Center for Transportation Research and Education

About the research

Conventional approaches to achieving compliance with speed limits are almost always punitive: speeders are intercepted and punished through fines or other sanctions. Nevertheless, psychological research and practical experience have shown that penalties and rewards are equally powerful motivators of human behavior. “Un-Ticketed” is an experiment to explore whether it is possible to improve speed compliance by incentivizing good behavior (in addition to punishing bad behavior). Specifically, the project will be a collaboration with one or more local police departments implement a contest where randomly-selected drivers who comply with the speed limit are rewarded with gift cards donated by local businesses. Traffic speeds in the selected areas will be monitored before, during, and after the intervention to identify impacts on speeds, and drivers will be surveyed to identify possible changes in attitudes about speeding. A guide will be produced to aid Iowa communities in applying this intervention.