Automobile Association (AA) Otago district council chairman Malcolm Budd, of Dunedin, said the cameras would help to enforce the law but needed to be deployed transparently and should not be used for revenue gathering.
Police recently admitted that the new cameras, which work better in adverse weather and at night, were calibrated to catch even small speed infractions.
While no clear trends were apparent in Coastal Otago and Southland, in the Otago Lakes Central police region, encompassing Queenstown, Wanaka and Alexandra, as of September this year mobile speed cameras had already brought in about $613,000.
Over the preceding five years, the cameras brought in an average of $374,360 over the course of a year, with about $390,000 being gathered last year.
Police said yesterday a replacement programme for police mobile cameras had recently been completed.
The new cameras performed better in rain, fog and at night, meaning they could operate more often, police said.
Cameras were also able to identify offending vehicles more accurately, meaning infringements could be issued in a wider range of scenarios.
Mr Budd said that if motorists were caught exceeding the speed limits it had to be a good thing.
However, he did not want speed cameras to be used for revenue gathering and the AA had been advocating for speed camera sites to be signposted.
"Those new cameras are ideal because they pick up whether a car’s currently registered or warranted, or whether the registered owner of the vehicles is wanted," Mr Budd said.
There was a need for transparency about speed tolerances as different cars had different speedometers and speed readings could also vary depending on weather and other factors.
"There’s got to be a tolerance," Mr Budd said.
Across the Southern police district’s three regions, in January this year 4727 speeding camera infringements were issued where the offender was driving less than 11kmh over the speed limit, netting about $142,000 in fines.
A decade earlier, in January 2012, the number of these low-level speeding tickets handed out was just 394, stinging motorists for about $12,000.
About 30,000 infringements were given in 2012, while as of September this year about 33,000 had already been given out.
- Additional reporting RNZ
