A Times Herald Record report:

Of the more than 26,000 speeding tickets issued on Route 17 in Sullivan and Orange counties and I-84 in Orange and I-87 in Orange and Ulster counties in 2008, the bulk of them were for speeds of 80 mph or higher.

There’s a simple explanation:

“We don’t want a trooper stopped on the side of the road with someone driving a lower speed and have somebody at a much higher speed going past,” said state police Capt. Martin Hansen of Troop T, which patrols the Thruway and I-84.

Contrary to the urban legend that speeding tickets are nothing but a money-making operation, Hansen said, speed enforcement is an effort to protect public safety. Troopers are told to overlook technicalities of the law and concentrate on the most dangerous motorists.

And the places troopers hang out with radar guns tend to be areas known for a lot of crashes, like just south of the Harriman exit on the Thruway.

“You want to stop those people you think are going to cause an accident,” Hansen said. “You want them to comply with the speed limit so they don’t hurt or kill themselves or somebody else.”

The number of tickets written tends to peak in the middle of the day and in the warmer times of the year, according to a Times Herald-Record analysis of 2008 ticket data, which was supplied by the state Department of Motor Vehicles. That’s mostly because there are more cars on the road at those times.

But there’s another factor at play in the winter, a kind of paradox. A driver is more likely to get pulled over at a slower speed in the winter, but less likely to get pulled over at all. That’s because police are worried more about crashes that have already happened than those that might happen.

“Speeding tickets are probably down in January because accidents are up,” Hansen said.

Here are the prime days and hours to get pulled over:

Route 17: Between 10 and 11 a.m. Fridays
I-84: Between 11 a.m. and noon Tuesdays
I-87 (Thruway): Between 11 a.m. and noon Wednesdays

(Recordonline.com / YWN-112)