The numbers from the NZ Herald's 18 March report are stark. Officers issued 538,192 infringement notices in 2025, up from 461,000 in 2024 and 402,000 in 2023. That is a 34 per cent increase in two years. Revenue collected was $54.2 million at an average penalty of around $100. Those figures cover only officer-issued fines and exclude all stationary and mobile speed camera detections, which run into hundreds of thousands of additional citations annually. The police data goes back to 2009, when 341,000 fines were issued. We are now 58 per cent above that baseline.
Inspector Peter McKennie told the Herald:
"Speed is globally recognised as the leading contributor to crashes occurring and the severity of outcome. The messaging from police has been very clear that if you exceed the speed limit you can expect to be stopped."
That statement is factually correct. Speed does contribute to crash severity. Police enforcement does deter some speeding. The AA's road safety spokesman Dylan Thomsen pointed to the correlation between increased enforcement and falling fatalities, noting that New Zealand recorded its lowest road death toll in a decade in 2024, with deaths dropping below 300 for the first time in ten years. These are genuine outcomes and they deserve acknowledgment.
What they do not explain is the policy environment in which this enforcement surge is happening. Because simultaneously, the government that has overseen this 58 per cent rise in fines is the same government that spent 2024 and 2025 raising speed limits on hundreds of kilometres of state highways, against the documented advice of its own senior officials.
The evidence the government commissioned and ignored
In March 2024, engineering consultancy WSP produced a comprehensive economic assessment for the New Zealand Transport Agency, analysing the impact of speed limit reductions implemented between 2020 and 2023. The report was later released under the Official Information Act. Its conclusions were unambiguous. Every single road corridor where speed limits had been reduced showed a positive cost-benefit ratio under NZTA's own standard methodology. For every dollar lost in slightly increased travel times, the analysis found New Zealand gained between $2 and $10 in reduced crash costs. Some corridors showed even higher ratios under sensitivity testing. The WSP report attributed the 2024 drop in road deaths below 300 specifically to the earlier speed reductions.
The then NZTA Land Transport Director Brent Alderton wrote to decision makers urging them to rely on evidence rather than ideology, noting that "there is well founded evidence, nationally and internationally, that establishes the link between vehicle speed and the likelihood of a crash occurring, as well as the severity and consequences of any crash."
The government reversed the speed limits anyway. The Land Transport Rule: Setting of Speed Limits 2024, signed in September 2024, required automatic reversal of hundreds of reduced speed limits by 1 July 2025 as part of the National-ACT coalition agreement. Transport Minister Chris Bishop called it "a great day for New Zealand." The first reversal was SH2 between Featherston and Masterton, returning to 100km/h from 80km/h. Bishop acknowledged that speed was important but argued the major cause of road deaths was drugs and alcohol. The WSP report did not support that framing. Neither did the road fatality data.
Professor Simon Kingham of Canterbury University, one of 97 signatories to an open letter warning the reversals would cause additional deaths, put it simply: speeds had been lowered because people were dying on those roads, and raising them again would mean more people dying on those roads. The Global Road Safety Partnership co-signed the letter from Geneva.
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The mechanics of a revenue system
This is the contradiction that New Zealand drivers are now living inside. Speed limits have been raised on roads where the evidence showed lower limits saved lives. Enforcement of those speed limits has simultaneously reached a 16-year high, generating $54.2 million in a single year. The average fine is $100, a figure set by legislation in 1999 and unchanged since, during which time median incomes have roughly doubled. The AA is now calling for fines to be doubled to restore deterrence value. The government says it is reviewing them.
MotorBuzz has covered this pattern extensively in its Drivers Revenge section, and specifically the argument that fining after the fact does nothing to prevent crashes. A fine issued on a road whose speed limit was raised against safety advice does not prevent the crash it is nominally designed to deter. It documents a transaction. The road is still set at a speed the government's own data showed was too high for its crash history. The driver is fined for travelling at a speed the government made legal on a different stretch of road two kilometres away.
The Acusensus AI camera programme that MotorBuzz covered in depth in its investigation into mass surveillance on New Zealand roads adds another dimension. A $100 million contract awarded to a private Australian company to film and algorithmically fine New Zealand drivers, on top of officer enforcement that is already at a 16-year high, on roads whose limits have been raised to generate more violations. New Zealand is building a comprehensive fine-generating infrastructure at the exact moment the evidence base for how it has deployed that infrastructure is most contested.
The Acusensus petition on MotorBuzz, calling for the government to halt the programme, has accumulated thousands of signatures. The petition is still live here.
The global pattern
New Zealand is not alone. This is the story MotorBuzz has been tracking across multiple jurisdictions. San Francisco issued 91,000 speed camera citations in five months, a 369 per cent surge. Virginia recorded nearly one million camera triggers in 2025. The UK government paid O2 £602,000 to track 25 million devices to identify potential road tax revenue sources, as covered in MotorBuzz's investigation into EV driver surveillance. Illinois is now proposing speed limiters fitted to repeat offenders' vehicles. The infrastructure of enforcement is expanding everywhere, and in every jurisdiction the revenue it generates is growing.
In most of these cases the safety rationale is genuine but partial. Speed does kill. Enforcement does reduce some speeding at some locations. The studies showing safety benefits from cameras are real, within their limitations. MotorBuzz has never argued otherwise.
What is also true, and what the NZ data makes visible with unusual clarity, is that a system generating $54.2 million in a year, from fines set in 1999, enforced at a record high intensity, on roads whose limits were raised against the government's own safety evidence, is not primarily a safety system. It is a revenue system with safety characteristics. The distinction matters because a safety-first system would start by not raising speed limits on roads where people were dying. A revenue-first system raises the limits, watches the fine count climb, and calls it enforcement.
One fine every 52 seconds. The government of New Zealand is invited to explain which objective that serves.
Sources: NZ Herald, 18 March 2026 | The Conversation / University of Auckland, January 2026 | NZ Herald / Transport Minister Bishop speed limit announcement, January 2025 | 1News, September 2024 | NZTA Land Transport Rule: Setting of Speed Limits 2024 | WSP economic assessment for NZTA, March 2024 (released under OIA) | NZ Ministry of Transport social cost of road crashes data | MotorBuzz Drivers Revenge | MotorBuzz It's About the Catch Not the Crash | MotorBuzz Acusensus investigation | MotorBuzz San Francisco speed cameras | MotorBuzz O2 EV surveillance