New details on how PBOT will spend $200,000 on intersection daylighting

Staff from the Portland Bureau of Transportation have revealed more details about their efforts to prohibit car parking at intersections.

At a meeting of the city’s Pedestrian Advisory Committee on March 18th, PBOT said they plan to implement “vision clearance” (their term for daylighting) standards at 200 intersections over the next two years. When I reported on this last month, all we had was the number of intersections and a timeframe. At the meeting last week, staff added that they have $200,000 to spend on the installations and that they expect to have all of them done this year.

New details revealed at the meeting include:

• Of the $200,000 budget, $50,000 comes from the Fixing Our Streets (FOS) program (revenue fro local gas tax). That means locations of those intersections must be spread evenly across the four council districts. FOS has $70.5 million allocated for its 2024-2028 project list. The daylighting projects will come out of the $6 million Safety on Neighborhood Streets spending category, so that means at least one of the cross streets of these 50 locations must be a local street classification.
• In a presentation PBOT shared with the Pedestrian Advisory Committee, they showed a few slides that are examples of locations they’re considering: N Mississippi Ave and N Failing St., NE Alberta Street and NE 16th Ave., NE Alberta Street and NE 16th Ave., and SE Belmont and SE 34th.
• The remaining $150,000 will come from the city’s General Fund, so there are no location restrictions on 150 of the intersections.
• PBOT will focus treatments on pedestrian districts that are also business districts. These are places where a busy street intersects with a local (residential street). Additional priority will be on locations where the side street is already a designated neighborhood greenway/walkway and where there’s an existing marked crosswalk.
• Intersections near schools will be a prime target. PBOT is already doing outreach to schools and will do a small educational campaign (lawn signs at corners) to explain why parking is being restricted.
• PBOT plans to clear two or four spots at each intersection, with a maximum of one parking spot at each corner. Many installations will remove just one parking spot at two corners (see diagram).
• Cost for each intersection is about $700-$800 in materials and labor (PBOT says they might be able to do more than 200 intersections with this first tranche of funding).

The practice of daylighting is a standard and proven road safety measure. When people choose to park their cars (especially larger ones) close to the corner it makes it harder for other road users to see cross traffic. Daylighting is especially popular among folks who aren’t inside cars because the risk of injury (or worse) from a collision is far greater when not wrapped by a metal cage.

Once completed, this work will help PBOT answer critics who say they haven’t moved fast enough on daylighting since making it a pillar of their Vision Zero strategy years ago. In 2020, PBOT was sued by a man who was injured in a collision while biking on SE Ankeny and his lawyers said the city was partly liable because they didn’t prevent drivers from parking all the way up to the corner.

The next step in this process is to identify which locations need daylighting the most. If you have ideas, email them to visionzero@portlandoregon.gov.

Learn more at PBOT’s vision clearance website.