The City and County of Honolulu is moving along with its plans to install speed limit signs, raised crosswalks and speed humps to slow drivers near schools.
In November the Honolulu City Council passed a law to reduce the speed limit near Oʻahu schools from 25 to 20 miles per hour and encourage other “traffic calming measures.”
City officials said there are plans to build crosswalks and speed humps at about 20 schools. They will also need to replace over 600 speed limit signs with the updated, lower speed signs.
“We have over 7,000 25-mile-per-hour signs. We are estimating that we've got probably about 600 or 800 or so school-zone speed signs that we need to update — that's a lot. We didn't get any new staff with this program, so we're trying to find ways to be efficient to implement this because this is a very large lift on top of our normal project work,” said Renee Espiau, the city’s Complete Streets administrator.
The city said it needs about $1.5 million to change all the street signs. The city budgeted $500,000 for next year, and is asking the state for $1 million.
