The best way to avoid a ticket is to obey the rules of the road -- but sometimes even innocent drivers are ticketed. Here are a few tips to keep you in the clear.

To butcher a common phrase, "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of traffic tickets." In other words, the best way to minimize your chance of receiving a ticket is to scrupulously obey all traffic laws. Unfortunately, police officers do stop and cite innocent drivers all the time, and it's easy for a conservative and safe driver to be cited for a technical violation. The most common tickets are for speeding on highways. Here are a few tips for staying out of harm's way.

Make Sure You Can Spot the Police

First, make sure your car is equipped with decent mirrors that give you an unobstructed rear view. To this end, periodically clean your mirrors and rear window, do not put stickers on your rear window unless you have to, and keep objects off the back ledge that may block your view.

If your rearview mirror vibrates at high speeds try to correct the problem. A mirror that vibrates a little will blur the subtle features that often give away the profile of a patrol car or motorcycle. Try tightening or slightly loosening any screws on the mirror mounting; if that doesn't help, remove the screws to add fiber, hard rubber, or even home-made cardboard or paper washers or shims to the mounting. Sometimes, you can reduce mirror vibration by having your front wheels balanced.

With a little practice, you can learn to recognize a Highway Patrol car's front profile in your side or rearview mirrors. Most Highway Patrol cars are manned by one driver and no passenger. One tell-tale sign of a Highway Patrol car behind you is the shotgun mounted vertically on a rack in the front compartment of the car. From your rearview mirror, the shotgun on its rack seems to divide the police car windshield in two.

The Highway Patrol is also moving toward increased use of smaller semi-compact cars, which are much harder to distinguish as patrol vehicles. While many larger Highway Patrol cars have conspicuous red-and-blue roof-rack lights, the smaller cars (and even some of the larger ones) use internally mounted red lights that become noticeable only when they're turned on and it's too late. Even so, many of these smaller cars still have the shotgun conspicuously mounted in the front-windshield rack.