States and municipalities across the country are struggling to match revenues with expenditures. Sometimes these governments use traffic fines and fees to help balance the budget more so at the city level than at the state level. This article explores the rationale for the issuance of traffic tickets and provides a state-level analysis on the occurrence of tickets and its relation with budget or public safety factors. Utilizing a cross-sectional multiple regression with lags, it was found that public safety concerns as evident in fatal crashes data has a significant and larger negative effect on the issuance of traffic tickets than budget concerns as measured by state credit ratings, unemployment rates, and housing prices.