Portland traffic safety officials held yet another press conference on Wednesday to highlight a disturbingly high number of fatal traffic crashes. And like similar events held recently, those officials pinned some of the blame for deadly streets on cultural issues and the erosion of behavioral norms that began in 2020 with the Covid pandemic and have hung around ever since.
“We’ve adopted this culture where folks feel like they can drive however they want.”
– Ty Engstrom, PPB Traffic Division Sergeant
The Portland Police Bureau (PPB) has tallied 67 deaths on Portland roads so far this year — a pace that puts us on on par with last year’s record-high number. PPB Traffic Division Sergeant Ty Engstrom offered historical context for that number to the group of media outlets assembled in a conference room inside a police facility in northeast Portland yesterday.
“I looked at numbers all the way back to 2000. And the last five years have all been higher than the prior 20 years before that,” Sgt. Engstrom said.
“This is a cultural issue that we need to address,” he continued. “We’ve adopted this culture where folks feel like they can drive however they want. That what is going on in their life is more important than the other people around them, and we need to have a culture change where we here in Portland — whether you live here, work here, commute through here, are visiting here — you respect the life and sanctity of life of everybody around you.”
Engstrom said the pandemic put Portlanders on a path of driving dysfunction. Here’s more of what he said:
“It created an atmosphere where people felt like they could get away with things. And it has not gone back to way it should be. I think that we have developed this culture where Portland is a playground and there’s no repercussions, and people get away with things here, and you can come here to drive fast speed, race, do donuts, weave in and out of traffic, whatever you choose to do, and there’s no repercussions…
We’re trying to do what we can to change the culture.”
These words felt hollow coming from Sgt. Engstrom, since he played a key role in perpetuating the dangerous behaviors he now laments. In 2021, Engstrom held a press conference with the specific intent to send a message that traffic laws weren’t being enforced in Portland. That dangerous gambit was exposed later as a political stunt to curry political support for a larger PPB budget.
Engstrom’s tactics worked, depending on which side of this cultural dysfunction you are on. Traffic behaviors grew much worse, but in 2023 the PPB was able to re-launch its Traffic Division. Now Engstrom says he’s hopeful police staffing will continue to grow beyond the seven-member team that currently patrols during an afternoon shift.
Engstrom shared at the press conference that PPB currently has a dedicated, seven-member Traffic Division team that patrols the streets seven days a week from 5:00 pm to 3:00 am (there are two teams total who share this shift). That timeframe was chosen because that’s when the PPB sees the vast majority of serious injury and fatal crashes, as well as when intoxicated and impaired drivers tend to be on the road. Engstrom said the current plan is to re-assemble a day shift traffic patrol team “in the future sometime” as bureau staffing levels rise.
Joining Engstrom behind the microphones was Portland Bureau of Transportation Public Information Officer Dylan Rivera. He said the multiple fatalities over the holiday weekend was, “Really shocking and should be alarming to everyone.”
Rivera said PBOT needs to do more, but he also repeated a new mantra that the issue of road safety transcends the transportation bureau. “This is bigger than PBOT. This is bigger than Portland police. This is about our community,” Rivera continued. “This is about public health, behavioral health, substance use disorders, many of the mental health and other behavioral health crises we saw emerging during the pandemic played out on our streets and contributed to traffic deaths that spiked in 2020 and continue to stay high.”
In an interview with BikePortland after the press conference, Rivera said that so far there are no specific proposals on the table for how other agencies like TriMet or Multnomah County can help PBOT achieve their goal of zero traffic deaths (a.k.a. Vision Zero).
How can PBOT and PPB encourage safer driving? Automated enforcement is one solution. Rivera said PBOT has installed 12 new speed and intersection cameras in the past year alone and that by early 2025 there will be 40 total cameras on the streets. While that is progress, Rivera made it clear more cameras are needed. “We need to do a lot more. We need more cameras on more high crash corridors, and so we are working to push our contractor to get more cameras on the streets.”
That view is shared by City Councilor-elect (and former PBOT commissioner) Steve Novick. At an event last month he said he’d support enforcement cameras on “every goddamn intersection in the city.” I shared that quote with Sgt. Engstrom and asked if PPB would support such a massive camera increase.
“That’s a lot of cameras,” Engstrom responded. “That’s a lot of intersections all over the city. And I do know that from behind the scenes, that’s a lot of personnel that it’s going to take in hours to because you have to review all those and you have to approve them, and so that’s a daunting task. But I absolutely support, you know, increased enforcement and education on streets.”
Camera enforcement will only reach its potential if drivers have legible license plates. The lack of visible plates and unpaid vehicle registration fees are symptoms of the sick state of driving culture. Engstrom and Rivera both said the lax enforcement since 2020 is over.
“I’m sure there are people out there that are avoiding putting their license plates on to try and get away from some of those tickets,” Engstrom said. “But that is absolutely illegal. You must have those license plates and registration, and our officers are absolutely able to issue citations for that type of behavior.”
And Rivera admitted that backing off enforcement during the pandemic (a decision that came from the state and federal level, due to pandemic-related issues) had a negative impact on safety and compliance. “What we learned is, when you give people an inch, they take a mile… now we need to get back to normal. We need everyone to understand that we need to get back to the culture of following the vehicle registration rules, displaying plates… It’s not okay to drive around with expired registration.”
Cameras are not a panacea and it will take a much more holistic approach to achieve Vision Zero.
To end deaths and serious injuries, PBOT’s Rivera said a lot more funding is needed. He says the agency needs “a major investment” from the Oregon Legislature in the 2025 transportation funding package. And lobbying for that effort will come from a new, 12-member Portland City Council. Rivera said PBOT believes the new councilors “understand the urgency and the funding crisis that all of transportation faces.”
That crisis has left PBOT in dire financial straits for years. Budget gaps last year led to the prospect of laying off 100 staffers and the coming budget doesn’t look much better. “We need to go from scarcity to bigger investment, and we believe the legislature, the governor and the city council understand this, understand the serious, seriousness of it, and will take action next year.
Moving the needle on road safety will take more than a larger budget or a culture change among road users. The agencies themselves need a culture change. PPB needs to do more with the budget they have, stop playing politics with their services, and rebuild community trust. And PBOT needs to communicate more urgency to the public about what’s at stake.
Last month, Rivera shared a controversial statement in an interview with a KPTV reporter who did an in-depth story on Vision Zero. Pressed on why deaths continue to rise nearly a decade after declaring a Vision Zero goal, Rivera said, “It’s taken generations to build the streets we have for speed instead of safety. It’s going to take decades, potentially generations, to redesign them.”
That framing frustrated some activists who felt it sent the wrong message to survivors of deadly traffic crashes and everyone who wants safer streets about how long the community should expect to wait to feel safer using Portland roads.
I asked Rivera to clarify what he meant by that statement. Here’s how he responded:
“It was in the context of the transportation funding crisis. That was in the context of facing layoffs among the people who could make our streets safer, and saying, ‘How come traffic safety investments aren’t working well?’ Traffic safety investments aren’t happening! Traffic safety personnel are facing layoffs. Instead of talking about what new projects we can do, we have a budget based on band-aids and borrowed cash.
We have had a rise in traffic deaths on our streets since the onset of the pandemic, we have had a flat to declining public investment in the things we know can reduce the severity of those crashes.”
While PBOT sees more funding as the most important tool to reduce crashes and deaths, PPB says its all about getting more officers on the streets.
Sgt. Engstrom said PPB staffing numbers are at “the bottom of the dip” and that in the next couple of years they’ll have more officers and will be able to increase Traffic Division officers.
One place PPB staffing issues have led to a tangible difference for Portlanders is in handling the growing number of hit-and-run cases. “We used to have full-time officers here and all they did is hit-and-run cases and follow ups. We lost those positions when we lost the Traffic Division and it hasn’t been able to come back yet.”
“There are, unfortunately, a large number of hit-and-run cases that don’t get the follow up that they deserve.”
