Paying your parking violations in Hawaii - good luck
Contents
About
If you've lived or are visiting Oahu/Honolulu for more than a month, you probably have your first parking ticket. A nasty little yellow piece of paper. Parking in Waikiki is especially hard, and the sings are hard to interpet.
Unfortunately, paying this ticket is espeically hard! You'll have a citation number that looks like this: 1DTP-21-075353 ... most likely it's $35, or if you're unluckly they've found 2 things you did wrong and it will be $70.
How to Pay your Oahu Traffic/Parking Ticket
(1) Attempt (probably unnsuccefully) to pay online
The instructions say that you can pay online via https://etraffic.ehawaii.gov/etraffic/home... so you enter your citation number and it says:
Citation Not Found Possible Reasons:
1. You may have incorrectly entered the citation number....
OR
2. Your citation information has not yet been entered ... it can take X days to enter.
So that really sucks - it's not an automated system and it might take weeks for them to enter it into their crappy system. Worst still... if it's been more than 21 days, it disappears, and the only way you can determine if your ticket is still outstanding is to call: 1 (800) 679-5949.
I remember calling, and even the lady said the system makes sense, and admitted that a check was the only "reliable option", but that it is also really hard to find out WHERE to send the check/cheque.
(2) Pay by Check with Snail Mail
If you're lucky, they gave you (and you kept) a postage paid envelope, but for me they didn't. So here's the mailing address I was given for Honolulu over the phone:
Honolulu District Court,
1111 Alakea Street,
Honolulu, HI, 96813
On the official page: www.courts.state.hi.us/self-help/traffic/parking_citations they claim to have a link which lists these addresses for each area, but in reality the link fails to deliver.
Make the check payable to "HAWAII DISTRICT COURT" and make sure to include your Citation Number.
Ouch right. I'd like to think the people behind the system read this and get embarassed, but when dealing with all things Hawaii, they are pretty backwards, and so although I wrote this in 2021, I'm guessing one decade from now it will still be the same awful system you have to deal with. All the best! Keep trying that phone number to get success.
Looking Up Unpaid Tickets
Since it's so easy to get tickets (they are pretty ruthless), there's a good chance you might have tickets you don't even know about! To find out, you can call: 1 (800) 679-5949, and give them your liscence plate. Expect them to ask a lot of questions (like are you the owner, when might you have been ticketed), but if you have good manners on the phone they'll tell you what might be outstanding and give you the citation numbers. Even then it might be a mistmatch, because I honestly think they just make mistakes when the enter stuff into the system. Fortnately, I believe if you make a check and the ticket has already been paid they will just mail the check back. I wish you could just look it up online, it would save time.
How to Complain
Some people might complain that they don't deserve a traffic ciation - I haven't tried that option, but I'm sure it's not worth the trouble for $35. Just paying the ticket is effort enough, let alone trying to refute it!
If you wish to complain about the terrible payment instructions and system? I guess write to a Hawaiian government official. I think they'll ignore you though. Oahu can't even afford to buy all their police officers actual cars (you've noticed some of the police cars are just personal cars with a blue light on top right?)... so they're not likely to upgrade their ticketing system to something modern anytime soon!
See Also
- How to: address an envelope - The US way.
Links
- State of Hawaii - Parking Violations - one of the worst payment websites you've ever seen. Ideally you could search by liscence plate number. No such luck. If you lose your citation number you are screwed, and chances are you'll miss your undefined "window" to pay online. Of my 4 tickets over 1 year, only 2 I was able to pay online successfully by catching the "window".
