Drivers fined $3 per month
The AA is shocked (shocked!) to find that traffic and parking fines in Auckland add up to a lot of money. The Herald did a good job on basic arithmetic, in converting traffic-fine totals of $36 million over 12 months and $20 million over eight months into the much less dramatic $3 million/month and $2.54 million per month.
One further piece of arithmetic would be to divide the $3 million per month by the 1 million registered vehicles in Auckland (table 36). Is $3/month a surprising average?
For comparison, the Dominion Post reported total fines of “more than $12 million” in Wellington for the 2008-2009 financial year, on 283000 registered vehicles, giving a per-vehicle average of $3.5/month (before the GST increase).
Perhaps, as the AA’s Simon Lambourne believes, this indicates not enough effort put into education of drivers. Perhaps the idea of fining people who don’t pay for parking is “not being realistic about the importance of the car to mobility in Auckland.” But the country’s primary motoring organisation can’t really get away with pretending surprise.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »
A revealing figure is not so much the total garnered in fines but more the number of drivers as a proportion of the driving population.
12 years ago