It’s a sight we all dread: speeding past an suspicious-looking white sedan only to watch it make a U-turn in your rearview mirror and fall in behind you, red and blue lights flashing. The next thing you know you’re on the side of the road with a flashlight in your face handing over your license and registration to a stony-faced deputy with too much time on his hands.

This unfortunate scenario is exactly the one I was faced with one late night last week. After I received my citation and vented my frustration on my malfunctioning radar detector, I drove home. A little more wary of police perhaps, but no slower than the speed I had been traveling when the cop clocked me.

Its amazing that one little yellow piece of paper can have such a momentous effect on a young life. Because of the ticket I was handed last week, my insurance is sure to skyrocket and any plans I had about getting a faster car are now confined to the realm of wishful thinking. I’ll probably have to work more hours now to make up the difference in insurance rates, which means less time for homework, which means my grades will slip, causing me to drop out of school and go to work at some minimum-wage job at a convenience store, which will more than likely lead to me being killed or otherwise maimed during an attempted robbery while I am on duty.

But I digress, my run-in with the law got me thinking, what good to tickets serve? Is the fear of getting a ticket a deterrent to fast driving? I really don’t think so, because if it was the average speed on highway 20 wouldn’t be around 70 miles per hour. The only thing that tickets really influence people to do is purchase a radar detector. This is my second ticket, and as I’m sure you can surmise, the first one did not cause me to change my driving habits, nor will this second one. I’ll still drive 70 mph every morning like I have done since the day I got my license. The same goes for just about every person I know who has ever received a citation for driving too fast. They don’t feel that just because they got caught once, they should change their daily driving habits, they just become more wary of police on the road. That is, until they slip again and get another ticket.

So, what would be a reasonable alternative to giving out tickets that have little to no effect on the way people drive? Well, in light of the fact that most highway traffic these days travels at around 65-70 mph, why not do what Montana and other states have done and simply raise the speed limit? The federal government has removed their constraints on states’ ability to set their own speed limits, so why not take advantage of it? I don’t think that a speed of 65 mph on a five-lane highway with minimal curves and a largely flat surface is unreasonable or reckless.