What kind of traffic offence lands you in a remand cell before trial? And why are 8,367 New Zealanders now sitting in one for exactly that reason?

That's the number of people held on remand for traffic and vehicle regulatory offences in 2024. It's the highest figure in 15 years. To find anything comparable, you have to scroll back to 2009. (Source: Stats NZ, remand-prisoners)

But here's what makes this genuinely strange: just four years ago, that number was 6,846. Then it collapsed. In 2021, it dropped to 4,512. It stayed low through 2022 and 2023, hovering around 4,500 to 4,700. Then, in a single year, it rocketed to 8,367. That's a 77% jump from 2023 to 2024.

This isn't about more traffic offences being committed. It's about more people being held in custody while they wait for their day in court.

Remand means you haven't been convicted yet. You're in a cell because a judge decided you're either a flight risk, a danger to the public, or likely to reoffend before trial. For traffic offences, that typically means repeat drink drivers, disqualified drivers who keep getting behind the wheel, or people caught driving dangerously after serious crashes.

So what changed between 2023 and 2024? The data doesn't tell us. But the scale of the shift suggests this isn't just random variation. Either enforcement priorities changed, bail conditions tightened, or the courts started taking a harder line on who gets released while awaiting trial.

The policy conversation around bail and remand has mostly focused on violent crime. Gang tensions. Youth offending. Retail theft. Nobody's been talking about traffic offences. Yet nearly 8,400 people are now being held before trial for breaking road rules, which costs the system roughly $338 per person per day. That's $2.8 million a day, or over $1 billion a year, just for this category of remand prisoner.

This matters because remand isn't punishment. It's preventative detention. You're locked up not because you've been found guilty, but because the system has decided it can't risk letting you out. For traffic offences, that's a serious call. It means judges are looking at driving behaviour and concluding: this person is too dangerous to be on the road, even for the weeks or months it takes to get to trial.

The 2021 to 2023 period now looks like an anomaly. The post-COVID years saw remand numbers drop across multiple categories as courts cleared backlogs and prioritised keeping people out of overcrowded cells. But 2024 snapped back hard. We're not just returning to pre-pandemic norms. We've blown past them.

The question nobody's asking: what's happening on our roads that's putting this many people in remand cells? And is locking them up before trial actually making those roads any safer?