I don't know if you're from the USA (based on your username), but here government is very inefficient at the state/county/town levels where these sorts of thing

I don't know if you're from the USA (based on your username), but here government is very inefficient at the state/county/town levels where these sorts of things play out. Maybe the department that issues tickets in your town doesn't have modern internet connected systems, so they only send notices by mail. If they have the wrong address in their systems for whatever reason (multiple legacy computer systems that don't talk to each other, happens all the time), you won't get the notice but you'll still be held responsible. It's entirely plausible in cases like these that the right hand doesn't know what the left is doing - the ticket is generated, various due dates are set and the paper notices are dispatched, but there's no system to verify if the notices are delivered. Instead, the due dates pass without response and the system generates more fees, more notices, more due dates, until the above scenario reaches its conclusion where a warrant for arrest is issued and makes its way into the police computer systems. In many places in the USA, there's no built-in feedback for the ticket-issuing authorities to ensure that notices were actually received until the police get involved with a warrant. The notices are just fired off, the government says it's the citizen's responsibility no matter what, and they wash their hands of the consequences. Additionally, in some places traffic tickets in particular have their own separate mini-justice system called "traffic court" or similar, and different rules apply - like no court-appointed lawyers because it's not technically a crime, no juries or even a "real" judge (just a magistrate or administrator), and so on. It also varies wildly by state and town. It's hard to talk about governance in the USA in general terms because it is so highly federated. For all the power and visibility of the federal government, state and local authorities wield enormous influence over the lives of their citizens. In some ways, the USA is closer in structure to the EU than a single unified country. In many ways, interacting with government and the justice system in the USA is incredibly byzantine, verging on kafka-esque. If you search around, you will find an endless series of stories of people who commit some minor infraction and are subsequently lost in the labyrinth of government, sometimes even destroying their lives and livelihoods in the process.