A woman was killed on Friday afternoon while walking across NE Broadway. Local advocates have now planned a memorial event to highlight the inherent dangers at this section of Broadway and encourage the City of Portland to do more to mitigate them.
“I hope that this memorial will seriously open the eyes of the people who need to fix this.”
— Victim’s daughter (via Facebook)
“We are devastated to hear about this tragedy and frustrated that this street is so dangerous for people that walk and cycle. We are coming together on Wednesday April 24 at 5:30PM to honor her memory,” reads a statement about the event from BikeLoudPDX, a grassroots, all-volunteer group that responded to collisions on SE Division Street in 2016 by installing hay bales to tame fast drivers.
The plan is to meet at the intersection on NE Broadway and Grand at 5:30 pm this Wednesday evening. There will be a moment of silence at 6:00 pm and then a group bike ride to City Hall.
Here’s more from BikeLoudPDX:
“As a city we uphold values that no one should die on our streets. In 2016 city council approved a Vision Zero resolution to eliminate traffic deaths by 2025, but we are already falling short of this goal. This is the 17th death on our streets this year.
NE Broadway ranks as the most dangerous corridor for biking and fifth for walking. 4 other people have been injured crossing this intersection since 2007.
Redoing this section of Broadway is part of planned safety updates in Central City in Motion, which was passed unanimously by City Council in November 2018. This project is on the 1-5 year implementation plan but there is no date scheduled for when any changes might come to this corridor.”
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BikeLoudPDX says there are several things that could be done quickly to make this street safer. They want a protected left turn sign from Grand to Broadway, a temporary narrowing of the street with construction materials, a protected bike lane, and a “leading pedestrian interval” (LPI, where walkers get green while drivers see red).
The Street Trust and Oregon Walks are also supportive of this event and are helping out.
The victim’s daughter is aware of the event and fully supportive. “Seeing someone bring a memorial together like this touches me so deeply,” she shared on the event’s Facebook page. “I hope that this memorial will seriously open the eyes of the people who need to fix this.”
As we reported over the weekend, an eyewitness to Friday’s fatal collision said the woman had the right-of-way prior to being run over by a “huge delivery truck” that was turning left, “and they didn’t even slow down.”
According to our fatality tracker, this was the 16th fatal traffic collision of 2019. There was yet another one yesterday, bringing the total to 17. That puts us five fatalities over our year-to-date total from 2018.
Get more details on Wednesday’s event on the BikePortland Calendar or Facebook.
— Jonathan Maus: (503) 706-8804, @jonathan_maus on Twitter and jonathan@bikeportland.org
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One more over the weekend–18.
At the present rate we will have 60 this year.
Time to rethink VZ?
Or maybe it’s finally time to start thinking or better yet acting on VZ.
Jim.. the total number of deaths is 17. I cannot find the 18 that PPB keeps referring to.
Also, it’s nitpicky… but IMO the problem isn’t VZ, the problem is the people we’re counting on to make it a reality.
Who is best suited to deliver that reality?
It’s pretty obvious what is causing the problems here. Outlaw using privately owned automobiles on public roads. Vision zero overnight, for free.
LOL. This is Portland. What police force would enforce that?
What kind of facist do I look like, enforce it yourself.
Well that’s realistic.
Can’t we just declare the trial period for cars and trucks over. We gave the scooters a few months and eventually went ahead. but we have given happy motoring 100 years with disastrous results. People die by the thousands, the land has been covered by millions of square miles of impervious oil covered gravel and the very future of the earth and all the species that live on it are in peril. Lets call it already, it was a failed experiment, lets send these fiendish machines back where they came from and give our children a chance.
I don’t think you have the time, energy, or money for that to happen. But it sounds cool and people keep saying it on this forum so what’s one more kick of the cliche can?
I don’t mean for this to sound like “whataboutism”, but something I’ve been struggling with lately is what a “reasonable” response is to death. As an example, the American response to 9/11 (whether we agreed with it or not) was to invade 2 countries and completely revamp the banking, customs and immigration systems in this country. The costs to the state were massive, but it was done in response to 3,000 people killed.
A hiker is killed by a cougar in Oregon and (though many of us pointed out the absurdity in this) the response is to go on a state sanctioned hunting expedition in order to kill the cougar (aside: the cougar that was killed in retaliation may or may not have been the culprit in the death of the hiker.)
Roughly 3,000 people die a month in road violence and the response is…..effectively nothing. I don’t think the mayor even commented on it? Just another day and another person dead.
How did we get here? There is certainly a car industrial complex, sure, but as a populace it seems like we’re in this sweet spot of sorts where the number of deaths is so massive but it happens on such a small/constant scale (a few hundred dead per day for the past 80 years spread out across the country the size of a continent.) I don’t have an answer here, but I hope that events like “no more deaths” can move forward the conversation that we really need to upend the status quo because the death toll is unacceptable.
I think how we got here, or maybe more accurately why we’re stuck here is that most people think our transportation system, at a fundamental level, serves them pretty well. The fact that it is dangerous is just accepted as a fact of life, something we’ve all known since we were 2 yrs old. I think most people would want the system to be safer, but not at the cost of degrading its utility.
My take, anyway.
I have no idea what you are talking about.
I know no one who thinks Portlands current transportation system is working well at all…
comment of the week !
this in response to MTW
People are very poor at risk analysis, they just don’t know it. Death by cougar or terrorist attack is extremely rare, so the reaction is extreme, but getting killed by a driver is so commonplace it doesn’t even make the local news. You may appreciate “Risk” by Dan Gardner.
Cars will go away when there’s something better to replace them.
A bike?
A bike isn’t going to help me haul 30 retaining wall bricks.
How often do you do this?
hahahahahahaha
If everyone thought bikes were better, cars would be gone.
Rule of thumb: Every bicycle lane is paved with a death. Let’s make this one the last for NE Broadway, which has had a planned PBL for at least a decade.
Jonathan — thanks for posting this event.
Everyone — come if you are able.
If you can’t, but would like to voice your concerns about safety on Broadway and elsewhere, please send an email to Commissioner Eudaly along these lines:
“Dear Commissioner Eudaly,
“Please make immediate safety improvements to Broadway and Grand, where poor road design resulted in the loss of a woman’s life last Friday. And please prioritize funding on fixing Portland’s most dangerous streets, especially Broadway!”
email: chloe@portlandoregon.gov
Phone, twitter, Facebook, etc. at https://www.portlandoregon.gov/eudaly/
Commissioner Eudaly’s office is supportive of the event. Let’s get her to ramp up support by reaching out to her.
Ted Buehler
BikeLoudPDX
Several of us BikeLoud folks have spent time at Broadway and Grand over the weekend. We’ve determined that, as per Ester’s comment on the previous thread, that the double-threat left turn lanes are absolutely terrifying. I’ve walked around the area a *lot* over the 10 years I’ve lived nearby, but I don’t actually recall using that particular crosswalk before.
We think PBOT should close the right lane for the block of Broadway from Grand to MLK. And install a bulb out on the left side of Broadway west of Grand.
These ideas aren’t our own ideas, PBOT folks have been throwing them around both before and after Friday’s tragedy. But they appear to be on a “let’s get this done in a couple months” timeline.
But we think it should be done immediately. There is absolutely no reason to wait more than 24 hours after coming up with the basic plan. The modifications can be put in with orange traffic cones, then upgraded to white bollards and paint later.
We are prepared to do these modifications ourselves with hay bales, prior to the memorial. But we hope that PBOT will take their own initiative and install the safety modifications with hay bales.
Ted Buehler
Thank you Ted. Give em heck.
I spent 20-30 minutes watching car/driver pairs at that corner yesterday. I noticed that the signal on NE Grand at NE Clackamas is on a sensor–it only goes to red when there is someone waiting on the cross street.
This means that a driver on NE Grand, as they cross NE Multnomah, sees:
*2 blocks of open 4-lane pavement, and then
*as many as 4 green lights, with potential of making them all.
Some drivers react to this by increasing their speed noticeably. Speed is a factor, as they say.
Nobody has asked me but I would put the NE Clackamas light on a regular cycle and set the timing for the lights on NE Grand to progress at 15 mph. It’s the last few drivers through the signal that are sometimes most aggressive so the signal at NE Clackamas could change to red a little early.
Keep in mind that this is State Route 99E and ODOT is not going to let anyone slow down single-occupancy motor vehicles trying to get to the freeway.
I am pretty sure Grand/MLK is now PBOT owned and controlled.
Correct. MLK is signed 99E as a historic highway designation, but it is owned and operated by PBOT. ODOT has no say whatsoever over the street.
There are a lot of angry drivers in Portland who see Twenty Is Plenty as the vehicular equivalent of gun control. Not only are they blatantly ignoring it, they seem to be reveling in disobeying it.
I got the “18” number from the Big O.
Wear blue for the victims of road rage tomorrow. Bring donuts to hand out to drivers raging stuck in traffic. No more traffic victims. We need real solutions not more freeways. Do not bring children. Let’s do this!
Just a reminder:
Bringing some big fixes to the notoriously dangerous N/NE Broadway corridor was a promise of the Rose Quarter Improvement (aka I-5 Widening) Project. Instead, it is proving to be the opposite. It would make things worse.
A safer and more comfortable bicycle route to replace Flint Ave. from North Portland to the Broadway Bridge? ‘Nope. Sorry. It’s the Vancouver/Broadway/I-5 Freeway intersection for you, bicycle riders.’
And what about the promise to create a revitalized walkable neighborhood? ‘Nope. Sorry. We will shave off sidewalk corners at multiple intersections to allow large trucks more comfortable and faster turns at the expense of shorter and safer crosswalks for you, pedestrians. ‘
A spoonful of surface street safety and connectivity improvements for bicyclists and pedestrians is being proffered to help make the freeway widening go down. Don’t swallow it.
Not that your comment adds anything of substance. Do you really want to defend the status quo? (Go ahead and try.)
There is this place called reality and another called a pipedream. The pipedream in this scenario is quite easily recognized. Bikeninja wanted the likes that are associated with relating what gets said on this blog quite frequently, to the point where fatigue has set in and just becomes annoying. Of course, BN is free to do so, but I am also free to point out that realistically, that isn’t going to happen. So what are we left with? Reason. To think cars will disappear is not reasonable at this point. That being said, it’s cool to get some freebie likes be repeating cliches, but that isn’t going to save anybody’s life.
I’ll defend anything worth defending. Cliches aren’t one of them.
Did you have anything to add other than defending the status quo? Liking cliches?
Johnny Bye Carter:
. . .this is State Route 99E and ODOT is not going to let anyone slow down single-occupancy motor vehicles. . .
You are onto something. Unless of course anyone happens to be laying in the street.
Just heard that PBOT Staff Art Pierce, Catherine Ciarlo and Dylan Riveria will be at the memorial.
Also, they made emergency permanent modifications to the intersection this morning to improve safety
* curb bulbouts
* “Leading Pedestrian Interval” for signal, so people walking start crossing ahead of the green light.
* changeable message sign stating that someone was killed here, please drive carefully (temporary)
Thanks much to PBOT for a quick response to this tragedy.
Ted Buehler