Top 100 speeders get 3,365 tickets each annually

By Lee Tae-hoon

The top 100 speeding violators last year received a total of 336,492 tickets or roughly 3,365 tickets per person, according to data submitted by the National Police Agency (KNPA) to Rep. Kim Choong-joh of the main opposition Democratic Party (DP).

On average, each of the frequent traffic violators had unpaid speeding tickets worth 187 million won ($167,740) at the end of 2009, Kim said Friday.

“It is absolutely disappointing to see traffic violators neglecting the basic duties of a citizen by habitually and intentionally breaking the law,” he said. “The police must come up with a tougher measure to tackle the problem.”

Fifteen of the lawless drivers live in Seoul, followed by Gyeonggi Province with 13, Daegu with 13, Daejeon with 11 and Busan with 10.

Kim noted that over 100,000 drivers have unpaid speeding fines totaling more than 1 million won.

The lawmaker, however, complained to The Korea Times that the KNPA repeatedly refused to disclose who the worst violator of the year was and how many tickets he or she received in a year.

Woo Shin-ho, an official in charge of traffic violation statistics at the KNPA, has also been reluctant to confirm Kim’s data, as well as disputed statistics about foreign envoys’ abuse of their rights to dodge traffic fines.

Based on the KNPA’s data, several media outlets reported that the Russian embassy here is the worst foreign diplomatic mission with none of the fines of 18.6 million won between 2004 and Aug. 2010 paid, followed by the Chinese, Mongolian, Indonesian and Kazakhstan embassies.

However, following a protest from the Indonesian embassy, Woo acknowledged to The Korea Times that the numbers concerning the China and Indonesian missions were lower than the media reported, but he has been refusing to provide further information.

Woo also admitted that the data for the Mongolian and Kazakhstan missions was not correct, but has declined to give accurate rankings.