While the Ministry of Justice worries about AI and deep fakes in courtrooms, something remarkable is happening in youth courts that nobody's talking about: young people are breaking traffic laws at half the rate they were four years ago.

In 2024, just 189 young people received court orders for traffic and vehicle regulatory offences. That's down from 387 in 2020, and it's the lowest figure in the 32-year dataset. (Source: Ministry of Justice, youth-court-orders)

This isn't a blip. The decline is steep and sustained. In 2020, youth courts were processing traffic offences for 387 young people. By 2021, it had dropped to 246. It stabilised at 321 for both 2022 and 2023, then fell off a cliff to 189 last year.

Go back further and the contrast is even starker. In the early 2000s, youth traffic offences regularly topped 1,000 per year. The peak was 1995, when 1,479 young people faced court orders. Twenty-nine years later, we're at 189. That's an 87% drop.

So what changed? The most obvious answer is graduated licensing. New Zealand introduced stricter learner and restricted licence rules in the 2010s, making it harder for young people to drive unsupervised. Fewer young drivers on the road means fewer opportunities to break traffic laws.

But there's another factor: enforcement. Police have shifted resources away from minor traffic violations and toward more serious offending. Speed cameras and automated enforcement have also changed the game. You can't take a 15-year-old to youth court for a speeding ticket caught on camera.

The data suggests something else too: young people might just be better at following the rules than they used to be. Road safety campaigns, stricter penalties, and a generation that grew up with seatbelts and bike helmets as non-negotiable have all played a role.

None of this fits the narrative you'll hear in Parliament or on talkback radio. Youth crime gets treated as a runaway crisis, a problem spiralling out of control. But when you look at traffic offences, the trend is unmistakably downward. Young people are not tearing up the roads. They're barely on them.

The 2024 figure of 189 represents just 0.003% of New Zealand's youth population. For context, in 1995, when the number was 1,479, it represented 0.025% of the youth population. Even accounting for population changes, today's young drivers are breaking traffic laws at a fraction of the rate their parents did.

While the Ministry of Justice considers mobile courthouses to improve access to justice, youth traffic cases have dropped so low they barely register. The real question isn't how to process more cases. It's what happened to make there be so few in the first place.