Doctors have malpractice insurance, which insures them against claims made by somebody they made a mistake while operating on. The cost of this insurance is carried by all of the doctors who contribute to it.  The underlying social contract is simple – if all doctors admit that they are likely to suffer a malpractice suit at some point, and they all pay a little each month, each individual doctor will, on average, pay less than they would if they had to face the lawsuits on their own.

In Paris, jumping the turnstiles on the Metro is something of a tradition – except it incurs a $60 fine. A group called The Atlantic has managed to recruit enough turnstile jumpers to pay into an insurance fund every month, and in return they get any of their turnstile-jumping fines paid off for them. So why can we not apply this logic to speeding fines and parking tickets, or fines received for talking on your phone while driving?

There is no law in the United States that prevents people from creating an insurance fund to protect against fines, so long as the fund does not itself promote the breaking of any laws. Speeding fines and parking tickets happen to almost everyone, and can be a massive drain on your month’s finances. Speeding fines also have a nasty habit of coming at the worst possible time, when you’ve already had a number of extra expenses that month.

So we propose the following two “misdemeanor” private insurance funds:

1)     Speeding Ticket Insurance

Some people just love to speed, and are going to do it regardless of the rules.  For the rest of us, we tend to stick to the speed limit, but every time we’re in a hurry we end up getting a ticket in the mail from some camera we didn’t even know was there, or getting pulled over.  To be approved for this insurance you would need to have a record that is mostly clean of speeding violations.

It would probably only cost a few dollars a month to insure yourself against speeding fines, if enough people in your state were doing it.

2)     Parking Ticket Insurance

Paying for parking is extremely expensive, but getting a parking ticket is usually much more so.   You don’t visit an area regularly, and it’s a busy city center, there’s a good chance you simply won’t be able to find a parking spot for love or money in the middle of the day, and are probably going to get a ticket wherever you park.

What if there was a fund that you paid into that was cheaper than renting a parking spot, but would cover the penalty for getting yourself a parking ticket. It might encourage illegal parking amongst its members, and could likely go bankrupt if too many members were too liberal in their parking habits, but it could be a viable alternative to paying for parking.