Nearly 13,000 complaints about dangerous driving were made to the police over the Christmas-New Year holiday period, Radio New Zealand reports.
The figure was 22 percent higher than the number of calls made during the last Christmas-New Year holiday.
People can call *555 from their cellphones free of charge to report unsafe driving or road conditions and police say they received 12,706 calls between Christmas Eve and 4 January.
Waikato road policing manager Inspector Freda Grace, whose area includes the many holiday hotspots on the Coromandel Peninsula and the popular surfing town of Raglan, said most of the complaints were about drivers crossing the centre line, passing dangerously and speeding.
She said the *555 service was a valuable road policing tool and the high number of calls showed many New Zealanders would not tolerate unsafe driving.
The majority of *555 calls are responded to and the responses are in priority order so, for example, a driver passing dangerously is treated with greater urgency than the driver of a campervan who is not pulling over to allow faster traffic to pass.
