HONOLULU(KHON2) — The Hawaii Department of Transportation is moving full speed ahead with its red light safety camera pilot project in an effort to save lives.
If all goes well, Ed Sniffen, the HDOT Deputy Director for Highways, said the two-year pilot project will start citing violators by June.
“The goal is safety bottom line,” said Sniffen. “We want to make sure that we stop one of the behaviors that are killing people in our system.”
According to DOT, there were more than 1,879 crashes caused by running red-lights and other violations between 2015 and 2020.
Sniffen said they are currently deciding which 10 locations to install the cameras from a list of 14.
“After we finish up our studies in March, we’ll start up our installation phase for two months,” Sniffen said. ” We’re looking at starting up, or setting up, the system to send out warnings by May.”
The warning period will last 30 days, with citations to follow.
“We are no longer ticketing the driver, we are ticketing the owner of the vehicle,” Sniffen explained. “So when we take pictures when a car runs the red light, we’re taking pictures of the vehicle and the license plate to ensure that we can send a citation to the owner of the vehicle, not the driver “
Violators will be hit with a $200 ticket for their first offense, $300 for the second and $500 for the third.
Sniffen said that money will be used to fund the project, and HPD will be the one viewing the cameras to determine if the law was broken.
The legislature set aside $2.8 million to run the project for the next two years. Redflex Traffic Safety Systems was awarded the contract.
Senator Karl Rhoads said although not everyone is on board with the project, he’s supporting it because it will save lives.
“It’s not the most popular thing that the legislature’s ever done,” Rhoads said. “But there’s lots of data on the fact that it that red light cameras do work, especially cameras like this, where they’re set in, they’re not moving around all over the place. Like, we had a couple of 20 years ago. Each intersection that they will eventually put them in will have signs that say this is a red light camera enforcement of intersection.”
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Sniffen said if the pilot project is successful, it could become permanent and more cameras could be installed in other areas where running red lights are an issue.