More Tickets, More Revenue, Fewer Crashes
It’s not uncommon to hear gripes of how traffic tickets, red light cameras, and the like are merely intended to boost revenues for cash-hungry towns. An interesting new paper from Michael D. Makowsky and Thomas Stratmann, looking at municipalities in Massachusetts (where the majority of tickets given by towns go to out-of-town drivers, particularly when towns are strapped, as indicated by their move to override the property tax cap) suggests that the revenue imperative in itself can help make the roads safer.
They write: “This paper shows that traffic fines reduce the number of car accidents and related injuries. We address the endogeneity problem that remains after using town and time effects by estimating the fixed effects model with instrumental variables. Our instrument is whether a town asked for more money through an override referendum and it’s interaction with stopped out of town drivers. Using panel data, we find that more tickets are issued when a town has asked for an override referendum, and that tickets issuance increase the more out of town drivers that are stopped, lending support to the tax exporting hypothesis while controlling for town fixed effects. Using these estimates, we find that tickets are a far more effective reducer of car accidents and automobile accident related injuries than ordinary least square estimation would indicate.”
Also of interest: “We find that in town with financial distress police officers are more likely to issue a ticket than a warning to out of town drivers.” (a finding that essentially jibes with what they concluded in another good paper, Makowsky, M. D. and T. Stratmann (2009). “Political Economy at Any Speed: What Determines Traffic Citations.” American Economic Review 99(1).
(via Marginal Revolution)
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This entry was posted on Friday, January 9th, 2009 at 1:10 pm and is filed under Traffic Enforcement, Traffic safety. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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January 10th, 2009 at 7:29 am
Hmmm…this makes me worried. “Out of town drivers” seems like a benign group to discriminate against, but what would happen if traffic ticket discrimination on the basis of race or gender were shown to produce similar reductions in crashes?
January 10th, 2009 at 2:27 pm
Sounds to me like the local driver quickly learn to drive better to avoid getting ticketed, but the outsiders continue their bad driving habits in the town and get tickets for it. They drive better long enough to get out of town, and as a result they don’t get into any crashes or collisions during the time they driver better.
…And the downside to this is what?
January 10th, 2009 at 5:45 pm
The downside is this:
Why is it acceptable to apply the law unequally between out-of-town drivers and local drivers?
May 29th, 2009 at 1:54 pm
Why are you trying to justify behavior that is unjustifiable. If you are violating the law - expect to get punished. There are so many fish in the lake - ya can’t catch all of them.