Honolulu drivers may share the road with other users under a City Council bill that would implement “shared street” measures.
The bill, to be discussed at Wednesday’s meeting of the Honolulu City Council, would call upon the Department of Transportation Services to develop “shared street” plans: sections of street where priority is given to pedestrians and other “non-motorized users.”
Those plans would implement “traffic calming measures,” physical design strategies intended to “reduce the negative effects of motor vehicle use and improve the safety of non-motorized users,” limiting speed limits within Shared Street areas to no more than 5 miles per hour.
The bill does not set specifics for where these plans would be implemented, but suggests potential features such as “curb-free design,” green infrastructure and other amenities.
Downtown Honolulu Councilman Tyler Dos Santos-Tam, who will introduce the bill Wednesday, told Aloha State Daily that there are already Shared Streets throughout Honolulu in all but name.
“For example, if you think about that stretch of Merchant Street by the Downtown Post Office, that’s kind of already being used as a Shared Street,” Santos-Tam said, before pointing to Duke’s Lane in Waikīkī as another example.
These roads, he said, are heavily pedestrianized, with Duke’s Lane in particular already including several of the suggested traffic calming measures, such as minimal curbs and bollards to slow traffic.
“This doesn’t mean Kapi‘olani [Boulevard] will be pedestrianized,” Santos-Tam said. “But there are already places where we are already doing this.”
The whole concept, Santos-Tam said, is a response to this year’s higher-than-normal rate of fatal car crashes — the Honolulu Police Department reports there have been 71 fatal crashes on the island this year to-date, compared to only 38 in the same period of 2024. He said a commonality across these crashes has been drivers moving too fast to stop for pedestrians and cyclists.
The bill is also a follow-up to a resolution passed by the state House of Representatives earlier this year which called for the City and County to develop a “Summer Streets Pilot Program," a hypothetical program that would similarly open up certain streets to pedestrians and the like during summer months.
That resolution was adopted in April to broad support, although it hasn’t yet led to an actual program — as House resolutions are non-binding, Santos-Tam said his bill was needed to formalize a program into City ordinances.
“And I thought, let’s talk about doing it year-round,” he said.
Santos-Tam said ideal Shared Streets could be comparable to places like urban Japan, where he said streets are not based solely around motor vehicle throughput.
“Bikes and cars can happily coexist,” he said. “But it doesn’t happen by accident. There are intentional design choices we can do … People have realized that public spaces have value beyond just being places for cars to drive.”
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