 Welcome to Moving Hawaii Forward, I'm your host, Tim Apachella. Since October 2016, when this show first aired, we focused on issues that we hoped were important to you, transportation and traffic issues, and at times identified solutions. We have covered topics ranging from the bus to the future of bus services. The pro and cons of Honolulu Rail project, admittedly more focused on the con than the pro. Banffful services, carpool strategies, and carpool lanes. We looked at employer transportation benefit programs, biking in Honolulu and Biki and Waikiki, and the fair structure complaints in between. We looked at ferry proposals from Sand Island to the naval shipyard, scenic air gondolas to U of H, hydrogen fuel cells in our cars, and even the topic of road rage and how to avoid it. Thirty-one shows in all, dedicated to trying to lay out Honolulu's traffic puzzle, one piece at a time. One topic we seem to skip over, but not intentionally, is pedestrian safety. Unfortunately, we seem to hear about pedestrian issues only when the news reports about pedestrian fatalities. We rarely hear about the positive work going on behind the scenes by dedicated transit employees attempting to make our streets and crosswalks safer for our children, our seniors, and for you and me. With me today are our guests, Mark Kikuchi, Division Chief, and Dana Tere-Moto, Traffic Education Specialist for the Honolulu Department of Transportation Services, to discuss their outreach and their education to the public, and efforts to keep us safe from increasing traffic and the distracted driver. Mark, Dana, thank you so much for joining us. I appreciate your time. We've taken away from important work to come here to our studios. So how long have you been working in education about pedestrian safety, Dana? Well, for myself, Tim, I've been working for DTS about ten years. So we try to educate the seniors. I have senior pedestrian safety presentations. I also have, like, ped-man, pedestrian-man presentations for the elementary school-age children. Okay, Mark, how long have you been working with DTS? Glad to be here, Tim, but I've been with the department about 27 years, most of it as a traffic engineer. Do you see things change over the last 27 years? Oh, yeah, definitely. Quite a bit? Yeah, quite a bit, especially in the area of traffic calming. As you know, speeding is one of our main problems on our roads, and traffic calming has come from its infancy to where it is now, where people actually request traffic calming devices, like roundabouts. So when we first started, everybody was against it, so it's kind of a new thing. But now it seems to be kind of mainstream. Traffic calming also increases or helps pedestrian usage in a right away? Yes. Okay, well, let's talk about what you guys actually do, you know, day in and day out, and that is educate and outreach. So Dana, without further ado, tell me, kind of describe your day and how you do it. Okay, Tim. Usually busy, a lot of emails, as you know, right, we always get emails. Like for instance... Especially when you work in government. I'm sorry, but... No, no, no. That's fine. Yeah, so like today, for instance, I got an email from one of our, I guess, partners. So they're going to have kids' fest, that's going to be in October, 29th. So that's a really big fair at the Bishop Museum. So that's one big thing that's coming up. And then also, I want to mention that, you know, besides my pedestrian safety education, we also do safe routes to school, so you know, we try to encourage people to bike or walk to school. Okay. Yeah, and then, you know, if people want to apply, you know, for, you know, we have $3,500, you know, applications that we can, you know, we give out money if they want to do educational outreach for their school. For communities? Or certain organizations? We prefer to be like, at least the school sponsors, you know, but maybe a champion from maybe the PTSA. Right, generally, the way the rules work is the staff members of the school probably don't have enough time, so what happens is a parent or anybody could actually champion a project. I would say for, if they see a need for concrete sidewalks to the school so that the kids can walk, you know, safely versus dirt and rocks and things, but they would need to do a number of things to kind of get that grant money, and that's why generally the principal and the teachers don't have the time to do it. Right, they have nothing going on. They have nothing going on. So because the surveys need to be done to, I guess, see how many students are actually walking to school, if it will be a benefit for concrete sidewalks to be placed. Now, if, for example, the survey finds that not too many students walk to school, and a lot of schools, you know, today are in a geographical exception where the students don't live in the district, so the parents drop them off on the way to work. So they don't have a chance to walk. So it has to be some kind of a benefit before we actually proceed with the grant. And survey is one way of doing it. And the parents would actually survey to see if, let's say, if they'll pose the survey in such a way that if concrete sidewalks were put in, would you allow your kids to walk to school? Well, that's going to my next question. Right. What percentage do you think of children that walk to school versus their parents dropping them off? And, you know, I know that's a tough statistic to come up with at the top of your head. But what would you guess? In one school, in Pro City, there was 50% were driving, and a small percentage were biking, and the rest were walking. So I would say, in that case, and it varies from school to school, I would say about 30, maybe 30 percent. Okay. So that's a lot of kids on the street. And when you say safe routes, earlier you mentioned the term safe routes, is that to pre-identify a safe route to the school from home, or did I get that wrong as far as a misnomer? Yeah, that's from home. Yeah. Okay. Back and forth from home. Yeah. All right. Well, through all these years of education, and it's hard to measure these things, I know that. Education and your outreach to communities, schools, children, adults, you do outreach to adults, I would imagine. Seniors too, by the way. You would go to senior? Yeah. So I go to like, you know, like a lot of the parks and rec, they have senior groups. Right. So I go to there. I give them like a 30 minute PowerPoint presentation. Like, you know, like stuff like the jaywalking fine, what they should be wearing so they're more visible, you know, when they're going out in about daytime or even nighttime walking, you know, they should wear reflective clothing at night. Excuse me. Yeah. So with all these different groups, how do you measure the impact of your outreach? That's pretty tough to deal with, imagine, but is there any kind of indicators that you guys follow or track to see if you're on the mark, off the mark? Hmm. Well, I know for instance, this year, there was only one pedestrian fatality. Okay. So unfortunately, you're saying maybe fatalities is your bra. A metric. Yeah. A metric of sorts. Yeah. So it's hard to figure out how effective we are. It is. And one way we do it. Maybe it's an unfair question for me to ask. Sorry. No, not really. I think one way to do it is look at our fatality of fatal statistics. Right. And as she mentioned, this year, we're like at one. And previously, you have the stats for that? Yeah. So I think the other year, there was like 20 fatalities. At this point in time. Right, right. No, 15. No, 15. Looking at some of those numbers, and unfortunately, it looks like seniors is the highest group of pedestrians that unfortunately are being affected adversely by, you know, cars and things. Yeah. We still have a lot to do. I mean, but the numbers still look good for the front half of this year. And traditionally, if we looked at previous years, the most of it, for example, if 20 pedestrian accidents happened or crash fatals, I'm sorry, fatals happened in a given year, three quarters of the fatalities happened in the first six months, and for some reason. And we find that to be, I don't know, we don't know why. The first six months? Yeah. We don't know why. You don't know why? I think it's consistent all the way through. I was wondering if there was a certain time of the year where you see an increase in pedestrian incidents or not? Yeah, just fatalities. Yeah. But we do notice that like from 6 a.m., like 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. is when a lot of them are getting, you know, hit, so it's more than 50 percent usually. So here's the tough question. And you know, I know there's some bills out there, you know, not only here in Pinellulu, but also in Seattle area, Washington state, that are trying to address distracted drivers, but in this case also distracted pedestrians. You had mentioned the crosswalk law. Could you describe that for our audience? Because I'm not sure a lot of folks know exactly what the penalty is if you jaywalk and things of that nature. Oh, okay. So what I usually tell the seniors is that even when it's counting down, you're not supposed to cross. That's also like a jaywalk. You can step out the curve onto the crosswalk. Yeah. And then when it's green and then it starts to count down, then you can finish crossing. But other than that, it'll be a jaywalking fine, so that'll be $130 fine. $130? Yes. Okay. All right, everyone. Did you hear that? $130? Because that's a lot of money to step off at the wrong time. Now there is some, I'm sure you've heard some criticism that the time allotted from the time, you know, it says it's okay to walk to with the flashing orange hand. There's not a lot of time sometimes for that. Well, I do know that when I talk to one of the engineers, they go by the manual of uniform traffic and show devices, so I guess it's in that mandate, and how many, yeah. Yeah, what it was, previously on the old standard, it was about 3.5 feet per second was what the average person would walk. So based upon, I guess, changing trends or maybe more elderly in our population, we went to three feet. We brought it down. We brought it down. So to allow more time for the pedestrians to cross. Just like to add that a lot of people are under the misconception that you can't cross on the flashing, flashing in the pit, flashing light. But once you're started, you can finish to continue to cross, yeah. And we have those countdown things, too, and that's just stepping off the curb to the street. Yes. Right. White walking symbol is up. You can start to cross. Right. But once you're in the crosswalk, you can continue until you finish, even though the flashing signal is on. Okay. Well, since we're on the topic of pedestrian crossing the street, and one of the main hazards do you, have you identified and tried to address for pedestrians? You mentioned sometimes early in the morning and wearing bright clothing, but are there other kind of hazards that are out there that are obvious or perhaps not obvious? Well, like for instance, I mean, I'm sure we've been guilty of it, holding the cell phone, right? You know, looking, texting, right, being on the cell phone, because I see people at the light waiting for it to change, but they're texting. Right. When the light changes to the crossing, they're still looking at there. They're still looking. Yes, I've seen that many times. And then when they finally realize it's, you know, it's time for the cross, it's now flashing. Yeah, it's flashing already. I just find that so... Oh, interesting. Okay. Yeah. Well, now that Bill 6 has been passed and it won't take effect, I think, until October the 26th, they'll have that to contend with for not looking at it at all. Have you heard any comments from your department about Bill 6? Well, Bill 6? Well, but I just have a comment about hazards that maybe pedestrians face. I think to truly get our numbers down, and our goal is probably zero fatalities for the year. We try to encourage pedestrians to be visible because on a lot of the traffic accident reports when the car impacts the pedestrian, the reason was I didn't see them. I didn't see them now. And we've noticed that, like she said, it's from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. So generally, that's the dawn. So if pedestrians could realize that and wear bright clothes, you know, when we went to school, we were always told to wear bright clothing, walk on the side facing traffic to make yourself visible to the motorist. And I think that will go a long way in helping bring our numbers down. I mean, we're happy with our numbers now, but I think we have a ways to go yet. I have noticed, and I've only been in Honolulu for 10 years, but I have noticed that a lot of pedestrians and bicyclists, unfortunately, either they don't have any lights on the bikes. Yes. They don't wear dark clothing rather than anything that's reflective. But I've also noticed that pedestrians do the kind of the same thing. They work to wearing darker clothing, and I'm not just sure why that is. Another thing we've noticed that pedestrians do, that they sometimes think that the crosswalk is some kind of an invisible wall, and you've seen it, they just will step out into the road. And in her senior classes, she tries to emphasize to them to try to be aware and look at, before you cross, you know, yes, you have the signal, yes, you have the crosswalk, but to be aware of the cars, you know, and because cars are a little big. I've seen a great amount of trust from pedestrians when they venture across, and they are completely oblivious to the possibility of a distracted driver. So it is amazing that pedestrians seem to have a great, I don't know if it's trust or courage or both, but it's, or there's another adjective I don't want to use. And we won't use that, but there is another adjective that could be used. I see you have some paraphernalia, but I think what we're going to do is we're going to take a short break. Okay. And then when we come back from the break, I'd love to see what you brought with us. Sure. Okay. This is Tim Apachella, and we're talking about pedestrian safety and moving Hawaii for it. We'll be right back. This is Think Tech Hawaii, raising public awareness. I'm going to the game, and it's going to be great early arriving for a little tailgate. I usually drink, but won't be drinking today because I'm the designated driver, and that's okay. It's nice to be the guy that keeps his friends in line, keeps them from drinking too much so we can have a great time. A little responsibility can go a long way because it's all about having fun on game day. I'm the guy you want to be, I'm the guy saving money, I'm the guy with the H2O, and I'm the guy that says, let's go. Ted Rawlsson here, folks. You're a host on Where the Drone Leads, our weekly show at noon on Thursdays here on Think Tech. We talk about drones, anything to do about drones, drones, remotely piloted aircraft, unmanned aircraft, whatever you want to call them, emerging into Hawaii's economy, educational framework, and our public life. We talk about things associated with the use, the misuse, technology, engineering, legislation with the local experts as well as people from across the country. Please join us noon on Thursdays and catch the latest on what's taking place in the world of drones that might affect you. Hi, welcome back to Moving Hawaii Forward. This afternoon, we're talking about pedestrian safety. And before the commercial break, we were just talking about pedestrians going through the crosswalk with an unbelievable amount of trust and confidence, and not necessarily looking at the cars that would be coming into the intersection, or maybe they're supposed to stay out of the intersection, but they're coming through. And we talk about some of the things that you do your outreach with. Oh, yeah, so it's great. So when I do the senior pedestrian safety presentations, I give all seniors a bag along with this blinker. So the blinker is really good. I tell them that they should wear this at night, or even like when you go shopping in the parking lot, and when cars are reversing. Do they wear on the sides, front, back? Where would they put it? Clip it on the front or on the bag. But if they're going to walk at night, I would suggest putting it on the back. Like for example, I go jogging. Sometimes it's dark when I go, so I have a visor I put on the back of my visor so that cars turning behind me can see me. So this is good. And then we give these to the kids. These are reflective stickers when we go to our fairs. And then when we also get invited to the Hawaii Pet Expo, so these are actually reflective colors, like leashes. Oh, for your risk. No, for your dog. You know, for the leash? Yeah, I mean, for the leash, you put the leash right here. And so it reflects, so it's very visible. So as you know, we forget our furry friends, right? Right. They have to be safe. So Mark, during the commercial break, you had mentioned as kids, you were taught when you cross, look out for cars. Look both ways. Both ways, right? What's going on? That doesn't seem to be happening anymore. I don't know. Maybe with the advent of all these distractions, cell phones and stuff, it's just the way that people are living now. And there's also more cars. Roads are getting wider. I mean, not wider, but there's more traffic on the roads. Well, nationally, the statistics for biking accidents and pedestrian accidents, which also includes fatalities, is a direct correlation to those drivers that are using the cell phone. I mean, I think the statistics are pretty straightforward on that. Our island, our city, has a pretty severe cell phone law. I don't remember what the dollar amount is if you're caught on your cell phone while you're driving. But it's fairly substantial. I wasn't going to mention this until later, but Washington State just passed their driver-distracted law, and it is very severe. And that is no cell phone at all, no speaking, to include no smoking in the car with or without children, no drinking, no eating. Nothing that can distract you is permitted under this new law. So not even the Google Maps then? Unless it's built into the vehicle. And even then, there's a debate whether or not inputting your address in itself is a distraction when you're driving. So it's pretty severe. And I'm wondering if other cities are going to fall suit if you've heard any discussions where Honolulu might be in a position to toughen their driver-distraction laws or not, because right now, when the law was passed, cell phones were used primarily for communicating. But the technology, of course, has advanced, and it hasn't taken a whole lot of years. And now they're used for everything from Google Maps, Wayfinders, and things of that nature. So I'm wondering if somehow the law that was initially passed hasn't caught up with technology. Well, I think that we're going to let, I think, a way to proceed is we let the law go, and then we take statistics, or we take data. And if we find that the cell is not working, maybe there's a need to get tougher, and we can propose legislation, or council members could do it. But at this point, I think we were willing to take a wait-and-see attitude. Let's see how it affects. The new law affects our statistics or data. And if it's working, maybe it's enough. I mean, if it's not, then maybe we should make it tougher. Well, that leads me to kind of the topic of Bill 6. And that is the pedestrian law that is recently passed. And again, it will be implemented in October. And that is the prohibition of people looking at their cell phone just when they cross the street. Is that correct? It's not any other time before that. Yes. I'm wondering if that was based on trying to make the pedestrian safer? Or I'm just curious why that law didn't address more of the driver versus the pedestrian. I mean, the pedestrian needs to be aware of what's going on. And I agree with that. So from that standpoint, I agree with that portion of the law. But it just seems that we're in a position to really look at the distracted driver, not only from a safety standpoint, but also from a traffic. We're being stalled in traffic. And every time you have a delay, we're making our congestion worse. So if everyone's on their cell phone while at a stop light, there is that minute second. It's taking them to realize the light is green and cars in front of them are starting to move. And they have a delayed reaction. The car behind that has a delayed reaction. And so we're seeing more traffic congestion because people are still using their cell phones even at lights. And I'm wondering if that has come up with statistical data that you've seen come across your desk or not? Not yet. We go to conferences and to see what's happening nationally in the area of pedestrian safety or destructive driving. And so far it hasn't come up yet. We're going to one this year. And it might show up. But right now, it's just cell phones, reading the paper, lips, makeup, and that kind of thing. And kids in the car. My kid, I was disciplining my kids in the car while driving, that kind of thing. But so far. But we'll keep an eye out for that. Yeah, I'm just curious if that has come up. Because if that is also creating delay in traffic, just because people cannot seem to put down their cell phones. And I'll come sit here right now and I'll look at the camera and say, I'm guilty of having the cell phone in my hands waiting at a light. I don't try not to do that anymore. I've learned that that's not good for a variety of reasons. If not financially, it's just inconsiderate. I did a program here not long ago about road rage. And the number one complaint or spark to road rage is when people see other people with cell phones not paying attention. So that's quite a change in what caused road rage in the past. So describe what you guys have done in the past. Now, tell me, there's a program called Safe Streets. Or safe after school? I'm not aware of that one. But there's also something called Safe Streets is where it's trying to create a buffer zone for bicyclists and pedestrians, I thought. Safe Streets, but well, I know that we just put in the King Street protected bikeway. And even though that's for bicyclists, it has an effect of helping pedestrians. Well, that's what I was trying to get at. If that was kind of a dual purpose. It is a dual purpose. We found that out to be true. Previously, our data showed that 75% of the bicyclists that went down King Street was using the sidewalk and dodging pedestrians and conflicting pedestrians. After that, the protected bikeway went in, we found that that percentage dropped to 4%. It varies from 4% to 2% of bicyclists on the sidewalk. Most of them are using the protected bikeway, whereby keeping off the sidewalk, keeping the pedestrians safer. And there's also that buffer zone. It's right now, it's about 13 feet from the pedestrian to the nearest car. So that's the safety zone, another safety zone. So you have the dual effect. Does the city have plans to increase the safe zones? Sure. We have plans for more protected bike lanes like that. The latest one is down South Street. And we're looking at right now Pico Street and possibly Keamoku Street to get kind of a network, to kind of make a connection to help bicyclists get where they're going instead of like orphaned bike paths where you ride in it and get nowhere. If you have a network, you can kind of use it to get to work. And the King Street bikeway, we've noticed a big increase in the usage. And when we're talking to people, they say they use it to go to work now. And they feel much more comfortable that they're separated from the traffic. And pedestrians are happy to have it. Well, they're getting used to it. Yeah, they're getting used to it. Yeah, sure. The only problem is, excuse me, is when tourists are on the road and they're not familiar with these kind of safe zones and they're not sure how the biking lanes work, particularly if you take a left on King Street, I think. And bicyclists are coming from both directions. And they fail to look to their left and side when they're making a left turn. We have a lot of tourists where we're a resort destination. And with the advent of the Bike Share thing, I guess a lot of them don't know the rules. They can't ride on sidewalks, for example. So we've asked Bike to kind of educate them, either by pamphlets or maybe some kind of signing on their stations to kind of help them, I guess, know that it's not really cool to ride on the sidewalks. Well, we know that tourists are multilingual. All the languages in the world are found on our streets of Bike in downtown. So maybe more visual, way-finding or more visual do not try on the sidewalk signs or in order. Dana actually produced a bike pamphlet in different languages, I think, as part of the English. Walkwise. Walkwise. Yeah, I'm sorry. Walkwise. So that was under walkwise? Well, I want to commend you both for your outreach and your activities, because we just can't do enough to protect our pedestrians, particularly our children, our seniors. And so all the things you do and they have done are very much appreciated. And I would like to thank you both for coming onto my show and thank you for taking the time out. No, thank you for having me. This is Moving Hawaii Forward. We'll see you in a couple of weeks. And aloha.