Re:Aaron Swartz was prosecuted for scraping, while Meta does...
by Dylan16807 on Friday August 21, 2026 @02:23PM
(#49392042)
2 billion dollars per 200 deaths, not per death. So that immediately drops your rough calculation to $500 per ticket, not too far off from actual ticket values.
You'd also need to amortize the damages over years, and then spread it to all the speeding tickets issued.
So I'd actually simplify it: if we say $40000 billion (11k deaths annually times $2b plus non-deaths too and financial damages to cars and infrastructure) of damages amortized over 10 years and spread to 40M tickets annually in USA, that's actually around $100k average per speeding ticket.
I'd also note that we can't assume worst possible impact as there will be combined offenses too — eg. simultaneous drunk driving and speeding — and this means that some damages need to be covered by drunk driving ticket instead :)
Edit: update numbers to reflect annual deaths attributed to speeding in US.