After a man was killed by a driver while bicycling on Northeast Glisan one week ago, I heard from a nearby resident who wasn’t shocked at all. Why? Because he’s seen dozens of speeding, dangerous drivers over the course of the past few years wreaking havoc on the street outside his door.
“People drive reckless on this section,” the resident (who has asked to remain anonymous) told me. “They use the bike lanes and center lane as passing lanes. Driver’s regularly do 60-plus mph.” And in dozens of videos clips taken by home security cameras and shared with BikePortland, many of these drivers slam into concrete medians, metal sign poles, and other infrastructure — all of it installed to make the street safer.
In the video above you can see — and hear — some examples. Drivers hit the concrete medians between 128th and 130th at full speed, sometimes launching into the air. You hear the breaking of metal, the “crunch” of impact, then see the damage to cars and the infrastructure we all pay for. The clips I share are a selection of what he sent me, and there are many more he hasn’t sent. About two years ago, he estimated there used to be about three crashes a week. Now he sees damaged infrastructure and/or captures a collision on video about once every 10 days.
The one video I’m not sharing yet clearly shows a driver speeding westbound on Glisan and striking a man on a bicycle from behind. In one angle, I watched a man riding with no hands, looking like he had no care in the world while he enjoyed a late night ride. Then, in a flash, a blur flies across the screen. It’s a driver going at least twice as fast as other drivers on the road and headed directly for the rider. Then the unforgettable, gut-knotting sound of impact.
Glisan a ‘High Crash’ Location
This section of NE Glisan is on the City of Portland’s list of “high crash corridors” streets that have an above average rate of serious crashes, injuries, and deaths. As such, the Glisan gets priority for safety investments and more scrutiny from transportation bureau officials.
Reached for comment on this story, Portland Bureau of Transportation Public Information Officer Dylan Rivera said PBOT has already made some “safety improvements” on Glisan and has more on the way.
“The observation of crashes at a place where we have a public school entrance, a pedestrian bridge, a marked school crossing with a flashing beacon, crosswalk and cross-bike and bike lane protected by concrete curbs indicate the need to address education and enforcement, as well as engineering as we work to make our streets safer,” Rivera shared with BikePortland.
Rivera said they’re “eager” to install more automated enforcement cameras and that PBOT will consider more location on Glisan in addition to ones installed 2.5 miles away at 82nd Avenue. A forthcoming $20 million investment into 122nd Avenue will include major upgrades to the NE Glisan intersection about 10 blocks away.
But what about this particular spot?
I asked Rivera how often PBOT maintenance crews have had to come out and replace broken signs, poles and other infrastructure in the blocks near NE 128th and 130th. Here’s the list he sent back:
- 3/1/2022 – Replaced 9 delineators at the intersection of 122nd and Glisan
- 8/4/2022 – Replaced 1 delineator just east 122nd on Glisan
- 3/29/2023 – Replaced 19 delineators on the islands and curb bike buffer at 128th and Glisan
- 1/10/24 – Replaced missing delineators on the island at 128th and Glisan
- 7/11/22 – Replaced down pipe and sign at 132nd and Glisan
- 3/29/23 – Replaced missing pipe and signs at 130th and Glisan
- 1/24/2024 – Replaced downed signs on median on the island at 128th and Glisan
- 3/27/2024 – Replaced missing pipe and sign on the island at 129th and Glisan
- 4/5/2024 – Reinstalled pipe and sign in Bio Swell 126th and Glisan
- 7/30/2024 – Replaced missing sign at the median on 130th and Glisan
- 10/14/2024 – Reinstalled downed pipe and sign at 133rd and Glisan
I could see some of the damage during a visit to the site over the weekend. Large chunks of curb are missing. Plastic delineator posts are battered and/or missing.
If this is what happens after PBOT does a major safety intervention, what are we doing wrong?
The resident who shared videos with me says one big factor is that local drivers don’t respect the bike lanes because they rarely see people riding in them (a situation I’ve been concerned about for years as well). He’s also concerned that staff at Menlo Park Elementary School do nothing to build that respect when they allow parents in cars to use the protected bike lanes outside the school to drop-off and pick-up their kids.
I hope people realize the design issue is there’s not enough concrete. The median crossings are relatively robust compared to the anemic protected bike lanes which rely only on paint. That leaves the existing medians floating on islands in the middle of a relatively wide and fast arterial. If we added more concrete to define the bike lanes we’d have better protection for riders and we’d give drivers more visual cues to slow down and it’d be less likely they’d strike the islands.
Rivera at PBOT hinted that the city knows the infrastructure on Glisan isn’t as robust as it needs to be. He said they felt pressured by, “public interest in moving quickly to improve traffic safety, especially to create protected bike lanes using inexpensive, temporary materials, as a way to deliver timely improvements.” So Glisan, Rivera explained, is a location where they “moved quickly and used plastic materials to provide protection.”
But these video clips, Monday’s horrible fatal collision — and the three other deaths on east Portland roads since — should make it clear that PBOT’s quick-and-cheap bike lane approach is just one reason this is happening. It feels like this is yet another illustration of the epidemic of lawless, inattentive driving that plagues our city — and the lack of enforcement that goes along with it.
It also shows that PBOT’s incremental, under-designed, under-funded Vision Zero projects are simply not enough to meet the threat of today’s drivers. I had a bad feeling about this when elected officials and PBOT staff held a press conference in 2018 just 1.5 miles away on NE 122nd Avenue. They patted themselves on the back for adding a few medians and a crosswalk, but I worried that it wouldn’t make a dent in driver behavior. “It will take much more to tame the wide and fast 122nd Avenue,” I wrote in a recap of that press conference six years ago. “Even with the crowds and cameras at the newly updated intersection this morning, I still saw close calls and aggressive driving.” The same can be said for NE Glisan.
The person who lives within yards of where that man was killed on Monday also happens to be a cyclist himself. But given what he’s seen and what his home security cameras have captured, “I do not ride on this street,” he said. “I drive my bike to other neighborhoods to ride.”
Given the harrowing footage I’ve seen, I don’t blame him.
