Watch Your Wallet When Driving Through These 10 States

With the first major driving holiday
of the summer season approaching, the National Motorists
Association -- a national drivers rights group - has analyzed the
laws across the country to determine the best and the worst states
when it comes to exploiting the motoring public.

These state rankings were calculated using seventeen criteria
related to specific traffic laws, enforcement practices, and the
treatment of traffic ticket defendants. The rankings are designed to
provide guidance to travelers who do not want their vacation ruined
by speed traps, arcane laws or "kangaroo" traffic courts.

The state most likely to find its way into your wallet is New Jersey.
With its toll roads, roadblocks, and speed traps, New Jersey has
left almost no stone unturned when it comes to extracting cash from
motorists. The state has also recently pushed through a red-light
camera pilot project at a time when many states are banning the
ticket cameras because they've proven to have a negative effect
on traffic safety. Add in "driver responsibility" fees, which are
ineffective and have a disproportionate effect on the poor, and you
have the worst state in our rankings.

Here are the worst ten states:

1) New Jersey
2) Ohio
3) Maryland
4) Louisiana
5) New York
6) Illinois
7) Delaware
8) Virginia
9) Washington
10) Massachusetts

On the opposite end of the spectrum, the five states that treated
motorists most fairly are Wyoming, Idaho, Montana, Nebraska, and
Kentucky. The complete list of rankings can be found on the
National Motorists Association website at
www.motorists.org/rankings.

Jim Baxter, President of the National Motorists Association, said "It
is not exactly a well kept secret that many traffic laws, enforcement
practices, and traffic courts are more about generating revenue and
political posturing, than they are about traffic safety. During holidays,
like the upcoming Memorial Day weekend, we're bombarded with
messages about intensified enforcement, _click it or ticket,' and
horrendous fines when in fact most vacation-related traffic accidents
are caused my inattention, distraction and fatigue. However, these
are accident causes that don't generate much in the way of
government revenue, so instead our highways are overrun with
unmarked police cars and ticket cameras."

Baxter went on to say "The long term solution to aligning legitimate
public interests with government policies is to remove the money
from traffic regulation, enforcement, and adjudication. Until that
happens, the focus on revenue generation will continue to trump
effective traffic regulation and ethical enforcement practices."

With this in mind, motorists who will be traveling to unfamiliar areas
during the holiday may want to check out the NMA's National Speed
Trap Exchange - a listing of speed traps across the country - at
www.speedtrap.org.

PCMag.com Names the Fastest ISPs in America

In a world where time equals money, slow Internet connections have real-life business and quality-of-life implications. Fiber optic connections have proven themselves the fastest way online, but they're still rare—and expensive. Which Internet service providers (ISPs) offer the fastest broadband? And in which state? After conducting over 200,000 individual tests as part of its third annual study, PCMag.com found that Verizon's FiOS fiber-optic connections are indeed the fastest overall service, and Cablevision's Optimum Online proved itself the fastest cable ISP in the United States. Likewise, Nevada, Virginia, and Pennsylvania are home to the fastest surf speeds—the full state ranking is below. PCMag.com’s “Best ISPs in America” list hits PCMag.com on December 2.

To uncover the nation’s best ISPs, PCMag utilized the custom-designed SurfSpeed application (a utility that grabs pages from several popular Web sites to measure actual Internet surfing speed) and pored through data from over 17,000 profiles (that is, unique IP addresses).

Cable vs. DSL: DSL and cable lines were for a time synonymous in people’s minds, but cable has clearly taken off in terms of sheer speed. Cable connections are 47 percent faster than DSLs. Cablevision’s Optimum Online tops the list, with an average nationwide SurfSpeed of 839 Kbps. And 61 percent of users declared themselves satisfied with the service. Even the slowest cable service provider (Earthlink, averaging 565 Kbps) was faster than some DSL providers, from CenturyTel at 520 Kbps down to Alltell’s measly 357. FrontierNet is the fastest DSL provider in the nation, averaging SufSpeeds of 724 Kbps. And, perhaps most importantly, just 27 percent of DSL users reported themselves satisfied.

State by State: Analyzing regions offers insight and challenges, but the region with the fastest Internet service—the West—is just 14 Kbps faster than the slowest, the South at 551 Kbps. The difference between states, on the other hand, is shocking, with No. 1 Nevada offering residents Internet more than twice as fast as bottom-ranked New Mexico.

South Carolina ranked quite low at #38.
North Carolina ranked #29.