(Photo: J. Maus/BikePortland)
The City of Portland is on the verge of releasing $300,000 from the city’s general fund for “emergency Vision Zero improvements” on outer Southeast Division Street.
The move comes after a spate of deaths and injuries on Division east of 82nd Avenue — including two fatal collisions within hours of each other nine days ago.
Division is home to seven of the city’s top 30 high crash intersections. This year alone five people have died and three people have sustained serious injuries while using the street. Seven of those collisions happened on outer Division between 124th and 156th.
Pressure has been building on PBOT for the past week to do something.
Last week nine bereaved family members (including two women who lost their sons at the same intersections on Division where people were killed on December 7th) signed a letter demanding immediate action.
And this past Saturday, dozens of volunteer activists used hay bales and their own bodies to slow down traffic on the notoriously dangerous thoroughfare. “PBOT won’t fix it, so we will,” proclaimed event organizers from Bike Loud PDX.
The $300,000 investment was confirmed today via a City Council agenda item that will be heard at their meeting on December 21st. We have also confirmed the action with a staffer in Transportation Commissioner Steve Novick’s office.
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The ordinance is being presented by Novick, Mayor Charlie Hales and Commissioner Nick Fish — which means it already has the three votes it needs to pass.
The money will come from contingency funding in the City’s general fund. These are funds held aside by the city in case projects cost more than expected. Specifically the agenda item calls for “emergency Vision Zero improvements and community engagement efforts on Outer Division.” We don’t have all the details about what the $300,000 will do, but we’ll update this post when we know more.
Asked about the ordinance today, Novick’s office said the idea for emergency funding came from PBOT Director Leah Treat and it was Mayor Hales’ idea to use contingency funding.
Interestingly this is a very similar approach to dealing with a traffic safety crisis that former Mayor Sam Adams took in October 2007. After two people died while biking in the central city less than two weeks apart, Adams called an emergency meeting and held a press conference at City Hall. At that meeting PBOT staff unveiled plans for installing the city’s first bike boxes at 14 high-risk locations. About five weeks later Adams got $200,000 in emergency funding (through the same contingency fund method being used by Hales and Novick).
In a story published yesterday in the Portland Mercury, PBOT dismissed the major lane reconfiguration (a.k.a. “road diet”) that Bike Loud PDX is calling for. Instead, PBOT called for much less controversial measures like medians, refuge islands and crosswalk beacons. (They were already planning to install speed radar cameras at 156th.)
There are a lot of things PBOT can do to tame outer Division. The question is, what measures will they take? And will it be enough to mitigate the clear and present danger posed by this deadly street?
The ordinance will be at City Council on Wednesday (12/21) at 10:15 am.
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UPDATE, 1:45pm: We’ve learned more context about next week’s ordinance. Commissioner Novick’s transportation policy advisor Timur Ender said it came about after a conference call convened by Mayor Hales on December 7th, the day after the two fatalities. Hales wanted to know what PBOT was doing and he wanted to move up the timeframe. “After looking at all of our efforts (engineering, enforcement, etc.),” Ender shared with us via email, “we realized we had room to improve our education and outreach efforts.”
Next week’s budget item, he added, is specifically related to funding for, “culturally-specific engagement and outreach about safety in the Jade District, and multi-language, multi-modal signs on Outer Division.” The money will also be used for traffic safety classes in languages spoken in the adjacent community.
At the council hearing next week PBOT will outline its future plans for outer Division which will include speeding up speed camera implementation and other safety-related projects. PBOT plans to dip into its General Transportation Revenue (gas tax) to supplement the emergency funding request.
More details coming next week.
UPDATE, 2:35 pm: We have learned more about the $300,000 educational effort. PBOT Traffic Safety and Active Transportation Division Manager Margi Bradway says the request (which includes more safety education, information, signs and more lighting) came specifically from APANO (the Asian Pacific American Network of Oregon). Both of the people killed last week — 51-year-old Myit Oo and 65-year-old Rohgzhao Zhang — were elders in the community and their families have been in touch with APANO. We’ll share another update after speaking with APANO’s leader.
UPDATE, 3:30 pm: The full text of the ordinance (PDF) has been released:
… This stretch of street east of SE 82nd is also located near Portland’s Communities of Concern. In addition to Outer Division, Outer Halsey and Outer Glisan have very high rates of traffic crashes. The traffic deaths and injuries on these three corridors greatly impact the community in the Jade District and East Portland.
It is urgent that the City take steps now to respond to the community’s request for increased funding for education and outreach programs on Outer Division, and for two other high crash corridors, Outer Halsey and Outer Glisan. This community-based education will be complimented with traffic signs and traffic safety information in different languages. Although this budget request will focus primarily on education and signs, PBOT will use this money to leverage engineering improvements on Outer Division, Outer Halsey and Outer Glisan.
And here’s the breakdown and timeline of the actions PBOT will take in partnership with APANO…
— Jonathan Maus, (503) 706-8804 – jonathan@bikeportland.org
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$300K isn’t even remotely enough. PBOT will just add a few rapid-flash beacons and call it a day while people will continue to die.
Try harder.
i think we should wait and see what they have planned to do.
And obviously $300K isn’t enough… But I think it’s a pretty solid number given that this is something that was unplanned.
I also think it might not have happened if we didn’t have both Hales and Novick looking to leave as much of a popular legacy as possible.
I don’t feel like we need to “wait and see” because we have plenty of examples of what happens in this situation. Under Hales and Novick, whenever “emergency” funds are dedicated, one of two things happens.
1: The city spends a year planning, talking to neighborhood associations, and holding open houses. By the end of the planning phase, most of the funds are gone – spent on all those meetings – and the initial project is watered down.
2: PBOT builds immediately, but doesn’t dedicate nearly enough funding to actually fix anything, so we end up with a cheap band-aid (a handful of painted crosswalks and a couple rapid-flash beacons, or worse: a victim-shaming hi-vis campaign). Whatever solution is chosen, rest assured that drivers of motor vehicles won’t be inconvenienced in the slightest.
In both cases, PBOT does the absolutely bare minimum to silence the complainers, but not nearly enough to fix any real problem. On a street as wide and long as Division, cheap band-aid solutions aren’t even remotely enough. I’d love to give PBOT the benefit of the doubt, but past history doesn’t give me much hope. At any rate, I think showing PBOT with praise for responding quickly to last week’s protest is counter-intuative. They have our ear, now is the time to push hard to get what we need, rather than sitting back quietly to “wait and see what they have planned”.
Exactly what I wanted to say.
preaching to the choir here adam. and do you really think I’m “sitting back quietly”? come on man. by “wait and see” I mean waiting for more conversations I’m having with them right now and especially waiting until next week. we have different styles of activism. and that’s ok!
Our city (of ~120K) budgets $200K/yr to spend on bike & ped infrastructure. We can (and do) bank it every other year, and then have to decide how it gets spent by March or we lose all $400K. Granted PDX is 5x our population (though we likely have more tax revenue per person), but I can’t imagine us coming up with that budget on short notice.
Adam is indeed dead on with his points, but I hope it’s spent efficiently and wisely, with a measurable reduction in incidents. I can only contrast with our situation; we recently restriped a critical connecting street to its original 4-lane configuration, despite the police department in favor of extending the trial road diet citing significant reduction in crashes and citations. City Council got scared by the public’s outrage at how ‘horribly’ traffic was now backed up and their commute times were prolonged.
Our measure of “successful investment” is seriously f***ed.
(flawed ;).
“…we recently restriped a critical connecting street to its original 4-lane configuration, despite the police department in favor of extending the trial road diet citing significant reduction in crashes and citations. City Council got scared by the public’s outrage at how ‘horribly’ traffic was now backed up and their commute times were prolonged. …” pete
Your understanding, is that your city council believed the reaction of some part of that city’s public to the road diet, was so strongly opposed, that the council felt it had to return the street to its former four lane configuration? Question: what percent of the city’s public, do you roughly guess, seemed to be in favor of the road diet, despite objections expressed by those opposed to the road diet?
I ask, because I think it sometimes can be very hard to know what percent of a city’s population, is and isn’t in favor of what to them may seem to be rather dramatic modifications to the streets and roads they daily travel.
What happened was they implemented a road diet (during a routine maintenance restriping) on a particularly troublesome stretch of Pruneridge, from Lawrence Expressway to Pomeroy (where there’s a popular park nearby). People became furious, writing letters to council as well as San Jose Mercury News’ “Roadshow” column, pressuring the council to revert it because of all the traffic it now created (which of course has nothing to do with how many more motorists now use this road). The police had noted that speeding tickets and “incidents” went down dramatically with the road diet, and are in favor of keeping it. Specifically, they noted that the four-lane configuration resulted not only in higher speeds but frequent rear-end crashes, as people stopped to turn into their driveways and side streets. Now, the reality of this section, as you can see in the satellite view, is that you’ve got a 35-MPH residential street (with many pedestrians and people street-parking at the park) being fed by a slip lane off a 50-MPH expressway, not to mention that it parallels Homestead which has become choked with traffic from new stoplights and Apple campus construction. (Coming out of Harvard is nearly impossible due to the speed of drivers exiting or entering Lawrence, as well as backups at the light).
https://goo.gl/maps/5vbRT1x8b8p
Anyway, our 2009 bicycle master plan called for adding bike lanes to the whole length, eventually connecting with San Jose’s strategic Hedding Street bike lanes, but the city went ahead and restriped the rest of it to the existing configuration, and when I brought it up at our BPAC meeting was told by two city councilors that it was discussed, but the majority feared an even bigger backlash than the one this little section brought upon them. So they directed the engineering department to keep the current configuration and make no changes, despite our BPAC being told two months previous that the bike lanes were about to go in.
Vision? Zero.
Mind you this is the same city council that asked me personally to lead the effort in moving us from a bronze Bicycle-Friendly City to silver level. I have resigned from the BPAC now, though will continue to be involved on a tactical level, as I have a series of proposals for improvements that I’m hoping to get time to publish on Richard Masoner’s site (cyclelicio.us) to gather momentum with. (And I’ll continue to fight for uninterrupted access to our trail that the 49’ers took over when they sold our city a bill of goods now known as Levi’s Stadium).
So yeah, this is the kind of stuff that goes on outside of Portland. Keep fighting the good fight up there; it’s inspirational!
Is the google view showing the road diet? Because rather than four lanes, it looked to me like essentially a two lane road with a middle turn lane…and bike lanes. Studied Pruneridge, from Lawrence Expressway to Pomeroy. Looks like a really nice street.
The term ‘slip lane’ isn’t one I’m really familiar with, but from the overhead view, I think I can see that the idea behind its configuration is to enable fast, what I’ll call sweeping turns to keep people from having to slow down like they would have to with more of a right angled turn. If it hasn’t already, maybe the city could take steps such as very explicit speed reduction signage for people leaving the expressway to Pruneridge, and speed limit cameras on Pruneridge managing whatever slower speed is posted there.
Didn’t look for posted speed limit on the street. Would 25mph tops be feasible for this street; allowing for reasonably efficient travel times for the majority of destinations people tend to use this street for? Streets posted for that speed, in my personal experience, isn’t too bad for walking and biking alongside. From Lawrence to the park doesn’t look like much more than a mile.
There’s only so much I can gather from looking at those pics, which is not like being there first hand to see it, or actually use it. Tends to remind me of Cornelius Pass Rd or Bethany Blvd out here in Hillsboro and Beaverton…streets which provide for biking and walking, but aren’t what I would consider inviting for that mode of travel to other than very determined or desperate people. Not great to live next to either, because of the roar of traffic, even with the sound walls built between houses and street.
Yes, that’s the road diet section. If you pan right (east), you’ll see that it becomes a four-lane road with on-street parking, no marked bike lanes, and no middle turn lane. What you see in my link is what was supposed to be done the entire length of the street, eventually all the way to San Jose (where it turns into Hedding Street).
The posted speed limit is 35 MPH. On adjacent Homestead Road the posted speed limit is 40 MPH. On both of these streets drivers are regularly hitting 40-45 MPH. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve nearly been rear-ended by driving the speed limit on either of these roads, especially there’s a part where Homestead reduces to 25 MPH because of a school, and I’ve watched people absolutely flip out at how ‘slow’ I was driving, waving their arms and honking like I’m the idiot.
Slip lane is a term I learned here years ago (maybe from Paikiala?). Our city engineer has been trying to get rid of these, but the county has jurisdiction over Lawrence Expressway and fears that doing so would cause backups on their road. The city doesn’t have the budget to implement the tools you mention, unfortunately. (Not that they don’t have the money, but budget is different).
Yes, similar feel to Cornelius Pass, Bethany, Murray, Scholl’s Ferry, etc, (but with fewer trees).
“Yes, that’s the road diet section. If you pan right (east), you’ll see that it becomes a four-lane road with on-street parking, no marked bike lanes, and no middle turn lane. …” pete
I thought further east may have been where the four lane section of the road was. The display I was using wasn’t quite good enough to take all of this in well enough. I suppose many of us reading, are familiar enough though, with the two lane, and the four lane road situations, to have some idea of what the problems are.
If there were video, for example, overhead, as well as street view at points along the street, of traffic on the road, that may give some idea of issues road users have with the section of the street you describe as having been configured for road diet…issues that might be reasonably addressed without dispensing with it entirely.
To be specific…were the bulk of people’s objections to the road diet, concerning congestion the reduction of four lanes of main travel…to two lanes of main travel…may have caused during peak road use hours? Or were the objections expressed, mainly having to do with a lower top mph speed that may have resulted due to a variety of factors, from the lane reduction.
On a big thoroughfare, some people for whatever reasons, may want to cruise at max posted speed, plus a bit…so 45-50 in a 40. Other people let’s say…for where they’re going, don’t really care or need to travel that speed…for them, 20 or 25 might be just fine, as long as the traffic keeps flowing along, and doesn’t involve a lot of stop and go bumper to bumper traffic congestion.
Just a layman’s viewpoint, but my impression is that local area government leaders, and road and traffic engineers are under huge pressure to redesign roads able to accommodate anticipated increases in motor vehicle road use…according to long standing road use capacity philosophy arising in part as a consequence of community planning…where people live in relation to where they work. Nothing really new in what I’ve just written there, but I think it kind of helps to periodically consider and try figure out just what the motivation is for these big, fast roads communities seem to get out of what originally were simple two lane roads.
Personally, with the population growing as it is in many areas, though I don’t really like them, I can see some justification for the multi lanes in each direction roads…four lanes, etc. It’s the top posted speeds over 25 on such roads that to me seems to be a major problem for reasons that are too numerous to list simply.
For outer Division to become a safer thoroughfare for people on foot to use, the city and PBOT have at least come up with some ideas of how to go about that, and have proposed to budget money to carry those ideas out.
Installation of pedestrian activated yellow flashing beacons would be a great improvement to Division being safer to use by people walking…but even those relatively simple signal systems cost a lot of money…like 90K a piece, if I recall.
Nevertheless, if there are points along the street where their installation can provide people on foot, safer use of the street, the signals should be installed. Education of the public, as to function and obligation associated with the signals to all road users, is essential for the signals to do what they’re designed to do.
The two collisions on the 7th of this month, resulting in deaths of people on foot, happened in the evening, after rush hour. Take a look at times other collisions involving injury or deaths to vulnerable road users have occurred on this street to be sure, but the suggestion from those two collisions, is that the reasons they occurred have mainly to do with lapses in judgment and understanding, of the occasional person driving, rather than most everyone else driving.
If at all possible, the city should look very closely at the numbers, confining top mph motor vehicle speed on this street, to a mph speed that can help provide safe use of the street by people on foot and bike, and still allow reasonable trip times for travel and transport by motor vehicle. If the street is posted for 30 or 35 mph, that probably means bringing the speed limit down to 25 mph, or even 20.
Sounds like a lot, but in the long run, the greater expense of longer trip times to individuals and businesses, may be offset by infrastructure that’s less expensive to build to provide safe use of the street by people on foot: no expensive overhead pedestrian bridges, elevators, tunnels…fewer, full red-yellow-green crosswalk signals…MUP’s completely separate from the street.
Well that was long so I read it really fast. Are you saying that it’s worth a little bit of everyone’s time to have fewer bodies in the trauma ward? Like, spend an hour bashing ice off the sidewalk so your neighbor will, hopefully, not break their hip?
“Well that was long so I read it really fast. Are you saying …” x
Take your time, read slower, think through carefully what you’re reading, and the answer to your question may come to you more easily on your own.
In a lot of comments posted to this story, is what to me seems to be way too much energy spent on sarcasm, and not nearly enough on serious thought about what changes should and could be implemented on big busy thoroughfares, to have them be able to better manage the percentage…small it would seem…of people driving that are major contributors to collisions with vulnerable road users.
All this infrastructure…the signals, varying in cost according to type…the engineering and construction for reconfiguration of lane provision…costs a lot of money. That’s part of the reason, I think, that cities don’t just abruptly install a bunch more expensive signals whenever a group of citizens raise concerns about a street that indications are, is in need of some improvements for its safe use by people walking and biking.
The city could probably make the case for some pedestrian activated flashing yellow beacons, on Division…partly, because they cost less money than the other types of pedestrian signals. And, because they minimize reductions in the flow of traffic, compared to full red-yellow-green signals with pedestrian crossing. The city should introduce more safety measures for vulnerable road users, of course.
My guess, is that the public isn’t going to support needs city leaders express, for improvements that blow transportation budgets sky high, or that dramatically reduces motor vehicle flow on thoroughfares through the city that are crucial to people meeting their day to day travel needs.
Well said. Another part of the reason is that signs in general are invisible; they get filtered out as visual noise as drivers pay attention to other cars, pedestrians, cyclists, etc (and yeah, smartphones). To make them noticeable they make them flash, and we’ve seen recently this isn’t foolproof either. If everything becomes visually important, nothing is.
I remember sitting at a (long) light last summer and moving left so a driver could get by to make a right turn on red. He stayed put. I politely said, “it’s all clear” to him though his open window, and he pointed up to a sign and said “there’s no right turn on red allowed here.” I’d ridden this route almost daily since 2009 and watched so many drivers turn right on red next to me at this light that I’d never even noticed the sign myself.
longer trip times (e.g. slower speeds) by out-of-neighborhood drivers are a feature, not a bug. division could be road dieted for mere hundreds of thousands per mile and this would almost certainly reduce dangerous driving behavior and serious injury collisions:
http://bikeportland.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/holgatecrashes1.jpg
http://bikeportland.org/2011/05/12/pbot-data-buffered-bike-lanes-lead-to-big-safety-benefits-on-holgate-52885
full PBOT presentation:
http://media.oregonlive.com/portland_impact/other/Holgate_Open_House_Presentation.pdf
(apologies for the oregonian link — i could not find this on pbot’s web site.)
“…but not nearly enough to fix any real problem. …” adam h
You live in Portland, it’s your city and other Portland residents’ money, part of which goes to diagnose and resolve problems affecting the safety of the city’s streets for use by people on foot and bike:
In more specific detail than just saying the streets ‘aren’t safe’ for use by people on foot, what do you believe are the problems to which you generally refer, and what viable solution do you propose to use to fix them?
Do you believe, as a taxpayer, that you and all of Portland’s other residents, are paying enough money to fix the street safety problems you have in mind?
they already did that at 156th and people are still dying there…
their plans amount to nothing…
300k isn’t enough for a permanent fix, but it could be enough for a temporary one if they’re creative enough.
Speed traps. Enforcement. Give the police a monetary goal specifically to cow drivers into driving at or below posted speed limits on Division. Make drivers fear the consequences. Yes, there are racist cops, yes people of color may be stopped disproportionally. Maybe this is a time NOT to care about that situation. Is it true that motorists are less likely to stop for black pedestrians to cross the road? In any case, pedestrians, cyclists and law abiding drivers of all skin colors are risking their lives until speeding is controlled. This is triage–stop the bleeding first. Stop. The. Bleeding. First.
We can’t just care about racial justice only when it is convenient to do so.
Saying someone doesn’t care about racial justice, because they are not troubled by the skin color of individuals being held accountable for their actions, if they have broken the law, isn’t very honest.
So we only target white rule breakers? That sounds like soft-bigotry springing out of low expectations.
OP literally said “this is a time NOT to care about [racist cops, people of color being stopped disproportionally]”. Saying that “everyone should be held accountable equally regardless of skin color” ignores the fact that this is simply NOT true and the reality is that people of color face bigger barriers that white people simply do not have to worry about. Top to bottom, from excessive use of force against POC’s, to bigger fines, longer jail time, institutionalized incarceration, etc. the system is simply stacked against minorities. We can’t just simply ignore this fact when it’s convenient for us.
Of course I want safer streets, but not at the expense of vulnerable communities. That’s not how a civilized society should behave.
Without enforcement people will continue to die on Portland roads due to negligent drivers.
There are plenty of safe streets in Portland that have the same lack of enforcement as the rest of the city. Road design plays a much bigger part in safety than police presence.
You are engaged in what is known as “magical thinking”.
Safer streets PROTECT vulnerable populations.
Enforce traffic laws fairly, and do it vigorously.
This is true. However, more police do not make a street safer. Safe design does.
More enforcement DOES make streets safer; if you’ve ever driven through communities known to have strict enforcement, you’ll see people do drive more slowly.
That said, street design is a more permanent fix.
Portland is not a city particularly well-known for police enforcement of any kind, ever, anywhere, but especially of car drivers. There are apparently 948 officers in Portland, a city of 623,000 – a pretty low ratio compared to other similarly-sized cities.
Here’s what gets me about this: Yes, people drive slower in areas with strict enforcement, but that’s because they know that area is a trap. I have driven (or at least been in the vehicle) between Portland and Milwaukie (via MgLoughlin and Grand/MLK) since I was in the 6th grade, and if you don’t know, there is a major, and very well known, speed trap in Downtown Milwaukie. There are regularly motorcycle cops, regular patrols, and speed camera vans and they have had a presence for at least a decade. People that drive through this regularly know and do not speed. Through that area, that is. As soon as the 30mph zone is over and it goes up to 40mph (southbound… Goes to 45mph in northbound), everyone jumps up to 50-55mph+ and the civilness goes away.
Street design is not only a permanent fix, but it is actually a behavior changing fix. And it has the extra plus of providing benefits to ALL users. When done right, there are significant safety changes that can have extremely limited impacts on traffic.
Well it’s crazy that police should not routinely stop motorists who are observed driving unsafely. I know about driving while (other), it’s a real thing. Until we solve the training problem (how does a largely white suburban police force trained with military tactics confront a more diverse population with mutual issues of distrust?) we still need a way to enforce traffic laws for public safety.
I propose catch-and-release. When a driver is observed to commit a clear ORS violation (5 miles over speed limit, following too closely, failure to yield, etc) it should be the policy of the city to have an officer who is on a specific traffic enforcement mission pull the offender over and sweat them for 5 minutes by the clock while they run the plates and do other important cop stuff. If there are no outstanding warrants or other aggravating circumstances, lights out, you’re free to go. No face-to-face interaction, by policy.
This may seem like a crazy idea, but when I was driving a car for work one strong reason for me to avoid a traffic stop was I just didn’t have time for it. I had no prior tickets, and being generally law-abiding any ticket I got wasn’t going to break me, but the lost time would kill my schedule. Sitting by the road is kind of humiliating (instant punishment) and a significant deterrent to people whose ostensible reason for speeding or pushing other boundaries is they must arrive somewhere by a specific time. It means that officers spend less time in court, often on overtime, and probably would not result in fewer stops. Also: there is no better single point traffic control device than a stopped police car, lights on, like as not blocking a lane.
But we do have to address issues with responses proportionate to the effects of those problems – People being killed and the social tolerance of people being killed is worse than people being discriminated against or arrested, and as such should be given the most immediate attention.
So are you saying that as a society we should not enforce any laws due to possible police discrimination?
No, I am saying we need to enforce in a way that does not discriminate while simultaneously working to fix our broken policing and justice system. Though, based on our incoming administration, the latter is going to get far worse before it gets better. So yeah, maybe a little less police presence would be a good thing. Fix the road design and add cameras instead. Cameras are still not a perfect solution, as they would still involve the justice system, but they at least take one problem (the officer) out of the equation.
“Speed traps. Enforcement. Give the police a monetary goal specifically to cow drivers into driving at or below posted speed limits on Division.”
Sorry. As the Executive Director of Oregon Walks explained on these very pages, Vision Zero in Portland does not include increased traffic enforcement because police profile, harass minorities, and are generally icky.
She’s right, too – if you step up traffic enforcement in low-income, minority communities, guess who is going to be getting most of the traffic tickets.
Heaven forbid we actually ticket someone breaking the law.
Just added this to the story… UPDATE, 1:45pm: We’ve learned more context about next week’s ordinance. Commissioner Novick’s transportation policy advisor Timur Ender said it came about after a conference call convened by Mayor Hales on December 7th, the day after the two fatalities. Hales wanted to know what PBOT was doing and he wanted to move up the timeframe. “After looking at all of our efforts (engineering, enforcement, etc.),” Ender shared with us via email, “we realized we had room to improve our education and outreach efforts.”
Next week’s budget item, he added, is specifically related to funding for, “culturally-specific engagement and outreach about safety in the Jade District, and multi-language, multi-modal signs on Outer Division.” The money will also be used for traffic safety classes in languages spoken in the adjacent community.
At the council hearing next week PBOT will outline its future plans for outer Division which will include speeding up speed camera implementation and other safety-related projects. PBOT plans to dip into its General Transportation Revenue (gas tax) to supplement the emergency funding request.
More details coming next week.
$300,000 for more talk.
Will the “traffic safety classes” be for motorists or just glorified victim-shaming campaigns? After all, we have a city councilperson who thinks everyone needs to carry pocket flashlights to be safe.
All legal motorists passed a driving test, so it [emphasis]should[/emphasis] be safe to assume they know the rules and signs of the road.
The driving test is a pretty low bar.
Yeah, that bar seems to be buried underground for all the knowledge required to get over it.
They might vaguely recall the rules of the road from 15 or however many years ago they took the test. Re-test at every license renewal.
This makes more sense regarding how $300k could be spent. I used to think $300k was a lot of money. Then I learned how far $4mil moved on only 3/4 miles of road. Drivin’ ain’t cheap.
Signage yes. But would love for the city to spend dollars leveling car industry propaganda on public airways. Not the cheesy don’t-drink-and-drive campaigns. But honest acknowledgment that we’re not going to eliminate congestion, what driving (infrastructure) really cost, and that driving is inherently dangerous — overall work toward creating buy-in for public mass transit and active transit.
For $300,000.00 in education, we are clearly going to have the smartest, best educated corpses lying on the ground.
FIX THE DAMNED ROAD!!!
We have to forget we ever learned about the “Three E’s”. If a street is broken, it’s broken. No amount of outreach, ticket blitzes, PR campaigns will fix a broken street. It must be completely rethought, WITHOUT the normal first assumption that we have to preserve the same throughput we have now.
Division St is deadly, and an education-based solution is only appropriate for educating our city leaders that we need more than education-based solutions.
Exactly. IMO in a situation such as this the street should be closed to motor vehicle traffic and any future studies should consider whether there should be motor vehicle traffic there again, and if so how it can be incorporated in such a way that doesn’t create a similar situation to this in the future.
If there was still irony, it would be ironic that we can’t decide what to do about a street where we’ve just decided not to have a fully realized bus rapid transit line because a radical step like that would make it harder to drive at the speed we are accustomed and get past the people who insist on living and dying there.
All roads are deadly to one extent or another. Only a fool or a liar promotes something like vision zero with a straight face.
Your comment is a little too narrow and way too black and white. Everything in life carries risk, true, and it’s the risk response that dictates the residual. In other words, it’s priorities. Vision Zero is a laudable objective, but it doesn’t sound like one your support.
The Portland version of Zero Vision consists of a task force, a logo, and an opportunity for people to get together to wring their hands and claim they are doing something about it. That will be followed by an annual report.
What I don’t support is establishing a goal that cannot be reached. Dishonest would be the kindest word I might use to describe it.
No, I’m not opposed to efforts to reduce traffic deaths. I can, however, offer no support nor excuse for a government that requires two years to write an action plan.
Is it that the goal cannot be reached, or that you see insufficient political will to achieve the objective?
The two are not the same.
vision zero denial.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2014/02/economist-explains-16
And Sweden, a county of ten million people, pulls over 2.5 million drivers a year and checks them for DUI. Being seriously drunk in Sweden carries a multi-year prison term.
Are you willing to support that level of intrusive law enforcement here? It is a key part of Vision Zero in Sweden. It’s not just traffic engineering.
i note that you provide no citation or source. i also note that you fail to address what your comment has to do with unambiguously effective vision zero reforms.
“I note that you provide no citation or source”
Because using Google yourself is too hard, apparently.
I think that wikipedia had the 2.5 million/drivers year checked number, but the NHTSA seems to be more definite.
“Sweden
RBT used frequently
Any police officer can stop any driver at any time and any place and request a screening breath sample. A positive sample = suspicion which leads to evidentiary testing which can be either blood or breath.
Enforcement has high priority. About 1.2 million random breath tests per year in a population of approximately 4.5 million drivers.”
So your chances of being checked in Sweden as a driver for DUI is better than 1 in 4 per year. (The equivalent in Portland would be more than 100,000 DUI checks a year, assuming that 3/4 of the population of Portland drives.)
But yeah, enforcement plays no part in Sweden’s Vision Zero program.
https://one.nhtsa.gov/people/injury/research/pub/DWIothercountries/dwiothercountries.html
*sigh*
once again, you fail to address what your comment has to do with vision zero reforms and are, also, arguing against your own position:
the more severe drunk driving policy dates to 1994 and did not have an obvious effect on road deaths (see below).
http://www.dss3a.com/btg/pdf/Parallels/Fri_aft/ake_lindgren_fri_aft_strand2_drinking_and_driving.pdf
vision zero reforms were first proposed in 1997 and began to have a very significant effect on serious injury collisions ins subsequent years.
another graph that shows fatalities during this period even more clearly:
http://www.salimandsalimah.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/solutions2.jpg
1994: Penalties and enforcement of drunk driving was increased but fatalities increased slightly.
1997: Vision zero was passed, engineering/infrastructure programs were funded, and in a few years fatalities began to plummet.
Speed cameras and traffic circles at all major intersections.
This is what so-called equity staff gets you Portland.
$300k down the drain.
——
People are dying because they cannot read the street signs? What a load. Presumably, all the motorists passed a driving test, so they can read the signs. So, not only is it fake equity, it’s racial pandering, AND it’s victim-blaming because they appear poised to teach pedestrians not to jump out in front of cars, in multiple languages.
PBOT going to walk into minority communities and telling them they’re walking wrong. Racial pandering is spot on.
Wait, is it racial pandering if the request came directly from the community? Am I missing something? It sounds like this request came from APANO, so ostensibly they think the lack of training and signs in multiple languages is a danger to their community.
That comment was posted before Jonathan’s update that the request came from APANO. If that’s what they are asking for, then that’s fine. I still disagree with the effectiveness of education campaigns, but who am I to tell this community what’s good for them? But PBOT shouldn’t either. Facilitate but don’t dictate. It’s the difference between saying “this is what you need” vs “how can I help you achieve what you want?”.
JeffS,
What if you didn’t speak English, grew up in a country with much different traffic culture, were very old and unable to communicate with others and were not aware of local traffic customs or best practices or where to cross the street safely, or….?
I think it’s pretty mean to say this money is going “down the drain” just because you have different needs/wants than others.
Let the neighborhood educate themselves. Rather than PBOT coming in and telling people what to do, they should give the money to APANO and let them do the work from the bottom up. PBOT’s top-down approach comes off as patronizing.
I think the neighbors already know that Division is a super dangerous street, including non-English speaking folks. People are crossing because they have to. They are crossing at unsafe crossings because safe crossings do not exist, not because they can’t read signs, most of which are in symbol form and have colors that transcend languages and most cultures.
“Let the neighborhood educate themselves. Rather than PBOT coming in and telling people what to do, they should give the money to APANO ”
Really? APANO represents the substantial Slavic community in east Portland?
You seem to think that APANO is a proxy for east Portland residents – it’s not.
Exactly the problem. PBOT thinks that by talking to one organization, that they have fulfilled the equity requirement, when in fact, it’s simply tokenizing.
The Slavic community is white, and is therefore privileged, an therefore already gets too much help from the city. Am I on the right track?
No. Because they are white, the census doesn’t track them, unlike they do for “visible minorities” like Asians, Hispanics, African-Americans, and Pacific Islanders, so the city has no idea where they are or how well they are doing. According to other government sources, such as Homeland Security and Immigration, they are numerous and diverse in the Portland area, and like all other recent immigrants, have issues with understanding the local culture, language, dealing with laws, and driving rules. Most are Russian, but they also include substantial numbers of Ukrainians, Poles, and Romanians (who are technically Romance-speakers but are classed as “Slavic” by immigration.) Most of the recent Slavic immigrants in Portland live in East Portland, along with the Iraqis, the Karan & Somi (from Burma), and Somalis.
I’ve lived in countries where I didn’t speak the language well enough to read street signs, and the traffic culture was vastly different from what I was accustomed to, and I figured out how to cross the street very quickly. It is demeaning to assume that people who move here from a different culture aren’t capable of crossing the street safely. Besides, how many people who have died on Portland streets weren’t able to read street signs or recently moved to the U.S.?
I agree and this is why this effort comes off as culturally insensitive. Telling a minority their culture is wrong and this is how we do things here. I’ve certainly experienced enough of that and I doesn’t feel good.
Who is telling people that their culture is “wrong”? Where do you come up with this stuff?
You don’t find it culturally-insensitive that the city thinks the problem with Division is people who can’t read English?
No; I don’t think it’s culturally insensitive to help educate newcomers to the customs and rules of the road that may differ from the places where they came, especially when those people are navigating a complex and dangerous and perhaps unfamiliar environment.
Of course it would be ideal to make that environment less dangerous, but this is irrelevant to the question of telling people their culture is “wrong,” as you have charged. Falsely.
How dare PBOT say some people in our community might have immigrated from places with different traffic customs, and might not be familiar with how things work here. How dare they?!?
Education and Outreach are absolutely wasteful and unnecessary. Do we really need to spend money to put ads on TV or put up billboards that say “thirty mph means 30 mph?” Maybe a bit of remedial character recognition so people see “30” on the Speed sign and match it with “30” on the speedometer in their cars?
E N F O R C E M E N T.
We’ve tried the other stuff that can be implemented in less than a few years and, guess what, it doesn’t work.
E N F O R C E M E N T.
Without ENFORCEMENT lives will continue to be taken by negligent drivers on Portland roads. Roadway redesign and education will only go so far to reduce the deadly consequences of unsafe driving. The idea that enforcement should not be at the top of the list of tools used to change driver behavior due to possible police discrimination is shortsighted. I would go as for to say this is an example of liberalism going off the rails. If Portland Police run enforcement operations that target drivers who drive 10 or more miles an hour over the speed limit how can this be called discriminatory policing?
enforcement has been a pillar of largely ineffectual north american transportation safety planning while successful vision zero reforms de-emphasize enforcement and emphasize redesign.
enforcement is a red herring.
No it’s not, we need both.
If you want to convince me of that, back it up with proof.
If you really need “proof” that getting people in trouble for breaking the rules deters other people from breaking the rules, no amount of “proof” from me is going to convince you of anything. Please.
the opinion of an anonymous online persona versus many years of empirical evidence in sweden.
gee…which do i trust more?
That’s because we’ve never actually tried enforcement – at least in Portland.
According to PPB’s annual report the Traffic Division had about 40 officers and had about 50,000 citizen contacts for the year. That’s 3 contacts per day per officer. And not all of the interactions resulted in a citation.
Meanwhile, there are about 15 million miles driven in Portland every day. That means there is less than one citation written for every 50,000 miles of driving. There is essentially NO chance of getting citation in Portland.
…and Portland drivers are very aware of that. It’s crazy here as a result–more and more dangerous and stressful every day. The threat of a hefty fine goes a long way toward deterring bad behavior and curbing that all-pervasive sense of entitlement and impunity.
Where oh where have you seen actual traffic law enforcement in N. America? As someone who has actually lived in one an American city that actually did do zero-tolerance traffic law enforcement, I can tell you that it flat out works.
Davis became the bike capital of the world with bike modal share at levels not yet recreated elsewhere almost solely on the shoulders of that zero-tolerance traffic law enforcement it conducted in the 1970’s and early 1980’s. Not coincidentally after adding scores of miles of bike paths, buffered bike lanes and all sorts of segregation creations in the late 1990’s and 2000’s but removing the traffic law enforcement, bike use plummeted.
Build all the segregated facilities you can afford, you’ll still have people being killed in horrid numbers at intersections and still won’t have a substantial bike modal share without the cultural infrastructure that comes with enforcement.
the idea that enforcement contributed to davis’ bike boom is absurd.
Says someone who wasn’t there. Enforcement was not just a contributor. Outside of the other cultural fact of Davis having been a highly educated city in which the community was actively looking for the right response to the oil embargo it was the most important thing that caused the boom.
Sure, Chancellor Mrak played a large role by actively encouraging a culture of bike use by the campus employees, himself included, during the ’60s and this had a large impact on the city at large. However, I can tell you as someone who was there that what got people on their bikes and kept them on their bikes was the extremely active zero tolerance traffic law enforcement that took place from the mid-1970’s to just about the mid-1980’s. No motorists dared to go even 2 mph over the speed limit and stop limit lines were strictly obeyed, among other niceties.
Not surprisingly, when that enforcement ended, so did the boom. It got so bad in the ’90s that my family got to be known as the “bike family” because we were among the few still riding. (This nickname doubtlessly arose due to the fact that my sister-in-law looks like my spouse and also rode with her kids and that there was a dopelganger for myself out there riding with his kids as well.)
Of course those traffic law cops gave cyclists citations too. We would all laugh at the streams of cyclists dutifully stopping at stop signs if we could see them today. In fact, it took me over a decade of living in Oregon to kick the habit of stopping at stop signs.
Soren,
Enforcement is regularly used in European Vision Zero efforts.
targeted enforcement, such as, speed cameras but the kind of expensive heavy-handed enforcement people are calling for here is explicitly de-emphasized in swedish policy.
J_R December 16, 2016 at 4:53 pm
That’s because we’ve never actually tried enforcement – at least in Portland.
pdxdave
Without ENFORCEMENT lives will continue to be taken by negligent drivers on Portland roads. Roadway redesign and education will …
With PPB, Enforcement will in all likelyhood be bands of police cars ticketing pedestrians on Division for crossing the street.
Another way of looking at this $300,000 allocation is that PBOT is essentially trying to force the community to have a conversation about enforcement – via the city budget. PBOT cannot enforce driver behavior, but the Police can. However, given limited personnel, the Police budget is primarily allocated towards solving violent and property crimes, and not so much traffic enforcement. PBOT cannot afford to do traffic enforcement itself, let alone build the infrastructure necessary for Vision Zero, so it must try to influence budget decisions for other bureaus. Council tends to be very conservative on budgets and what each bureau does or doesn’t do. By starting a $300,000 conversation now, PBOT can influence the budget process when it goes public in April at the various public hearings. If that is PBOT’s strategy, I think it’s pretty clever.
I remember last year when they threatened to cut the Traffic Division entirely. That was fun.
So they are limiting their actions to education and outreach?! Even though it was stressed during the Vision Zero Task Force meetings that street design had to be at the top of the list of the four focuses? They’re not even considering the “much less controversial measures like medians, refuge islands and crosswalk beacons”? I cannot express how much more than disappointed I am (even though I want education and outreach, this is not the kind I had in mind).
Yep. The Vision Zero plan was passed not even a month ago and the city is already ignoring it.
I hear and feel your disappointment Kristi. On Wednesday we’ll have a better sense from PBOT about what sort of additional measures they will take beyond this initial $300K of educational work.
I talked to APANO Executive Director today… he supports this step. From his perspective, there are many people who walk (and who get hit while doing so) in this area who are not from the U.S. and who can’t speak any english. They can’t read signs and they were taught totally different traffic culture than you and I. As such, he feels that it’s a reasonable first step to talk with them and see what they need immediately in terms of education and signage and maps and stuff — while working simultaneously on the larger infrastructure fixes.
Then the city should just give the money directly to APANO and let them spend the money as they see fit.
If you look carefully at the budget, that kinda is what they are already doing. Only about $55,000 is being spent by PBOT for signage, albeit in other languages and scripts, some of which will need translation (words) and transliteration (context). The rest is for meetings and workshops that APANO will help set up with other groups, probably including EPAP, SEUL, and EPNO and the many neighborhood associations, then invite PBOT and Police staff to talk with a variety of interpreters on hand.
That’s great. PBOT should act only as facilitator here and let the community decide for itself what is good for them.
I agree, except I think APANO ought to be the facilitator. PBOT is just another stakeholder.
Agreed.
And if they decide that they want to keep five car lanes are you okay with that?
Technically there is enough space on outer Division to fit eight 9-foot travel lanes, 4 in each direction. It’d be a tight fit, but it could be done. So, yeah, I’m fine with keeping the current 5-lane configuration, as long as they add chicanes and/or roundabouts every few blocks, as someone else suggested, to slow car traffic speeds.
That is undoubtedly true, but if people were driving slower and there were less lanes of travel and more frequent signalization, fewer people would be dying.
Is the executive director of APANO averse to speed limit reductions, traffic calming road design, potential loss of parking, building infrastructure that supports non-motorized transportation? Who is the executive director of APANO?
I really doubt they would be opposed to any of those things…they’re just saying that the most immediate action should be to do education and outreach. Don’t jump to conclusions.
Those were questions not conclusions. Do you have anything to base your doubt on? Prior PBOT projects have found surprising resistance from “community leaders.”
APANO may not be opposed, but they also might not want to take the heat for slowing down traffic.
Sorry, but “non-english speaking people don’t know how to cross the street” sounds more like intra-community classism than a starting point for a solution. Why not make the streets safe enough to accommodate people who may be confused about the best place to cross the street.
I think this approach is lousy. For any perception that would help a pedestrian protect him/herself from traffic violence (sight, hearing, language literacy, understanding of traffic culture, etc.) we will always have some citizens who lack some or all of those perceptions. The roads should be engineered to be safe for everyone. Anything else is not Vision Zero.
I’m not disagreeing, but I think it would be an interesting experiment to game out what would happen if, for example, outer Division had the speed limits reduced to the 20 or 25 some have called for. What would that do to travel times, congestion, pollution, safety, transit, etc.
Maybe the net effects would be positive, maybe not.
This also raises the question about what is the role of high(er) speed arterials in our transportation system.
the unambiguously successful original vision zero plan has only one major focus – designing a safe road system. moreover, the focus on individual responsibility in portland’s plan (enforcement and education/outreach) is explicitly contrary to these original vision zero reforms.
https://ec.europa.eu/transport/road_safety/sites/roadsafety/files/pdf/20151210_1_sweden.pdf
Soren.
What new rights are you willing to grant the designer? You cannot expect responsibility for your safety to be transferred to another individual, or the state, without also giving them new authority to control your behavior.
You continue to compare the US to socialist societies, but I don’t see any great push to change the current US political system.
It’s just this $300k that is going to education and outreach. There is Fixing Our Streets money for enhancing bike lanes on Division and it sounds like there will be extra gas tax allocated to more roadway redesign. Hopefully all this together will make a real difference.
Another update just posted:
UPDATE, 3:30 pm: The text of the ordinance has been released:
And here’s the breakdown and timeline of the actions PBOT will take in partnership with APANO…
This is nothing more than pandering and self-congragulatory feel-good back-patting. None of the actions listed will actually improve safety enough and we’ll just end up with more victim-shaming campaigns, lawn signs that don’t do anything, and $300,000 lost. Guaranteed this will go over budget and take longer than expected, too. We need a full rebuild of Division, and there is nothing in this plan that is working toward that goal. But at least Novick and Hales get to leave office pretending they helped minorities!
That is $300,000 wasted. Frankly, City Council should be ashamed of themselves. That is the opposite of Vision Zero.
That is really startling to read. $300k gets spent really fast, and most of the money strikes me as victim-blaming.
Actually, it could work both ways. At such meetings, the non-English speakers will probably be “educating” PBOT and Police staff as much or more than the staff will be trying to educate the immigrants. As you say in most of the posts, it’s about enforcement, but really it’s about taking police away from dealing with drugs, break-ins, and shootings, and re-assigning them to traffic enforcement, as their priorities. Neither the staff nor Council hear that from you and me, but they might listen to the immigrants, especially if they are paying $300,000 to do so. It’s up to Council to re-assign police, so I’d argue that this is one way to do it.
It just might work.
People using the street on foot do have some responsibility to be certain their personal actions contribute to their safe use of the street. Not every person driving a motor vehicle on the road, can be relied upon to look out for the safety of people on foot. There’s a good chance I think, that a lack of education of all road users, including people using the street on foot, on how to do so safely, is a contributing factor to at least some of the collisions that are occurring.
To a comment to a different story, a couple weeks ago I think it was…I posted a link to an Oregonian story about a collision in Portland involving someone driving, and someone in the process of crossing the street using one of the pedestrian activated flashing beacons.
Story covered some of the exchange in court between parties involved there; attorneys prosecuting and defense, judge, and the defendant…the person driving. With this person driving, indications were that there were other contributing problems on their part as well, but a couple of the other points that came out of just that story alone, was that…one…the person driving may not have understood what particular instructions these signals oblige people driving to observe.
… :the person walking had activated the signal, but the person driving did not stop and yield for the pedestrian…he drove right on through and into the person that had started walking across the street.
…two…though they had activated the pedestrian activated flashing yellow beacon, alerting people driving to the presence of someone in need of crossing the street on foot…the person walking, proceeded to walk out in front of a car that did not yield to them, and may not even have shown any indication to be slowing down in preparation to stop and yield to them.
… :the person driving is reported to have been driving at what may have been the posted speed limit of 35. Not an excessive speed for the road, if I recall, though I should review the story to be more certain. He was found guilty, but that’s not much consolation now, to the person that was trying to walk across the street.
Some education of the public on what this type of street signal infrastructure means, and how to use it and the street to be safe, may have been all that was needed to have avoided this collision.
That being said, I think the multi-language signs are a good idea, as is PBOT’s model of working with the local community. We don’t need another Williams debacle on our hands. However, it is insulting that this the entirety of the project. Those “engineering improvements” PBOT wants to use this project to leverage will likely just be rapid-flash beacons, when what we need is a full streetscape redesign.
It appears that the city only cares enough about equity to provide basic assistance to vulnerable communities, but not enough to actually fix something that is killing people. I am so sick of the city using equity as an excuse to serve their own needs while ignoring it when it doesn’t. Case in point: Fritz’ rant about how parking fees are inequitable, but doesn’t mention the far more equitable buses or bikes. If City Council truly cared about equity, they wouldn’t have forcibly removed from City Hall people who peacefully protesting an inequitable police contract. If we care about equity, then we must care about it all the time.
If this $300K was a part of a larger project to fix Division, then fine. But what will happen is that we will spend a year planning for the new signs, PBOT will put them up, along with a proverbial “Mission Accomplished” banner, City Hall will get to say they addressed equity concerns, and photo ops will ensure. Meanwhile, people will continue to die on Division and the city will continue to not find the funds to fix it.
Addressing your first paragraph: Williams had some serious teething troubles and the community didn’t totally support it. Some bike riders still won’t go there. I find it works OK though. If I take Rodney now it’s for variety and not out of desperation. PBOT stuck with the Williams project and fixed some stuff. I say go ride it, as opposed to using it for a handy stick to beat the city with.
I’ve sat and watched the traffic on Williams, and at peak times the bikes per light cycle can be greater than the car count. That’s OK with me.
A complete waste of $300K!!!
If PBOT staffers can come up with the reasons to answer point 1 in one hour they should be fired for being totally incompetent.
Here are some better uses for $300K:
Give it to the PPB for overtime to enforce the traffic laws.
Give the cops a stack of $100 gift cards to hand out to people driving considerately.
Let PBOT staffers hand out gift cards to pedestrians walking along Division Street or to people waiting at bus stops along Division Street.
Portland’s Motto: “The City that will try any feel-good solution before trying something that has been proven to work.”
That’s supposed to be if PBOT staffers cannot come up with ….
In other Oregon cities, it costs about $100k/yr to pay for a full time cop. Imagine the difference on Division if there were three full-time cops assigned, on an emergency basis, to patrol it full-time for traffic law enforcement. That’s nearly round-the-clock enforcement. I daresay that motorist behavior would change even with that small investment.
Speed reader boards less than $50K? Those work pretty well, from what I’ve seen. I recently watched one that flashes at 5 MPH, then flashes red/blue lights like a cop car at 10 MPH over. Saw lots of hard braking when those went off.
Previously on this forum someone posted a treatment they used elsewhere; I think UK. Exceeding a certain threshold would activate a red light (with camera), forcing the motorist to have to stop and wait when they were detected speeding. I wonder how much that costs?
Still boggles my mind that the US can automate precise assassinations from across the globe, but we can’t deploy basic technology to prevent pervasive traffic deaths due primarily to speeding and distracted driving.
“Speed reader boards less than $50K? Those work pretty well, from what I’ve seen. I recently watched one that flashes at 5 MPH, then flashes red/blue lights like a cop car at 10 MPH over. Saw lots of hard braking when those went off. …” pete
I think the item text in the chart maus posted to his comment, isn’t referring to just a single speed reader board, but is the budget for all of the measures that might be provided for in that item. I don’t know what the digital speed reader boards, or signpost style digital speed readouts cost, but they may not be a big sum of money. Hard to know without hard figures at hand. I’d like to think 5K or less. There’s different types, some on wheels, tow-able, some would cost more. Probably not tough to try out on Division, if they haven’t been already. But…they’re likely only good for one lane.
The one you refer to that, I think you’re saying, flashes at 5mph over posted, is an interesting idea, though it seems like the digital readout would be generally more effective in communicating to people driving. The flashing red/blue lights at even higher excessive speeds, is also interesting, especially if the lights were backed up with either photo radar cameras, or actual persons with police depts, authorized to stop and cite violators.
Use of some of the really big digital message boards is an idea I think of from time to time, as a possibly effective means to use on thoroughfares, to have people driving adjust their speed or other use of the road to something specific than the standard use of a particular road.
If you’ve driven Hwy 26 east from Sylvan to Downtown, you’ll have seen one of the signs to which I’m referring: Big…looks to be maybe 18′ by 9′ dimensions. Used for traffic congestion notifications, but can be programmed to provide probably any message. Likely expensive.
Yup, that board went in about the time I was working in Beaverton. They’re popular on Bay Area highways here as well. I notice people basically slow way down to read them, and they usually tell you travel times that you’ll inevitably get stuck in because where you’re going tends to be straight down that particular highway anyway.
The speed-sign placements I’m referring to (that I’ve witnessed here) tend to be midway on longer, straight stretches of road, typically with 25, 30, or 35 MPH limits. I can’t remember where I recently saw that one that flashes red and blue; I was riding somewhere I don’t normally go and noticed a Ford Expedition was particularly fast, so I can’t confirm but it seemed to flash a speed (with no red/blue) when people were doing over 25, and this person was easily over 35, but they broke pretty hard and didn’t speed up for the duration I could see them. The red/blue lights caught me off guard too; I’d never seen that technique before.
On one of these roads I ride regularly, they put bumpouts and a hashed crosswalk with button-activated flashing yellows, and that seems to slow traffic some (from what I saw before), and I think, again, because it’s mid-span… about where people tend to have gathered speed, I imagine many times simply by not paying attention to their own speed compliance.
Freedumb.
That is $300,000 wasted. Frankly, City Council should be ashamed of themselves. That is the opposite of Vision Zero.
What I see missing from this commentary is the necessity to engage the community east of East Portland.
Coming from inner Portland, East Portland is a bridge community where the speed limits often increase, the small blocks of the inner grid disappear, and the raceway begins. Approached from the other side via Fairview/Wood Village/Troutdale/Gresham, it is merely a destination or a passing point on that same raceway heading westbound.
To fully address this problem we need to engage the mindset of not only east Portland proper, but “East County” itself, the one that transcends Portland’s lines. These streets are a problem that all of the people in the region are a part of and as such, could really benefit from some inter-city cooperation.
You could buy a lot of hay bales and cones for $300k and see temporary safety improvements and traffic calming it would accomplish.
It’s my understanding the city already has a supply of cones and straw bales 😉
UPDATE, 3:31 pm: I see dead people.
Another person was killed today on outer SE Division?
I’ve been back to SE Asia 4x in the last 12 years. Traffic there is a much different situation.
1. cities are so congested that traffic rarely gets above 20 mph
2. very FEW stop lights , lots of “traffic circles”
3. most traffic is motorcycles
4. peds do NOT wait for a break in traffic , they look straight ahead and step out into it. Drivers know this and dodge around them. usually.
5. TPHCMC has 16 (sixteen) ped fatalities PER DAY. (and YES, it has 9 million pop)
I am NOT blaming the Division victims. They may have been born here, I don’t know. I do know that the above 5 points are fairly standard in 3rd world countries.
Also I drive Division, Stark & 122nd often. Am astounded at the number of peds that will dart across traffic when they are within 50 feet of a signalized crosswalk. It’s like the signals aren’t even there. And it’s ALL races/nationalities that do it. The thing that bugs me too is the squandering of resources .
Just south of Holgate on 122nd there are two signal crosswalks within 60 yards of each other and have NEVER seen either of them used.
Do they do studies or just plop those signal crosswalks where they feel like it ??? There is another at 141st on Powell that I’ve NEVER seen used, but yet that long stretch from 122nd to 136th has nothing ???
WAKE UP PBOT !!!
I agree with you about the ped signals in East Portland. Great as they are, and useful too, I have also seen many potential users not use them, but instead cross about 50 feet away from them, often with children in hand. No idea why.
PBOT does do studies about where to put them and uses those studies, but the studies assume that humans are rational and predictable. Most pedestrians and most drivers are safe and predictable. And some are not.
Powell is an ODOT facility – PBOT has very little power over it. Part of the reason that ODOT hasn’t yet put crossings between 122nd & 136th is that they actually have at least $22 million to rebuild it, plus some Portland SDC funds too. PBOT and ODOT are currently wrangling over what type of bike facility to build. PBOT wants a protected facility, ODOT wants buffered bike lanes. The arguments are pretty nasty and BP has already covered it in previous posts.
I think meeting with and listening to the residents of the neighborhood is important. So the first two steps of that timeline ($20,000) are great. But then they’ve already decided what they’re going to spend the money on after those meetings. Apparently we know already that the community residents want hundreds of thousands of dollars wasted on useless propaganda. What’s the point of the neighborhood meetings then? This is so depressing.
Put Jersey barriers on those blocks separating the bike lane. Only break them at signalized crossings. Peds will unlikely climb over a barrier if there is a signaled crossing nearby.
Peds and bikes win!
Plan a program:
Full Signal – $200 to 300K (includes soft costs)
Half Signal/Ped Hybrid Beacon – $150 to $250K
Rapid Flash Beacons – $40 to $100K
http://www.psrc.org/assets/9421/2_Pedestrian_Treatments.pdf
With half signals you can control the speed.
Jersey barriers are about $250 for a 10 foot barrier through commercial suppliers. Since we are talking 4.5 miles from 82nd to 175th (the Portland Gresham line), this works out to ((4.5 x 5280 feet x 2 sides) / 10 feet) * $250 = $1,188,000. With new signals every 200-400 feet, we are looking at a multi-million dollar project just on Division. Then there are the other super-wide high-death expressways of Foster, Halsey, Glisan, Stark, and 122nd.
Maybe pick them up at Costco for a bulk discount?
Actually I was thinking at the Lents Walmart, on the same aisle as you find marbles, in a variety of colors, made cheaply in China by panda prison slave labor. Of course, you might find a somewhat more expensive organic Jersey barrier at Nature’s, made with recycled concrete reinforced with fair-trade steel from Indonesia, but with fewer choices of colors.
I would rather see Jersey barriers or preferably a planted median in the center of the roadway. That would help slow down traffic, plus traffic would slow down because the lanes would end up weaving whenever turn pockets or pedestrian refuge islands are added. A lot of people seem to complain about NE MLK, which is like that, but the median treatment has definitely reduced the severity of crashes.
Will an 30 mph speed limit be installed by next Monday?
Nice to see the city is still engaged in this magical thinking you can stop dangerous driving without enforcement.
Oh wait, it’s not nice to see, because then dangerous driving won’t stop.
Often see it on SW Canyon Road. Not much enforcement.
#FIXTHEDAMNEDROAD!!!
Why not install traffic lights instead of flashing beacons? The pedestrian hits a button and the light at the intersection goes red. Or why not install crossing arms that lower and block the road like a railroad crossing so pedestrians can cross safely.
The Division BRT project is looking at putting in Pedestrian Hybrid Beacons (aka HAWKs) at the transit stops. Those work like signals, stopping traffic completely. They’re a lot more expensive than rapid flashing beacons, which is why they aren’t used as often.
Why expect change when people often vote for the same kind of city council?
Now that I think about it… $300,000 could go a long way in education. Use it to pay some of PSU’s traffic engineering student’s tuition, then hire them to FIXTHEDAMNEDROAD!!!
JM should run against Saltzman in 2018.
I Chloe can beat Novick, JM could beat Saltzman
The Jade District has been asking for safe streets for years. How is going with “outreach” and classes on how to cross the street not an insult?
Why don’t you let them decide if they have been insulted or not.
I still think “The what?” every time I hear “Jade District”…
Gwenevere said there’s a
“. . . speed trap in Downtown Milwaukie. . . As soon as the 30mph zone is over and it goes up to 40mph (southbound… Goes to 45mph in northbound), everyone jumps up to 50-55mph+ and the civilness goes away.”
Yep, the effective speed control in Milwaukee is actually kind of an argument _for_ traffic law enforcement. And yes people do speed up further south on 99E / McLoughlin but let’s be fair: Clackamas County deputies are not idle on that stretch. You can definitely get a ticket out there. The apparent free-range road design and the longer stretches between lights seems to lead to more rampant behavior on the part of some. It kind of seems that the light timing rewards a lead foot.
I think that’s an important piece of the puzzle–how fast do the lights roll through? What’s the light timing on Division, does anybody drive out there enough to know?
In general, you can’t really make coordinated light timing (to allow progression at a particular speed) work on two-way streets. You can have shorter or longer cycle times, but that doesn’t really impact progression speed.
“In general, you can’t really make coordinated light timing (to allow progression at a particular speed) work on two-way streets. You can have shorter or longer cycle times, but that doesn’t really impact progression speed.” glowboy
Why don’t you think so?
Beaverton actually has coordinated signal light timing on both of the main east-west highway-thoroughfares running through town. Together with the often heavy volume of traffic on those roads, the signal lighting does a fairly good job of regulating the speed of traffic to within the posted speed limit, which I believe is 35mph.
The terrain is flat, allowing a view ahead to perhaps 750′ or more, which allows people driving with a green light immediately before them, to see the point in the distance where the lights are turning yellow and red. The effect seems to work as an incentive to most people driving, to regulate their vehicle’s speed to one which will allow them to reach the signals in the yellow and red light cycle, at the approximate time they change to green, so as to avoid having to completely stop their vehicle.
The posted speed limit at 35mph, is too high I think: too much noise. Creates a hostile environment for walking and biking, though I don’t think there are a lot of injuries and deaths to people walking and biking, because of this. The roads are county or state jurisdiction, so the city couldn’t adjust to a lower posted speed even if it wanted to.
People run stop lights. Less so than in past, due to help from red light cameras.
Maybe it’s just the long blocks on McLoughlin that get people excited then. They see a green light out in the distance and accelerate. If there was a way to have the main commute direction traffic lights progress at 25 mph that would be great. Of course some folks would still go for 4th gear in between.
“Maybe it’s just the long blocks on McLoughlin that get people excited then. …” x
McLoughlin does have some very long blocks. As I recall, that road is kind of extraordinary with parts of it being located on the bluff close to the river, and further south, running past the big Moreland parks. More closely spaced intersections with coordinated signal light timing, that people driving could see the progression of some distance down the road, could work to have people moderate their speed of travel.
I don’t know how it compares to outer Division, but to me, McLoughlin seems more like an expressway than it does a thoroughfare. Some of Portland’s other thoroughfares than outer Division…like Sandy Blvd, Burnside, or Foster, may be better examples of where coordinated signal light timing could work to help moderate vehicle speed.
When people driving on a green, see down the road two or three intersections away, a signal, and those after it going from green to yellow…to keep moving rather than having to stop and get started again, there’s some incentive given by those changing signals, to slow down, proceeding through the intersections at a pace that will bring the vehicle to the intersections as the signals again change to green.
I know, by direct observation, that some of the major two-way streets in Portland roll green in the principal commute direction, and switch sometime mid-day. North of Sacramento, MLK flows S. in the morning. You can watch people hustling and making lane changes to catch lights because they know it too. I’d like to know what the programmed speed of that succession is. It may aid traffic flow, but it also creates an expectation of catching all the lights and leads to a certain amount of aggressive driving.
Yes ok, you can choose to have progression in one direction, though as you said, long distances between lights pretty much wipe out the benefit. If people are jockeying around to make the light timing, the usual solution is to reduce the progression speed. Even 20mph would amount to faster progression than random, unsynchronized light timing and people going 40mph between the lights.
Division should have a road diet with protected bike lanes. Period.
1367 Adopt the Locally Preferred Alternative for the Powell-Division Transit and Development Project and Conditions for Approval
CBO Analysis: In order to qualify for the FTA’s Small Starts program and an FTA grant of up to $100 million, the overall project cost must be less than $175 million. TriMet is preparing formal cost estimates based on a refined design and preliminary engineering. Currently, the project is in the development phase, which is estimated to cost $7.15 million, funded by the City with $2.0 million of Transportation System Development Charges (TSDCs) in FY 2015-16 and FY 2016-17, with the rest funded by the City’s partners, including Metro and TriMet. Up to $8.4 million of the City’s TSDC funds are available for the project, with $2.0 million of that dedicated to the development phase, and are included in PBOT’s 5-year CIP. The TSDC funds require a 25% match over the life of the project. Additional funds from the City are anticipated in order to meet the project’s local match, and the Resolution directs PBOT to work with the other partners to develop a finance plan and a financial strategy for the City’s contribution. Metro and TriMet may each have up to $25 million for their share of the total project costs.
http://www.portlandoregon.gov/bps/67013
I want to know more about this $15k listening session. Is that 100 listeners at $50/hr, or one really amazing $5k/hr listener? Will this include 3hrs of attentive nodding?
Of course this budget includes the 1.5hrs staff will sit in traffic to get to and from the 5:30pm listening session in city SOVs.
If the outreach and engagement is honest, humble, and productive, and followed up by real action that makes a difference, then I’m very excited to see this happening. But if there’s victim-blaming, I hope we can call that out.
The postcard came yesterday from PBOT:
Safety Cameras on High Crash corridors
coming soon on SE Division and SE 122nd.
http://www.portlandoregon.gov/transportation/70763
SE Division Street (between 148th and 162nd) Coming spring 2017
SE 122nd Avenue (between Foster and Holgate) Coming spring 2017
After watching today’s City Council meeting, I withdraw my initial skepticism. While I still don’t believe education nor enforcement to be an effective fix, it appears that the city has dedicated real funds to be allocated for a lane reallocation. PBOT specifically mentioned removing parking to install protected bike lanes (!), and nearly everyone from the local community that testified – including a rep from APANO – mentioned slowing down the cars on Division and reworking the street to be safer – i.e. infrastructure. I think the multi-language signs are only a good idea if coupled with infrastructure changes, and it sounds like that is the overall plan. Fritz even said something I agreed with! That Portland streets are too dark and we need better street lighting city-wide.
The city can still back down on things discussed today, and AFAICT there was no mention of removing two of the travel lanes, so we need to keep up the pressure to ensure that the city adheres to its goals.
The car parking needs to be removed. ODOT has pledged this for Barbur Blvd.
“…lane reallocation. PBOT specifically mentioned removing parking to install protected bike lanes (!), and nearly everyone from the local community that testified – including a rep from APANO – mentioned slowing down the cars on Division and reworking the street to be safer – i.e. infrastructure. …” adam h
‘lane reallocation’…is an interesting phrase. For a street like this section of Division, removing parking to create bike lanes sounds like a good idea. If the city were to decide to reduce two main lanes in each direction to just one, a la ‘road diet’, as the means by which to bring speeds of motor vehicles down, I’d be surprised…but if the city specifically set itself to reduce the posted speed limit, and create more effective means of reducing excessive speeds…that would be a great.
It looks like the city is going to install both speed reader boards and speed radar cameras. Those devices likely will help some to manage excessive speeds. If after that infrastructure is given a chance to work on this street, and it happens to turn out the result aren’t encouraging…then consider some stronger method of reducing excessive speed.
“…we need better street lighting city-wide.”
http://www.businessinsider.com/the-worlds-first-solar-panel-road-has-opened-in-france-2016-12
I have driven in dark and stormy weather in Portland. Drizzle is also troublesome. I have literally passed a cyclist in a bike lane inches off my fender and had no idea they were there until
…They were there.
Speed and lack of visibility will routinely kill innocents. The solution is to slow the street and light it up like a runway. That costs more than a cool 300k.
Or you could follow Oregon’s basic speed law.
the holgate re-striping road diet was remarkably effective and quite cheap:
http://bikeportland.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/holgatecrashes1.jpg
“I have driven in dark and stormy weather in Portland. Drizzle is also troublesome. I have literally passed a cyclist in a bike lane inches off my fender and had no idea they were there until
…They were there. …” mark smith
Offer additional thoughts if you will, about why it was in the circumstances you described, that you weren’t aware of the person riding a bike in the bike lane until they were very near your vehicle’s fender. Extra bright street lighting as a means to counter poor visibility of the street and everyone using it, is something that simply is not likely to happen on a wide basis, because of the expense and complexity involved. Many streets will continue to remain dark, and people need to learn to safely compensate for this road use condition through better road use techniques, whatever their mode of travel may be.