[masraum]

My experience

1 - traffic school - usually the easiest option that you can usually request right away without going to court. Here in Texas if you take traffic school and then request your driving record, the ticket is still there, but the points are reported as "0" (at least, that was my experience years ago).
2 - deferred (disposition/adjudication) - I think this is the best option, at least in my experience. In this case, you usually need to go to a court date, but in some cases may be able to talk to the prosecutor ahead of time. In this case, they'll say "don't get a ticket in X amount of time and we'll dismiss this ticket." (could be 3 months, 6 months, whatever) In my experience, you can usually actually get tickets as long as the final disposition of the ticket is dismissal or completes after the time period. In one case, the judge said "cannot be cited for another ticket". But, once the time period completes, the ticket goes away and does not show up on your driving record. It's like it never existed. Obviously, away from where I've had experience (and potentially even different here now) the details may be very different.

It's been many years since I had to deal with this. In my younger days, at times, I got more tickets.

In both cases, "they" generally want to get paid, so the "deferred" option usually costs about as much as the ticket.