If you’re caught speeding in Southborough, how likely are you to get a ticket? The answer? Less likely than you are in Hopkinton, more likely than you are in Framingham.
WHDH Channel 7 took a look at how much money towns inside the Route 495 loop collected in traffic tickets last year. The average was $4.53 per resident. Southborough came in just under that at $4.35 per resident.
Best not to push the speed limit when you cross the border into Hopkinton, though. They rated one of the highest in the area at $9.32 per resident. Framingham came in at $2.99, and Marlborough at $3.43.
You can read the full article and find a link to the data on the Channel 7 website.
Why doesn’t the Globe article identify the actual number of tickets writtem by a department rather than the dollar value? Bear with me here: multiply the $4.35 per resident, times the Globe’s list of 9,484 Southboro resident and it appears teh total amount of fines is $41,000. If you assume an average ticket is $50, then there were only 825 tickets writen in the entire year. THAT’S ONLY 2.2 TICKETS PER DAY. If you’ve got at least 2 patrol officers for each of the 3 shifts per day, that means that the average Southboro officer writes 1 TICKET EVERY THREE DAYS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
For the record, it was a Channel 7 News report not a Globe report (so lower your expectations a bit) … but yeah, I wish there was more data, too.
(Removed at the commenter’s request)