Oahu crosswalks still dangerous with 26 deaths this year, so far

If the alarming number of pedestrian deaths on Oahu this year has made people more wary when crossing the street, you wouldn’t know it by observing busy traffic spots in Honolulu.

Twenty-six pedestrians have been killed so far this year, with two months to go. But jaywalking, ignoring traffic signals and other risky behaviors are still rampant, despite laws aimed at getting pedestrians to reduce their chances of a potentially deadly encounter with motorists.

One of those laws was a Honolulu ordinance passed in July 2017 — the first of its kind in a major U.S. city — prohibiting walkers from looking at mobile electronic devices while crossing the street. In the year since enforcement began in October 2017, Honolulu police have cited 147 violators.

Fines for first-time offenders range from $15 to $35.

(By comparison, 9,616 citations were issued to drivers caught using mobile devices last year, another hazard to those on foot.)

Pedestrians also continue to put their lives in jeopardy by jaywalking, crossing the street midblock between intersections instead of using a crosswalk. As of Oct. 25 of this year, Honolulu police had issued 4,457 citations for jaywalking, compared to 4,537 for all of 2017, according to the HPD Traffic Division.

The three top jaywalking hotspots are Pearl City, Kalihi and Honolulu’s urban core, including the downtown, Makiki, Ala Moana and Moiliili areas. Together, they account for more than half of all jaywalking citations issued by patrol officers this year.

All told, police issued 9,671 citations for pedestrian-related violations in 2018 — 376 of those to motorists — for offenses that also include walking in bike lanes or roadways, disobeying pedestrian signals and darting into the path of a vehicle.

Pedestrian fatalities are the sixth-leading cause of injury-related deaths in Hawaii, and the second-leading cause for children age 14 and younger, behind drownings, according to the Hawaii Department of Health.

The casualty toll goes far beyond those killed. DOH statistics show Emergency Medical Services responded to an average of 529 pedestrian incidents annually on Oahu over the past five years, with this year’s total projected to exceed that number.

A separate DOH tally shows an average of 342 pedestrians treated at Oahu hospitals for injuries during that same period.

The Health Department’s EMS & Injury Prevention System Branch tracks traffic incidents of all types and plots their locations on a map, sharing the data with the state Department of Transportation, public safety agencies, planners, engineers and nonprofit agencies such as AARP that help promote pedestrian safety, said trauma system public health educator Kari Benes.

“We want to see people make it safely from point A to point B without ending up in the hospital or worse,” she said.

NO CLEAR CAUSE

Despite the increased focus on distracted pedestrians, public health and safety officials say there is no clear culprit to blame for the spike in fatalities on Oahu this year, which is double 2017’s 13 pedestrian deaths.

As with traffic fatalities in general, officials say the numbers can vary greatly from year to year, and some years are just worse than others.

This is one of those bad years.

“It’s a lot of things,” said HPD Traffic Division Capt. Ben Moszkowicz. “It’s hard to nail it down to one particular thing.”

Four of the 26 pedestrian fatalities involved people walking on the freeway at odd hours of the night, four were kneeling or laying in a roadway, two were killed by a suspected drunken driver while changing a tire, four were in the driver’s so-called blind spot when they were hit, six were in a crosswalk and eight weren’t.

Moszkowicz said it appears none of the deaths involved pedestrians distracted by mobile devices, although it’s often hard to prove both in the case of device-distracted motorists and pedestrians. One only need look around, however, to know the distractions are real, he said.

The city ordinance passed last year doesn’t prohibit pedestrians from listening to music or having a phone conversation while crossing the street, as long as they aren’t looking at their device. However, a growing body of research has documented the effects of these kinds of distractions on pedestrians navigating traffic crossings.

Using video and eye-tracking technology, researchers from Hefei University of Technology in China and the Highway Safety Research Center at the University of North Carolina found texting had the greatest effect on pedestrian behavior compared to listening to music or having a phone conversation.

Their study, published in the June issue of Accident Analysis & Prevention, reported that pedestrians distracted by music initiated their crossing later, didn’t look around as much and had fewer visual fixation points and times. Pedestrians engaged in phone conversations walked more slowly and were even less alert to their surroundings.

Those who were texting did all that plus scanned left and right less often and paid less visual attention to the traffic environment, according to the study.

RAISING AWARENESS

After a rash of pedestrian deaths last month, HPD began enforcement pushes around the island in which plainclothes officers posing as pedestrians entered crosswalks in a manner calculated to give motorists sufficient time to stop.

On Oct. 31 alone, 33 tickets were issued to vehicle operators on South King, Bishop and Merchant streets for failing to yield to pedestrians, Moszkowicz said.

The crackdowns are as much about drawing attention to pedestrian safety as catching scofflaws, he said.

“If we’re out there all over the place, maybe someone you know may have gotten cited, and everybody who’s going by is watching, so it’s a public awareness tool,” Moszkowicz said.

“But we can’t cite our way out of (rising pedestrian fatalities); there’s not enough of us to do that. We have to change attitudes and perceptions.

“It goes back to what I tell my kids: You have to look left, right and left again and keep on looking all the way across,” he said. “Motorists also have to be on the lookout. You have to make eye contact and take a couple extra seconds.

“There’s nothing any one of us can do (to reduce pedestrian fatalities). We literally have to look out for each other.”

Pedestrian deaths on Oahu by Honolulu Star-Advertiser on Scribd

Danger Signs: Pedestrians & Motorists by Honolulu Star-Advertiser on Scribd