- Hawaii put up speed cameras in Honolulu, and it’s created a new problem.
- The system is actually catching far too many speeders for the courts to handle.
- The government is going to keep handing out warnings only for now as a result.
Speeding is a top contributor to accidents every year, which is why it’s such a favorite target for authorities nationwide. But as Honolulu ramps up its efforts to curb speed-related incidents, it’s now facing a problem of its own making.
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Read: Cops Bust Rider Who Allegedly Hit 190 MPH And Posted It Online
The new speed cameras, which have been in use since March 1, are catching an average of 30,000 speeders every week. To put that into perspective, that’s more than the total number of tickets the city issued across the entire island in 2024.
“We’re right now targeting or sending out warnings for those that are going 11 miles per hour over the speed limit. So, if we had targeted seven or five miles per hour over you can almost double that,” said Ed Sniffen, director of the state Department of Transportation. The government has been piloting this new speed camera program since March 1. Speeders currently only get a warning in the mail.
A Potential Overload for Local Courts
The volume is creating concerns, though. Initially, the program was supposed to go live with real speeding tickets beginning on May 1. If that happens, it could overwhelm the local court system. “That being said, we’re probably going to extend this warning period out to October,” Sniffen explained. “This will give the public a little bit more time to adjust, but also to give us the time to work with our judiciary and our prosecutors to ensure that we have capacity in our programs to push these types of numbers through if necessary.”
Naturally, not everyone is thrilled with the new system. If so many drivers are already speeding, it raises a valid question: Are the current speed limits actually reasonable? If the state goes ahead with the program, anyone caught speeding just five miles per hour over the limit will face a $250 fine for a first-time offense.
“That’s a little bit too steep because everybody does that”, local driver Cathy Ehia told KHon2. “Im sure even the law enforcement people do it. I’m pretty sure they do, you know. I understand it because we have a lot of death, fatalities, and everything, but that’s a little too steep.”
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The Department of Transportation points out that speed was a factor in about half of last year’s fatal accidents on state highways. That said, it’s odd to bring out such a fact when none of the speed cameras are actually on highways. Instead, they’re at everyday intersections. Ehia isn’t the only local upset with the cameras and the new system either. On Reddit, others are speaking out.
Local Frustration Grows
“I drive through there 5x a week, and I go 27-30, and people are clearly pissed zipping around me. 25 is too low for those two lights, clearly. It’s frustrating because I absolutely do not want a ticket, but being the one person going the speed limit makes me feel like an accident waiting to happen,” said one user.
Others called out HDOT and accused it of cherry picking statistics and sourced data that appears to indicate that less than one percent of the fatalities over the last ten years have happened at the intersections where the cameras are.
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At least one person had an interesting idea to solve the problem. “The solution we had in Colorado nearly 30 years ago was everyone in town agreed to not pay. They removed the cameras two weeks later,” they said. We’ll keep abreast of the situation when the program goes live or maybe gets pushed back again in October.
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