O‘ahu’s record high traffic fatality rate this year poses a challenge for a plan to eliminate traffic by 2040.
In January, the Honolulu City Council adopted an “O‘ahu Vision Zero Action Plan,” a proposal to enact various infrastructure upgrades, public education initiatives and more to reduce traffic crashes that cause severe injury or death to near-zero over the next 15 years.
Over the 11 months following the adoption of the plan — but before any of its proposed improvements could be implemented to any meaningful degree — traffic fatalities have soared. As of Nov. 17, there have been 74 traffic fatalities, outstripping the 54 total road deaths throughout the entirety of 2024.
Representatives of the Department of Transportation Services and Honolulu Police Department discussed on Wednesday the high number of fatalities and how the Vision Zero plan could prevent them.
Of those crashes, 22 of them — 30% — have involved pedestrians, despite pedestrians making up only 6% of all commuters on the island, said Germain Salim-Hagihara, planner with Honolulu’s interdepartmental Complete Streets Program. Of those pedestrian fatalities, 17 were people aged 65 or older, and three were children, she said.
“And for every fatality we have about five serious injuries … that is, injuries that change people’s lives,” Salim-Hagihara said.
Salim-Hagihara said speed, inattention and impairment are the leading causes of crashes, but the discussion on Wednesday particularly focused on the first factor.
HPD Interim Chief Rade Vanic said his department is on track this year to exceed the number of speeding citations issued in 2024 — nearly 22,000 have been issued so far, while 25,186 were issued last year — while speeding arrests have already dwarfed those from last year. Between January and October 2024, HPD made 213 speeding arrests; between those same months this year, there were 565 arrests.
Vanic suggested that the frequency of excessive speeding is simply a fact of modern society.
“There’s been a bunch of societal changes,” Vanic said. “I think the speed at which everyone moves and the speed at which people expect things to occur is a lot quicker and that’s reflective in even the way people drive … I mean, it’s hard not to notice, it just seems like people just drive faster now.”
DTS Director Roger Morton said the city is preparing for future societal changes as well. Over the next five years, he said, DTS will replace every traffic light on the island — upward of 900 — with adaptive systems that communicate with autonomous vehicles as a “future-proofing” project.
Salim-Hagihara added that smaller, less cutting-edge infrastructure changes can lead to measurable improvements in traffic safety. For example, she said, DTS conducted a study of raised crosswalks, which combine road crossings with speed humps, in Kalihi and Wai‘anae.
Since those crosswalks were installed, crashes causing serious injury or involving pedestrians were reduced to zero for all locations in the study, Salim-Hagihara said.
Similarly, Salim-Hagihara said the department has rolled out flashing beacons at various pedestrian intersections with a high rate of injurious crashes. At one location, the intersection of School Street and Ahonui Street in Kalihi, the rate of drivers yielding to pedestrians increased from 60% to 87%.
DTS will also roll out crosswalk and intersection improvements across 50 high-injury locations over the next year via a $3.5 million federal grant. While the improvements will include flashing beacons, extended curbs, raised crosswalks and more, the locations for those projects have not yet been determined.
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