I recently got a speeding ticket from the Colorado state patrol. First of all, the cop says that if you pay the full amount of the ticket within 20 days, they will deduct fewer points.

I tried to look up how many points I might have, and I could find very little information. I couldn’t even really find general information about how many points I might have, much less my specific situation. So who cares about how many points are on my driver’s license?

I’ve only had a few tickets and I’ve always just paid them. I decided to fight this one and see what happened. I looked up the laws and the laws for minor traffic infractions are pretty simple. I read the whole thing, and they have simplified things down to laymen’s terms, and the whole process operates for laymen. Here are the laws for Colorado. It starts in Rule 1 and goes through Rule 18. You can’t play Monopoly without knowing the rules. How could you fight a traffic ticket without knowing the rules?

The first step is a hearing where you plead guilty or not guilty. The cop will not show up for this. I thought I’d be appearing in front of a judge, but it was just a clerk in the clerk’s office. But just for showing up, they offered everyone a plea bargain. My $170 fine and 4 point ticket was reduced to $72 and 2 points. I wussed out and took it. It was hard to pass that offer up.

But, reading the rules made sense out of some of my experiences in seeing how things work. I’ll write a couple of articles on ideas for how to get out of a ticket completely and how to gum up the works.