Segways patrol the crosswalks

I was walk­ing down Fort Street Mall this morn­ing, when I saw 3 HPD offi­cers, each on Seg­ways and wait­ing for jaywalkers.

One patrol­man was writ­ing up a jay­walker by the McDonald’s on Fort and Hotel Street.

I would have taken a pic­ture of the Seg­way cross­walk police, but I didn’t want to get a ticket either! Jay­walk­ing tick­ets are now over US$100 apiece, you know.

Any­way, it is that time of year when Fort Street Mall is burst­ing with stu­dents. Hotel Street is restricted to buses and gov­ern­ment vehi­cles, but that doesn’t mean it’s an easy cross­ing dur­ing the day. It’s one of the busiest bus stops on the island. I’ve seen more than a few bus dri­vers honk and brake for pedes­tri­ans who jay­walked in front of their bus. The Hon­olulu Star-Bulletin has some safety tips in this August 26 arti­cle.

It is pos­si­ble to hack a cross­walk sig­nal with the right sequence of but­ton presses  – almost every piece of hard­ware has an override.

But the Fort Street and Hotel sig­nals cycle pretty quickly.

Not worth the jay­walk­ing ticket, I’d say.

Tagged as: government, hardware, Hawaii, Honolulu, HPU, mass-transit, USA