Albert Pirro is lucky. Of course, he probably considers himself unlucky for getting a speeding ticket for going a reported 98 mph in New Rochelle a few days ago.

He’s lucky simply because he was in Westchester — and not because his wife is the Westchester district attorney who’s running for attorney general. Pirro is lucky simply because he wasn’t in the city. He’ll probably beat the ticket, or at least plead it down to a lesser violation that doesn’t require suspension of his driver’s license.

But if he were caught with his pedal to the metal in the five boroughs — or in the five western towns of Suffolk County or the upstate “cities” of Syracuse and Rochester — he’d have far less wiggle room.

This is probably the right part of this column to get the disclosure out of the way: I do have some personal experience with this topic. But I have no pending matters with any of the entities mentioned below.

Pirro’s case will be handled in a local “justice court” where the judge is a village resident elected by his neighbors to handle low-level infractions and even hold arraignments on crimes as serious as murder. The big crimes wind up in full-fledged courts for trial. But the low-level stuff, ranging from bar fights to traffic tickets, stay in justice court. The bulk of these courts’ much-beloved revenue comes from traffic court, which also takes up much of their time.

While hundreds of justice courts typically don’t look much like courts — some are even just the back room of a farmhouse, like the court in Clyde I visited during college — they are very much real courts. And they have all the procedural rules that real courts feature. Even for speeding tickets, the burden of proof is “beyond a reasonable doubt.” Also, the state’s criminal procedure laws mean drivers charged with routine traffic violations can demand time-consuming paperwork from the police. And as in any court, plea bargains are the routine way of moving cases quickly and efficiently through the system.

So when Pirro goes to court, he’ll have the chance to make a deal. The routine is pretty much the same in justice courts throughout the state: Drivers gather in makeshift courtrooms, waiting for troopers or local sheriffs to call out their names. The drivers and the officer then go into the hallway and negotiate a deal.

While 98 mph is absurd for the New England Thruway where Pirro was stopped, the trooper will surely offer him the chance to plead guilty to a speed below 85 — that way, Pirro won’t face automatic suspension of his license for exceeding 30 mph over the posted 55 mph limit. If he’s really lucky, the speeding ticket might become a “failure to obey traffic device” ticket — which carries many fewer points. And if he’s luckiest of all, the speeding ticket will become a pointless violation like a “parked on pavement” or “cell phone” ticket. Those don’t even count as real tickets, and won’t cause his car insurance to go up even a penny.

This process is a win for everyone involved — the police win a conviction, the local town wins the revenue from the fine and the drivers win the chance to avoid higher insurance premiums. (Okay, so this isn’t a win for quite everyone. The insurance companies don’t make quite as much as money as they could.) Pirro surely needs a win, given that he faces a $600 fine and the unlikely possibility of 30 days in jail.

The whole process is in many ways counter-intuitive, but it’s the process nonetheless, and it’s fair to everyone who shows up in court.

Here in New York City, the process is entirely different. Back in 1969, the state legislature took traffic tickets out of the court systems in the five boroughs, and also Syracuse, Rochester and parts of Long Island where courthouses were becoming overwhelmed with drug cases.The theory was that real judges shouldn’t waste their time with routine moving violations and should instead focus on criminal felony and misdemeanor matters. The result is that drivers in these parts of the state have far fewer rights and remedies than drivers elsewhere, even when they’re accused of the same violation.That isn’t fair.

To handle traffic violations, the Department of Motor Vehicles was ordered to create a Traffic Violations Bureau. The unit is an administrative part of a state agency and hearings at the TVB are not court proceedings at all.

The burden of proof is a measly “clear and convincing evidence,” which lawyers define as a 75% likelihood of guilt — far easier to prove than the “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard that upstate drivers enjoy.

There is also no plea bargaining at the TVB. Speeds aren’t reduced to lower points, and speeding tickets aren’t changed to something else. This is why Pirro would be doomed to lose his license if he’d been just a few miles south on Interstate 95 when he was stopped.

The intent of this column isn’t to suggest that the laws should be weakened to help speeders beat their tickets. In fact, I’d support implementing the strict TVB system statewide. This is purely an issue of treating all New Yorkers equally.

The traffic court systems in New York State are created unequally. There is no reason why Pirro should have a chance to weasel out of his ticket simply because he was one county north of the city.