Reducing the burden of pedestrian fines and fees with Freedom to Walk legislation
Under our current system of traffic enforcement, harsh penalties are meted out for minor offenses that pose little risk to public safety. This includes jaywalking laws, which penalize pedestrians from crossing a street outside of designated crosswalks or against traffic signals. There is growing recognition that this approach is ineffective at improving roadway safety. It can also lead to cycles of debt and damaged court records.
In the 2025 legislative session, Hawaiʻi Appleseed is advocating for more equitable approaches to traffic enforcement, including the elimination of fines and fees for jaywalking. To support this work, Hawaiʻi Appleseed recently published “Beyond the Ticket,” a policy report that examines the negative impacts of traffic enforcement and provides a series of recommendations to improve our system. These recommendations include:
Requiring the police to collect demographic data for all stops;
Eliminating unnecessary pedestrian and bicycle enforcement; and
Reclassifying certain minor traffic infractions as “secondary violations” that cannot be used as pretextual stops.
Proposals still moving at the legislature would accomplish some of the above recommendations. That includes the Freedom to Walk bill, Senate Bill 106. If passed, the legislation would eliminate legal and financial penalties for pedestrians who crossed streets safely, but outside of designated crosswalks. However, the legislation is structured as a three-year pilot program that would only apply for pedestrians crossing 200 feet or further from a crosswalk. Unfortunately, as currently proposed, the pilot program would only occur on the counties of Kauaʻi, Maui, and Hawaiʻi—excluding Oʻahu, where the vast majority of jaywalking citations actually are given.
Although jaywalking is foundational to the way many Americans understand roadway safety, it is a relatively young concept. Jaywalking laws were enacted in the 1920s following a lobbying campaign by the auto industry to shift the blame onto pedestrians for the national rise in traffic fatalities. Unfortunately, jaywalking laws have done little to prevent the nation’s growing traffic violence. Moreover, jaywalking tickets have been found to disproportionately impact people of color.
These impacts are particularly prevalent in Hawaiʻi, where the number of jaywalking-related citations given is significantly higher than other localities in the U.S. For example, from 2018 to 2023, Hawaiʻi Appleseed found that there were over 5,000 jaywalking tickets given per year on average (not including tickets given to juveniles). Nearly all tickets (over 99 percent) were given by the Honolulu Police Department on Oʻahu.
Jaywalking tickets given on Oʻahu were largely concentrated in densely populated, low-income, urban areas. For example, the top five zip codes in Hawaiʻi with the highest per capita number of jaywalking tickets are 96814 (Waikīkī-Ala Moana), 96815 (Kapahulu-Diamond Head), 96817 (Kalihi-Pālama), 96813 (Nuʻuanu-Downtown-Chinatown), and 96826 (McCully-Mōʻiliʻili).
All of these zip code areas have a higher percentage of Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed Households (ALICE) households compared to the Oʻahu average of 31 percent. ALICE households earn above the federal poverty level, but still face challenges in meeting their basic needs. A StoryMap showing who is most impacted by jaywalking citations in Hawaiʻi is available here.
Figure 2. Economic Characteristics of the Top Five Jaywalking Zipcodes in Hawaiʻi (2018 to 2023)
This is the third year that Freedom to Walk legislation has been introduced at the state legislature. While the bill did not ultimately pass during the previous session, it did pass through its referred transportation and judiciary committees in both the House and Senate. This success was a testament to the diverse coalition of community partners that showed up at the four hearings to testify in support of the legislation, including the Hawaiʻi Public Health Institute, Hawaiʻi Bicycling League, the ACLU of Hawaiʻi, and the Grassroot Institute of Hawaiʻi, among others.
At an individual-level, the Freedom to Walk legislation aims to reduce the amount of unnecessary fines and fees imposed on pedestrians. At a societal level, we seek to shift public resources away from penalizing pedestrians and toward addressing the root causes of traffic violence. By maintaining the focus on data-driven strategies to address systemic roadway safety issues, we can push for investments in infrastructure that slows vehicle speeds, increases the visibility of pedestrians, and physically separates vehicles and pedestrians, keeping the public safe while providing transportation options that work for everyone.
