that the list matches up very well with their day-to-day experiences helping motorists fight traffic tickets.

Click here to view the spreadsheet used to calculate the rankings.

You can find a sample of the state-by-state data for the "speeding ticket" keyword on Google Insights for Search by clicking here.

The rankings were compiled by averaging the data for the following keywords:

speeding ticket, speeding tickets, "speeding ticket", "speeding tickets", traffic ticket,

traffic tickets, "traffic ticket", "traffic tickets".