Auckland still larger than Wellington

Stuff, this time:

Auckland teenagers had the highest number of convictions for drink-driving, with 1553 in the past two years.

Christchurch teenagers weren’t far behind, with 1383, while 793 Hamilton teenagers were convicted and 728 Wellingtonians.

That’s out of a national total of about 9700 per two years (so this could also have been in our ‘think of a number and double it’ series).  Based on total population it looks as though the drink-driving rate in Auckland is about half that in the rest of the country — and any journalist should know that Auckland is roughly 1/3 of the country and Wellington and ChCh are each very roughly 1/3 of Auckland.

With a few minutes at Stats New Zealand we can check the denominators and see if teenagers are distributed differently than people.  At the 2006 Census, the number of 15-19 year olds was 99,000 for the Auckland region, 33,000 for the Wellington region, and 36000 for the Canterbury region (ChCh is about 60% of Canterbury), out of 300,000 for the whole country.  These follow the overall population pretty accurately

So, the numbers are showing a news story that’s the opposite of what was actually reported: Auckland has dramatically lower rates of conviction for drink-driving among teenagers than the country as a whole and than the other major cities.