HONOLULU (KHON2) — It’s full speed ahead for the speed camera program now in the second week of its warning period. Transportation officials said the numbers are staggering.
“If we are looking at speed over seven miles per hour, we’re looking at about 80,000 warnings per month,” State Department of Transportation Director Ed Sniffen said.
That’s 20,000 warnings a week spread across the 10 camera locations in Honolulu.
“I was expecting to see more speeders on routes like Likelike, but when we’re looking at the numbers we saw just as many on the other routes,” Sniffen explained. “The highest speeds we saw were on Ward (Ave) going 88 mph through a 35 mph zone.”
The speed program, still in its infancy, piggybacks on the red light safety camera program that successfully decreased accidents at those intersections by almost 70% since 2022.
The goal was to continue to make roads safer by reducing speeding.
According to Sniffen, once the speed cameras can see your vehicle, at any point on the road, and you are going more than five mph over the posted speed limit, you could be cited.
“In general, the public should understand, 5 mph over the speed limit is where the bill allows us to ticket from and officers will use discretion from there.”
“Are you seeing road blocks, hiccups and challenges?” KHON asked.
“The volumes are the challenge,” Sniffen replied.
And he said they still don’t have enough manpower to issue citations.
“We have 1,500 red light tickets per month and we need two officers to take care of those,” Sniffen explained.
“If we reduce from 80,000 to 40,000, that’s still 20 times the resourcing that we’ll need to address these tickets.”
Sniffen said they don’t want to overwhelm the judicial system either, so they are working on hiring people to ensure everything runs smoothly.
That will extend the warning period beyond 30 days–possibly until summer.
“I’m hopeful that people who are driving right now just don’t understand that they are going 15, 20 mph over the speed limit, and once we start getting these warnings out to them, they’ll understand their behavior and hopefully will be able to change it,” he said.
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According to DOT, the warning or citation will be mailed out to the vehicle owner within 10 days of the violation date.
For more information about the speed camera program click here.