Drive west out of Pukekohe and the city falls away fast. The motorway ends, the road narrows, and within a few kilometres you are in genuine rural New Zealand — paddocks, hedgerows, the occasional dairy herd. Keep going and you reach Waiuku, a town of around 10,000 people perched above the Manukau Harbour at the end of a road that goes nowhere else.
I have represented this community on the Franklin Local Board since 2022. I know this road the way locals know it — the bends, the dips, the spots where the shoulder disappears and the ditch comes close. I also know it has become something of an obsession for New Zealand’s traffic enforcement authorities.
Over $4 million in speeding fines have been collected from the Glenbrook Road and Glenbrook-Waiuku Road corridor since 2020. Three cameras currently operate on the route. Four more point-to-point average speed cameras go live on 23 June. Franklin District already accounts for roughly one in three of Auckland’s fixed speed cameras. For a community of 10,000 people served by a single road, that is an extraordinary concentration of enforcement infrastructure. By any reasonable measure, Waiuku is New Zealand’s speed camera capital.
I want to be clear about something before I go further. I am not writing this as a defender of speeding drivers. Speed kills, and I have no interest in arguing otherwise. What I am interested in is whether the intervention matches the actual problem — and whether anyone in authority has bothered to check.
So I did something straightforward. I downloaded NZTA’s publicly available Crash Analysis System database and analysed every recorded crash on this corridor going back to 2000. The CAS database is the government’s own official record of every crash reported to Police. It is as authoritative as crash data gets in New Zealand.
What it shows stopped me in my tracks.
Of the crashes on this corridor where road-environment factors were recorded during the camera enforcement era, nearly three quarters involved vehicles leaving the road. Not colliding head-on. Not running red lights. Leaving the road — ending up in a ditch, hitting a fence, rolling down a bank, striking a tree. That is the dominant crash type on a road that now has more cameras than almost anywhere else in the country.
Now, I can already hear the response: speed was probably still a factor in some of those crashes. Fair enough — the CAS database does not record travelling speed, so I cannot rule that out. But here is the thing. Even if a driver was going too fast when they lost control, the injury happens when the vehicle hits the ditch or the bank. A speed camera records how fast you were travelling before you left the road. It cannot put a barrier between you and what you hit. Sealed shoulders, drainage improvements, and roadside barriers can.
And yet when I asked NZTA under the Official Information Act whether they had ever assessed road maintenance as an alternative to cameras on this corridor, their written response was stark: that analysis has never been done. There is no site-specific business case for the Glenbrook Road cameras. The corridor was selected using a national risk formula. Nobody sat down with the crash data, looked at what was actually going wrong on this particular road, and asked whether a camera was the right answer.
The five-year numbers tell their own story. In the five years before the speed limit reduction and cameras arrived — 2015 to 2019 — there were 15 deaths and serious injuries on this corridor. In the five years of intensive camera enforcement that followed — 2020 to 2024 — there were 17. The enforcement has intensified. The serious harm has not reduced.
More than $4 million extracted from a captive rural community. A crash record dominated by vehicles leaving the road. No analysis of whether fixing the road would work better. And four more cameras going live next month.
I am not saying cameras have no place in road safety. Internationally, the evidence supports their use in the right locations. The question I keep coming back to is whether this is the right location — and whether the right questions were ever asked before the first pole went in the ground.
Someone should answer that before 23 June.
The views expressed are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of the Franklin Local Board as a whole.
Gary Holmes is a local body politician and business association manager who made Waiuku his home and has never stopped asking questions about how it is governed. Elected to the Franklin Local Board in 2022 to represent the Waiuku subdivision, he has built a reputation as a fiscally conservative voice prepared to take on Auckland’s bureaucracy when the numbers don’t stack up. He believes good local government starts with reading the data yourself.
https://stevebaron.co.nz/author/garyholmes/