State Highway 51 in Clive has been revealed as the busiest speed camera site in Hawke's Bay. Photo / Warren Buckland
State Highway 51 in Clive has been revealed as the busiest speed camera site in Hawke's Bay. Photo / Warren Buckland
One small stretch of road in Hawke's Bay is responsible for almost 1000 speeding tickets a year, police data has revealed.
The region's top road cop says they don't actively seek to revenue gather, but if they did they would put a speed camera beside the 50km/h stretch of StateHighway 51 between the Clive River bridge and Farndon Rd "all the time".
Data released to Hawke's Bay Today under the Official Information Act has revealed 966 speed notices were issued at the site in 2020.
More than half of the tickets (487) were handed to vehicles travelling between 11 and 15km/h over the speed limit.
The second most ticketed site in Hawke's Bay is Chatham Rd in Flaxmere (693 notices issued), with vehicles most commonly caught travelling six to 10km/h over the limit.
The data shows that overall more than 20,000 tickets have been issued every year in Hawke's Bay since 2009, but 2020 had the lowest number of tickets issued in 12 years.
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There are no longer any static speed cameras in Hawke's Bay with all four - on Pakowhai Rd, Karamu Rd, Kennedy Rd and Meeanee Quay - phased out in 2017/18.
In 2020, 12,736 speeding tickets were issued by officers and 7824 by mobile cameras – garnering a total of $1.91 million in fines.
In comparison, 15,199 speeding tickets were issued by officers in 2010 and 9209 by mobile camera – totalling $1.99m.
Eastern District Police road policing manager Inspector Matt Broderick. Photo / File
Eastern District Police road policing manager Inspector Matt Broderick said 50km/h areas were more likely to net speed limit breaches, but the recent focus in the region had turned toward patrolling 100km/h areas for speed.
"People are more inclined to exceed 50km/h.
"This is most likely aligned to people's perception of risk than a deliberate law breaking mindset.
"In the Eastern District, police deploy to greatest risk, and since the outcome of a crash at 100km/h is likely to be far worse than at 50km/h, road policing staff deploy to the higher speed zones more often than the lower.
"The net result will be a lower detection rate as there is less to detect."
Broderick said it was no surprise the Clive stretch of road topped the ticketing charts.
"If police simply wanted volume, we would place a speed camera there all the time," he said.
"There used to be a passing lane just beyond the Farndon Rd intersection and there is still a speed transition at that point."
Broderick said the local community had raised concerns about speeding in the area, and said people needed to respect Clive locals by driving to the limit.
Hawke's Bay Rowing Club president Chris Morgan, whose club sits near the stretch of road, says speeding "isn't really an issue" for them, but the speed limit of 50km/h was reasonable for the built-up area.
"We know it's a good catchment area for the cops," he said. "But when you come off the bridge towards a 100km/h zone, people naturally start to speed up towards it which is a worry."
A month-by-month breakdown of the data in 2020 shows the month with the most speeding fines in Hawke's Bay was January (2358), followed by November (2035) and June (2027).
In the last decade, the month with the most fines was January 2014, when a total of 5850 fines were given out.
This was followed by January 2017 (5067), December 2015 (4311) and February 2012 (4049).
Broderick said the bumper statistics in January is not a conscious tactic from police to align ticketing with the holiday period.
He also said that despite the number of overall speed tickets in the region being on a downward trend, there is no evidence that drivers are slowing down in Hawke's Bay.
In 2020, the most common excess speed that was ticketed was between 16 and 20km/h, while three drivers were caught going more than 50km/h over the limit.
New Zealand's most active and profitable mobile speed camera van is located on State Highway 1 in Wellsford, which has issued 18,294 tickets since January 2018 (worth $1.13m).
