KEY POINTS:
Police vow not to ease up against motorists speeding past schools, despite National Party suspicion they are trying to fill ticketing quotas.
Road policing manager Superintendent Dave Cliff disclosed yesterday that almost 80,000 tickets were issued to drivers caught speeding near schools last year.
The result included 75,696
tickets issued from speed camera enforcement and 4012 by police patrols.
Mr Cliff said: "We are still getting, on an almost daily basis, schools thanking us for our efforts.
"So we intend for this campaign to be a major enforcement emphasis during all of 2007."
National Party police spokesman Chester Borrows cried foul at the weekend over statistics showing the police issued 34,651 tickets in the 2005-06 financial year to motorists caught exceeding limits by 6-10km/h.
The figure was up from 7247 the previous year, prompting Mr Borrows to question "if they are playing catch-up in the lower-threshold range".
Mr Borrows said yesterday he had made his comments before receiving advice from police about their Speed Kills Kids campaign outside schools, and he was waiting for them to provide a breakdown of their figures before deciding whether to take the debate further.
The former police detective, who is MP for Wanganui, said National supported the campaign and he did not want to "get painted here as taking a big swing at the cops".
But he wondered how a single campaign enforced last year for just three hours a day, before and after school, could have accounted for such a large increase in tickets.
Mr Cliff said most tickets issued near schools last year were for speeds of less than 10km/h above legal limits, although the police were still working through the statistics.
The police normally tolerate motorists travelling up to 10km/h faster than general speed limits, but reduced that last year to 5km in school zones between 7.30am and 9am and between 3pm and 4.30pm each school day.
Mr Cliff said that was the main reason for the increase in lower-end tickets for the financial year, the second half of which coincided with the campaign, although the police tolerance for heavy vehicles had always been no more than 5km/h above legal limits.
The tolerance level within 250m of schools has been cut even further this year - to 4km/h - and the police reserve the right to extend that to whenever schools are in session, or even during after-hour events such as Saturday sports.
But Mr Cliff said that although more speeding tickets were issued last month than in February last year, that was because the police were spending more camera time outside schools, and the rate of offending had actually declined.
He said speed cameras were catching an average of 26 motorists an hour outside schools, down from 29 last year.Although the number of tickets jumped to 9340 last month from 6310 in February last year, that followed an increase in camera hours, from 335 to 568.
"That is a fantastic result - it demonstrates that the high-visibility advertising campaign we have run with Land Transport NZ coupled with the enforcement have already shown a really good solid reduction in the numbers of speedsters ."
Automobile Association spokesman Mike Noon said his organisation backed the campaign, but preferred a lower limit of 40km/h outside schools at given times, and for flashing signs to warn motorists of when that applied.