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In an attempt to prove or disprove the belief, in 1990 a reporter for the St. Petersburg Times conducted his own smallish survey of which color of cars were getting the most speeding tickets in his area. He first staked out four intersections in the two counties he was studying and made a tally by color of vehicle of the 1,198 cars that went through them. He then leafed through the most recent 924 speeding citations issued in those two counties to arrive at a count of how many had been issued to each color of car. Last, he compared the two results to see if the resultant percentages closely approximated one another or were badly out of sync.



His findings challenged the belief about red cars being dunned with proportionally more of the speeding tickets. Red cars accounted for 14 percent of the local vehicle population and about 16 percent of the citations for speeding, which is not a significant difference. Surprisingly, his informal study did reveal certain statistically significant differences, but they had to do with other colors of vehicle.




White cars, which accounted for 25 percent of the local vehicle population, received only 19 percent of the tickets, which meant such jalopies were cited for their transgressions less often than they should have been. This raises a new hypothesis: Rather than red attracting the unwelcome attentions of the highway patrol, perhaps instead it is the case that police tend not to notice white vehicles that are breaking the law.



Grey cars were the ones that gained a greater share of the speeding tickets than they statistically should have: while they accounted for only 6 percent of cars on the road, they pulled down 10 percent of the tickets issued. On the flip side, silver cars got only 5 percent of the tickets, yet they represented 10 percent of the car population.