Nearly 1,200 motorists were fined for speeding through new school zones outside Marryatville High School and Goodwood Primary School in Adelaide over 11 weeks, with South Australian Police recording an average of about 24 penalties a day. The fines were issued by fixed cameras on Kensington Road and Goodwood Road as the first full test of the lower 40km/h limits on busy main roads.
The camera data showed 992 drivers were fined on Kensington Road near Marryatville and another 202 on Goodwood Road, generating $694,037 in penalties. Today matters because South Australian public schools resume from holidays, putting the time-based limits back into daily use from 8am to 9.30am and from 2pm to 4pm on school days.
The new 40km/h limits are part of a broader rollout that was announced in September 2025 by then-Education Minister Blair Boyer and is partly funded through the $168 million National Road Safety Program in partnership with the federal government. Around 60 schools have already introduced the lower limits, more than 160 schools across South Australia are set to eventually do so, and about another 100 school-zone speed limits are expected to be installed by the end of the year.
South Australia mainly used 25km/h zones on local streets before the change, but the new main-road limits do not replace those existing zones. Charles Mountain said drivers need to slow to 40km/h before the crossing and not speed up again until they pass a 50km/h or 60km/h sign on the departure side. He also warned that motorists ignoring the new drop-off and pick-up limits may be putting children and other road users at risk, and said children are among the most vulnerable road users.
The enforcement numbers suggest the problem is not confusion alone. Fixed cameras at two Adelaide sites caught hundreds of drivers each before the school year had even restarted, and the scale of the fines shows the new regime is already biting. The question now is not whether the limits will spread, but whether enough drivers will adjust before the rest of the rollout reaches them.
