A teenager in Dunedin caught racing at 111kmh over the speed limit has topped the list of this year's worst speeding offenders - slammed as "bloody idiots" by New Zealand's top traffic officer.
The worst cases among police records, released under the Official Information Act, include an 18-year-old travelling at 161kmh in a Dunedin 50kmh zone, a 28-year-old woman caught on camera doing 159kmh in a 50kmh zone in Gisborne, and a 19-year-old man stopped for driving at 200kmh through a 100kmh zone in Northcote.
National road policing manager Acting Superintendent Rob Morgan said such cases were rare, "pretty random", and left police exasperated.
"For most police, it's about bloody idiots more than anything. Once we've caught the person there is not anything we can do about targeting, unless the area as such is known as an area of high speed and that we get a group of people continuously doing high speeds.
"These get known to us as what we call hot locations for that offending and we focus more of our resources on those areas," Supt Morgan said.
Overall, the war on speeding was being won.
"Looking at top speeds and those sorts of things, we don't do that to measure our effectiveness.
"We look at the mean speed, we look at the percentages of people exceeding the speed limit by more than 10kmh, and what we are seeing is we are getting a reduction in that." The latest statistics showed a 2% reduction in the number of people caught exceeding the speed limit by 10kmh during the past two years, he said.
The New Zealand Herald revealed earlier this year that the total 63,396 tickets issued from all fixed cameras in the 2010-11 financial year was well down on the 105,403 issued in the year to June 30, 2010.
Supt Morgan attributed the drop to a consistent approach by police and other agencies and the amount of effort being put in.
"It's also consistent with the fact we are making a point of saying it's not just the high-end speeding ... That even at 100kmh, if you have a crash then the results, the damage or trauma caused, can be significant.
"The whole point about it is you can't beat physics. The faster you are going, the less time you have to make decisions."
Under the Safer Journeys strategy, pulling New Zealand's mean speed back by 5kmh would annually save 60 lives on open roads and 30 lives in urban areas.
"Those are the outcomes we are looking for. We are looking to save lives," he said.
The objective was to "calm" traffic, and new approaches were being discussed.
"There are options out there such as point-to-point cameras and a better network of fixed cameras, and they are signalled in Safer Journeys," Supt Morgan said.
"There's also talk of demerit points for [tickets from] speed cameras and even changing the demerit point system; lowering fines and making demerit points higher. Those are all things on the table."
