California traffic court is such a scam. I got pulled over 3 weeks ago on my way to Vegas. 90 in a 70, pretty trivial (imo). The police officer in question was somewhat of a dick, apparently he thought that he had made a moving violation and a pot bust, and was sorely disappointed. Anyway!
Earlier this week I got the actual ticket in the mail, because on the spot, instead of giving you a $ value, you get a court date, and then 3 weeks later you get a bail notice in the mail so you can pay it off and skip out on a mandatory court session.
Here is where the scam starts. First, my options for paying are to 1) send a check, 2) call over the phone or 3) go online. Being who I am, I head straight to the website with my card in hand. Surprise surprise, the website isn't run by the California government at all. It is a private company, who then *charges* me a relatively large 'convenience' fee. I think almost 10% of the ticket cost. Great shit.
But wait, the court (not the private company) then gives me the option to take traffic school (inperson, correspondance, and even online) to make it so the ticket doesn't go to the DMV and then to my insurance company. This looks like a great option to take advantage of. Instead of just letting you do that, and send the court some info that you did it, they actually have the balls to charge you 30$ in order to "receive traffic school information". And by traffic school information, they mean a printed on newspaper leaflet with some phone numbers and some urls. Now, that cost is *on top* of whatever the traffic school charges you, and is 100% non-refundable. The number itself is trivial to me, but the thought of paying for the privledge to pay more money in order to not get reported to the responsible agencies seems.. well.. a bit like blackmail. This is legal apparently, as long as you do it under the guise of a traffic court.
Not that any of this really surprises me. It just sucks. Yay for a legal system that makes absolutely no sense.
Posted by tberman at May 19, 2005 09:19 PM