Biggest North Texas Speed Trap Cities of 2014

Everyone in Dallas drives around with a mental map showing the contours of local traffic enforcement. It shows the places where cops with itchy ticket-fingers treat minor driving infractions as tantamount to high treason and, conversely, those spots where they are too busy catching murderers or snacking on doughnuts (depending on the jurisdiction) to bother much with traffic laws. But these maps, sketched as they are from a mix of personal experience and anecdotes from friends of friends, are necessarily crude and are useless once a driver exits their typical sphere of travel. In a word, what’s missing from those maps is data.

That’s where the following charts come in. For the second consecutive year, Unfair Park has crunched data compiled by Texas’ Office of Court Administration to determine how many traffic tickets were prosecuted in ever municipality in Dallas, Collin, Denton, and Tarrant counties. (The data actually spans December 2013 to November 2014 since that’s what was available from the OCA.)

So we’re comparing apples to apples, we’ve separated the large and large-ish cities (those with at least 15,000 people, aka places you’ve almost definitely heard of) from what amount to semi-rural hamlets (Double Oak? Westover Hills?).

See also: The Biggest Speed-Trap Cities in North Texas

Once again, tony Southlake is the most ticket-happy of the large cities, writing .56 tickets for every one of its residents, but its officers seem to have eased off in the past 12 months; in 2013, they wrote .73 tickets per resident. And Southlake is almost neck-and-neck with upstart Balch Springs (.54), which leaped from seventh to second on the list.

Neither Southlake nor Balch Springs, however, can compete with the traffic-ticket purgatory that is Northlake. It has a population of just 1,880 and scarcely has a police department but still managed to write 7,618 tickets — 4.05 tickets for every single person in town. No doubt it helps to straddle I-35 about midway between Dallas and Denton.