First red-light camera under construction at Vineyard and Palama

Honolulu’s first red-light camera is going up at the intersection of Vineyard Boulevard and Palama Street, with the monitoring system issuing its first warnings in two weeks when it catches cars that run through traffic lights.

A second camera is scheduled to go up in October at the intersection of Vineyard Boulevard and Liliha Street, the state Department of Transportation said Tuesday.

The announcement of the first two of 10 locations to get the cameras came after repeated delays to the launch of the monitoring system — most recently due to vandalism, the Honolulu Star-Advertiser previously reported.

The remaining eight sites will be identified along with the engineering study the DOT plans to release later this month. Installation of the next four cameras is scheduled to begin in November, and the last four in December.

After each camera is operational, a 30-day period will follow in which drivers who run red lights will receive a warning. Once the warning period concludes, citations will be issued to the registered owner of a vehicle that runs a red light.

Fourteen intersections have been the subject of an engineering study to determine how many vehicles run red lights on average, including Vineyard Boulevard and Liliha Street, where officials from the DOT, city and Honolulu Police Department gathered Tuesday for a news conference.

According to DOT Deputy Director for Highways Ed Sniffen, the yet-to-be-­released study found that about 10 cars per day ran red lights at the Vineyard-­Palama intersection. The intersection had just one red-light-running-related crash from 2016 to 2020, according to data in the news release Sniffen handed out. Eleven other crashes occurred there that were not related to red-light running, the data shows.

The intersection of Vineyard Boulevard and Liliha Street, the site of the second red-light camera, saw five red-light-running-related crashes over the same period, Sniffen said his data shows. That location saw 15 other crashes unrelated to red-light running, the data shows.

The launch of the red-light camera system was delayed after a vandal damaged the engineering study equipment at the intersection of School and Kalihi streets in May, rendering the data irretrievable and prompting another round of data collection.

Asked whether he was worried about further vandalism, Sniffen replied, “We’re always worried about vandalism, on any system that we put up.” He said police will be in place to help prevent future damage. “But we also have the cameras. It’s a camera system,” he said.

The cameras, however, are designed to photograph license plates, not people, HPD Major Ben Moszkowicz, head of HPD’s traffic division, said at the news conference.

Honolulu last traffic enforcement cameras, the so-called “van cams” to catch speeders, were installed in 2002 and didn’t last the year. Then-Gov. Ben Cayetano shut down the program four months and $8 million later.

“The public perceived that the program was operated more to maximize revenue for the vendor running the program than to improve traffic safety,” the act creating the new red-light camera system said, referring to the 2002 system.

This time, officials say, revenue from the citations will go to a DOT fund to manage the system, and none of it will go directly to the vendor.