Event announcement from Transportation for America is below:
Walk of Remembrance – Honoring Those Killed and Injured on High Crash Corridors
WHAT: Mayor Sam Adams, Metro Councilor-elect Bob Stacey, other community leaders, friends, and family will gather to walk SE Foster Road and SE 82nd Avenue, visiting sites where pedestrians have been killed and injured in the last 10 years. The group will hold a brief press conference partway through the walk to call for safety improvements that could prevent future tragedy on high crash corridors. This event is part of the Willamette Pedestrian Coalition’s Walktober series of walks.
A fact sheet outlining the problems with Portland’s high crash corridors – a history of the tragic loss-of-life and the lack of funding to fix safety problems – will be made available the day of the event.
WHY: Even as overall traffic deaths decline in Oregon, deaths of pedestrians have seen disturbing increases in 2010 and 2012. Most of these deaths occur along “high crash corridors,” busy streets like Foster and SE 82nd Avenue with high-speed traffic. These streets are very important to the community – key economic activity areas and transit corridors. That’s why safety improvements are badly needed. Safety plans for many of them sit on the shelf as more people are killed and injured without funding for implementation.
We face this grim reality as the Oregon legislature considers its budget in the coming legislative session, as Metro begins the process of prioritizing “regional flex funds,” and as the US Department of Transportation interprets the new federal transportation bill, MAP-21.
VISUALS: Participants will leave flowers and other mementos at the sites of collisions.
WHEN and WHERE:
Tuesday, October 23
10:00 a.m. – Walk begins at Laurelwood Park, SE Foster and Holgate
11:00 a.m. – Brief press conference at SE Foster and 80th Avenue, site of the 2009 collision that took the lives of Lindsay Leonard and Jessica Finlay.
Details available here: http://walktoberpdx.org/event/walk-of-remembrance/
WHO: Mayor Sam Adams – City of Portland
Bob Stacey – Metro Councilor-Elect
Daniel Campbell – Transportation Chair, Foster Powell Neighborhood Association
Seth Richardson – Chair, Foster Area Business Association; Owner, Meticon Bikes
Steph Routh – Executive Director, Willamette Pedestrian Coalition
Safety improvements sure couldn’t hurt, but let’s not forget that at the end of the day in many of these cases someone in a car was most likely going too fast or not paying enough attention or both. I’d call that entitlement, which infrastructure improvements can chip away at, but not eliminate. Our legal system unfortunately seems to reward that sense of entitlement by generally giving those who drive recklessly and maim or kill someone a pass.
Speed limits, folks. And yes, they need to be enforced.