Yes, sort of, and New York is the only state on this site where that's the honest answer.
Everywhere else, "traffic school" is really about the ticket. California masks it, Texas and Florida dismiss it. New York's Point and Insurance Reduction Program does neither. Your ticket stands. The conviction goes on your record. Your insurer sees it. What PIRP does instead is subtract up to 4 points from the total the DMV uses when it decides whether to suspend your license.
Read that carefully, because it's narrower than the course ads suggest. The reduction only touches points from violations in the 18 months before you finish the course. It can't take your total below zero, it can't be banked against your next ticket, and if your license is already suspended or revoked, completing the course changes nothing about that. The DMV says all of this plainly on its own PIRP page, which is more than most of the sites selling the course do.
So why take it? Two reasons, and the second one is the quiet star.
One, the suspension math. If you're carrying points and one more ticket puts you in dangerous territory, a 4-point haircut is real breathing room, and it's available once every 18 months.
Two, the money. Finish a PIRP course and New York law, Insurance Law section 2336, forces your insurer to cut the base rate of your liability and collision coverage by 10% for three years. Not may. Must. It applies to the principal operator of the vehicle, you claim it by showing your certificate to your insurer within 90 days of finishing, and you can retake the course every three years to keep it running forever. On a typical New York premium that's roughly $214 a year in our data, call it $642 across the cycle, for a 320-minute course that costs $24 to $60. Plenty of New Yorkers with zero points on their record take PIRP purely as an insurance play, and they're right to.
The course itself is 320 minutes by regulation, online through any DMV-approved sponsor, and the sponsor reports your completion to the DMV within 10 weeks. No court involvement at any point. That's the other thing that makes New York different: PIRP is between you, the sponsor, the DMV and your insurer. The ticket process runs on its own track, and if you want to fight the ticket itself, that's a plea or a hearing, not a course.
Every DMV-approved online PIRP sponsor we track is compared on the New York page, with current pricing.