If Portland never reaches Vision Zero, it won’t be for a lack of effort or analysis. Now a new, independent report by City Club will add another layer of research onto this vexing challenge of preserving every life on the road.
Since City Council adopted the Vision Zero resolution in 2015, which called on them to marshal the resources to achieve zero road deaths by this year, they’ve consistently monitored and tracked progress via a series of internal updates and reports. In 2024 the City Auditor investigated the program and gave it a mixed review.
Now Portland City Club will devote its considerable research capacity to the issue. City Club is a nonprofit with a mission to, “inform the community in public matters and to arouse in them a realization of the obligations of citizenship.” “The [City Club research] committee will study the effectiveness of current strategies and evidence-based alternatives that could help Portland move closer to its safety goals,” reads a description of the upcoming report. City Club announced the effort in an email on June 27th.
They will assemble and independent team of City Club members to aid their research committee. Those selected must commit to 12 months of service and be free from any conflicts of interest and/or financial contracts related to Vision Zero work.
Here are a few of the questions City Club hopes to answer:
- How does the current implementation of the Vision Zero plan affect traffic fatalities? Are these policies effective, sufficient, and enforced?
- What policies would improve Portland’s Vision Zero approach, or hasten the results? Are there more aggressive or effective policies that could be adopted?
- How should Vision Zero balance other transportation objectives, such as environmental concerns, public safety response times, and freight mobility?
The report will issue a set of recommendations and its finding are likely to be closely considered by community and elected leaders. I still hear transportation bureau staffers refer to City Club’s 2013 report, No Turning Back: A City Club Report on Bicycle Transportation in Portland. That report was more than words on paper as City Club formed an advocacy committee after it was published with an aim of pushing forward on its recommendations.
City Club’s initiative comes at a time when Portland’s Vision Zero efforts are at an inflection point. The overall narrative and statistical trend suggests a new normal of annual road fatalities that are double the amount the city had in the early 2000s. But the startling rise in deaths between 2018 and 2021 has plateaued. After a downward trend in the last three years, our current tracker shows just 15 people have been killed on Portland roads so far this year —that’s less than half the number on this same date last year and puts us on track for the lowest total since 2012.
Political winds also suggest a new era is afoot in how roads are managed. Safety advocates have a strong champion in Portland City Councilor Tiffany Koyama Lane, who has made Vision Zero her top priority. In the recently adopted city budget, Koyama Lane fought for and saved $670,000 in Vision Zero safety project funding that was on the chopping block. A budget note sponsored by Koyama Lane will move a top Vision Zero staffer out of the Portland Bureau of Transportation (PBOT) and into the office of the City Administrator for Public Works, “to ensure they have full access to critical cross-bureau collaboration and initiatives.”
PBOT also faces the most severe budget crisis in the history of the agency. This is forcing the agency to consider bold ideas like a new local tax or fee to raise revenue, or even banning car use on some roads to reduce maintenance costs and increase the community value of our shared right-of-way.
Given this context, it’s a good time for City Club to embark on this project. Hopefully their final report will grasp that Portland’s failure to accomplish its Vision Zero goal is just as much of a political problem as it is a technical one.
Like many transportation problems that are characterized as intractable or impossible, the solution to saving lives is simple: we need to dramatically reduce driving trips and decrease human exposure to cars and their drivers. That’s how we fix congestion, clear the air, improve our neighborhoods, strengthen the local economy, build a more resilient, vibrant city — and it’s how we achieve Vision Zero.
If it succeeds, City Club’s research will provide even more ammunition to advocates, agency staff, and elected officials who are working to bend the arc of political possibility.
— For more on this initiative view City Club’s full recruitment message and/or apply to be on the research committee here.
Thanks for reading.
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As I have often said / written in the the past the opposite of Vision Zero is ‘Zero Vision’.
Based on past expert witness consulting for bike ped injuries (in Oregon) I have noted from this experience that the tougher nut to crack (and often overlooked) is the legal / courts side of things…and is not the engineering side (as engineers are great problem solvers – if planners and political leadership give engineers the correct outcomes to fix).
The uptick in deaths starting in 2020 correlates perfectly with the pandemic and the George Floyd protests, followed by PPB going on strike and refusing to enforce traffic laws. And that’s where we are today.
As so many people have said on BP ad nauseum, you can have all of the so-called “safe” infrastructure in the world, but if you don’t have basic enforcement of the laws that exist to promote safety, then VZ is meaningless.
Even in my “safe” SW Portland neighborhood, I can hear cars and motorcycles racing up and down the streets, all night long. These drivers know that no one is enforcing the law and they can drive as fast and dangerously as they want.
The past few years have also seen more distracted driving, particularly as vehicles come with “features” that are distracting (when I accepted a ride in a friend’s car recently, I observed his phone relaying to his car’s dashboard a text message telling him he had a filled prescription ready for pickup at a particular pharmacy. I watched his eyes leave the road to look at the text on the dashboard, and then watched him wondering which prescription it was based on the price and the pharmacy. WHY DOES A DRIVER NEED THIS WHILE DRIVING??), as well as more addiction to mobile phones, and more “businesses” that incentivize distracted and aggressive driving by delivery drivers and by ‘rideshare’ drivers. And so many more things, because no one is really saying, “we need to decide if this makes communities safer or more dangerous before it gets implemented in our community.”
There seem to be more distracted pedestrians, also.
Pedestrians aren’t killing car drivers.
People and animals should be able to be as “distracted” as they want and not risk death or injury.
Yes, let’s tell people using the transportation network that they have no responsibility.
I assume the ocean is to blame for people falling off boats and drowning, too.
So if an inebriated person runs across 99E in Milwaukie at 3am wearing all black, what is to be done?
Bringing the speed limit down to 20? These roads are so wide it will take a lot of enforcement to bring the speeds down.
But wise Millenials told me policing is racist.
The medeival night watches which spawned modern Policing were actually catching slaves in the South because all policing used in every country in the World derives from American slave patrols.
Because America’s history with slavery must dictate the approach to every social ill in Portland whose largest minority is Asians–oh and also Western Europe–I loved walking around there–it was so amazing, I went to Europe and I was so cultured and they just have everything figured out I’m gonna retire in Italy and restore a farmhouse…
when I finally grow up.
But I digress, Europe does that to me, it get lost in in its pedestrianized streets with all the authentic gelato shops,Turkish barbers and other tourists…
BUT WE MUST DO road narrowing on 99E and Oatfield and every single wide road in Oregon.
This will cost approximately $1345678913456789123456789.
This will be paid for by raising the income tax 5%. Its only 5%, after all we have a long way to go before we hit 100%, and after it is raised we will enter safety utopia made more utopic by reducing income inequality.
Portlandthink. Its Harvard level.
Water is wet and wet.
Morg shifting blame for CARnage to people walking.
Surely you can admit a pedestrian should look both ways instead of relying solely upon someone else (the driver) for their safety.
I’m simply saying that all users of the transportation network share some responsibility. Is that something you can agree with?
But that wasn’t what you were saying.
Indeed. The nose glued to the screen while crossing a street demographic seems to be growing at a high rate from my experiences on the road.
Yeah, and they are trusting the drivers with their noses glued to the screen.
Thanks, Lois. I see the same things when I’m on the road also – drivers who are paying attention to devices instead of the road. It’s a big probem, but how can VZ address it? Portland can’t make its own preemptive laws around cellphone use.
Oh – PPB could step up patrols that target device use while driving, which might help a little, but only for drivers who are still holding their phones. I see almost every driver now has that little cradle on the dash to allow her or him to use the phone without handling it.
Nice try . . . The mayor at the time told them to stop enforcing traffic laws because of COVID. No mayor has rescinded that order since then.
Correct. Unfortunately the usual tack of “repeat a lie until it is accepted as fact” is all to common in emotionally charged arguments like this.
This outlet has a responsibility to choose not to publish blatant mistruths and today it has failed.
On August 7, 2023, I was there in person when Sgt. Ty Engstrom with PPB Traffic Division publicly admitted at a press conference that their announcement in 2021 that they would no longer be enforcing traffic law was done as a political move to get increased funding. See article https://bikeportland.org/2023/08/07/protestors-shout-down-officials-at-road-safety-press-conference-377884
“I [bp editor Jonathan Maus (cc’d here)] asked him again about his press conference two years ago when he broadcast to everyone that the PPB wasn’t able to enforce traffic laws. And he finally admitted that it wasn’t a good idea. And that it was a political move. “We needed to create a stir to get some change to get them [city council] to fund us back up,” he said. “I mean that’s the honest truth. I know that could make things more dangerous. I don’t know. But at the same time, we needed some change.””
There are two independent claims here: 1) The mayor approved disbanding the traffic division, and 2) it was done to grab attention.
Both can be (and probably are) true. Since he was ultimately responsible, why let Mayor Wheeler off the hook, whatever his motivation?
The really dumb thing about that is that, despite a single year drop in funding (only the 3rd highest PPB budget up to that year), PPB was in the middle of a 10 year span in which their funding increased 62%.
And with that cut ($15m, or just 20% of the $75m that all the bureaus ate that year) they had to cut *VACANT* sworn officer positions, leaving dozens more vacant positions still fully funded.
So, yeah, they had to get funding back up to pay for the massive amount of overtime their using, while reponse times are 2 1/2 times what they were in 2015.
Hahaha… so you’re saying that the reason that the police sit back and don’t ticket or patrol for people on their phones driving, people running red lights, people speeding is because the mayor hasn’t given them the ok to do this?
It’s because the outcomes weren’t equitable.
Actually, as reported right here in BP, “a veteran member of the PPB’s Traffic Division, Sergeant Ty Engstrom” told Jonathan Maus in 2023:
https://bikeportland.org/2023/08/08/portland-police-bureau-officer-admits-no-traffic-enforcement-messaging-was-politically-motivated-377939
It’s weird how the police are more honest than their boosters/ apologists.
The uptick in road fatalities across the US definitely preceded Covid and George Floyd. Yes there was a surge at this time but the trend was already very firmly established
Also, the 2020 spike in road fatalities was not isolated to Portland. This was a trend across the country, whether communities saw less police enforcement or not
This is blatantly dishonest and I’m disappointed that Jonathan approved this comment. Misinformation like this is rampant in activist circles and continues to harm our community and our relationship with police. I’m sick of seeing these lies repeated.
PPB did not strike and it was the City of Portland under Ted Wheeler who directed them to stop conducting routine traffic stops:
Mayor and Police Chief Announce PPB Will Change Traffic Enforcement, Consent Search Protocols
Lmao I don’t know what you think that press release says, but it definitely does not say that the city directed cops to stop conducting routine traffic stops. First, it is an announcement from the mayor and the chief of police (so the decision is equally attributable to the police as the city). More importantly, it says they will deprioritize non-moving and non-safety related citations, specifically to focus on and increase enforcement of stopping dangerous driving like speeding and reckless driving in high crash corridors. So we should have gotten more enforcement against speeding and reckless driving under this policy, not less. This is entirely separate from the disbanding of the traffic unit referenced above and the public announcement of the disbanding, which police admitted was done specifically for political purposes to increase their budget.
The relationship with police in this town is bad because PPB doesn’t want to do their real jobs; they want to beat up lefty protestors, shoot off chemical weapons in neighborhoods and near schools, lie about public office holders, and then refuse accountability. For just the latest example of this, see this piece in the Mercury today.
https://www.portlandmercury.com/opinion/2025/07/08/47914550/normandale-survivors-asked-police-for-an-explanation-what-portland-got-was-a-partial-apology-and-more-excuses
Good point. The police never officially declared they were on strike, which is usually a big part of “going on strike.” Extortion may be a more accurate term.
Spot on. Enough with the gaslighting! Portland cyclists need to fight back against the rabid dishonesty being peddled in this comment section
“[A] veteran member of the PPB’s Traffic Division, Sergeant Ty Engstrom” told Jonathan Maus in 2023:
https://bikeportland.org/2023/08/08/portland-police-bureau-officer-admits-no-traffic-enforcement-messaging-was-politically-motivated-377939
Fred, I agree with you characterizing the Portland Police Bureau as “going on strike” when they dissolved their Traffic Division. The worst part, though, is the way they publicly announced it as a political stunt to get more funding, blaming and twisting the meaning of the Defund the Police rallying cry and movement. (See my reply below to Solar Eclipse documenting division head Sgt.Ty Engstrom publicly admitting to this.)
I find it reprehensible that some in our police department would make a public political show of announcing a move that they knew would give carte blanche to drivers so they could disobey traffic law with impunity. Looking at traffic death vs gun death numbers in Portland, as just one example, how is it they even justified eliminating traffic enforcement as a ‘low priority’ for keeping citizens safe?
We’ve read here and on the Shift listserv many stories from people who had made police reports and asked the officer to ticket/investigate/follow-up on hit-and-run reckless drivers when they had the full plate number, eyewitness accounts, and sometimes even full video, but the assigned officer would not make the effort to charge the driver.
Additionally, we have many stories of police trying to enforce laws that don’t exist on cyclists, or misunderstanding the law and failing to issue citations to the driver when they “remained at the scene”, but were nevertheless at fault.
With all the hue and cry and accusations and leaving of false impressions and other forms of BS that blame the increase in traffic fatalities only on lack of enforcement (for example https://www.oregonlive.com/crime/2023/07/portland-traffic-stops-reach-record-low-while-fatal-crashes-spike.html), and in turn blame that on the Black Lives Matter movement (“riots”), and ‘defunding the police’, I think it is important to accurately describe what has gone on at our PPB with traffic enforcement.
1. No ‘defunding’ caused the staffing shortage at PPB in 2021.
2. Dropping traffic enforcement ‘due to staffing shortage’ and announcing it publicly, was one, a political move, and two, encouraged reckless driving
3. Many officers do not know, understand, and/or agree with the law related to bicyclists and pedestrians
4. Many peds, cyclists, drivers, etc., do not know or understand our traffic laws, resulting in people feeling confused and/or (mistakenly) entitled to a ROW, or protective force field, that they do not have. Changing behaviors is not all about punishment. PBOT could use multiple means of educating people that have been effective in other jurisdictions.
5. We have some ambiguous infrastructure, that in some cases even encourages violation of legal ROW laws (example: “cross bikes”)
6. Even with all the evidence handed to them, officers choose not to pursue reckless drivers, except in tragedies of death or severe injury
7. Some officers appear to be ‘quiet quitting’, and ‘slow walking’ in their responses to less dramatic crimes, like traffic crimes and burglary. These are the crimes that affect generally law-abiding citizens the most, so failure to enforce against them gets people’s attention that the police are not ‘protecting’ us as they should.
***
[* One point I would like to make on the side of the police, however, is that I have heard that it is very discouraging to an officer who puts the time into documenting a case and when it finally goes to court have to make schedule changes to appear, sometimes multiple times when the case is set back, and then the victim and/or key witnesses fail to show up in court and the case is dismissed. When reporting a traffic crime, it is important to emphasize to the officer, “I will show up in court.”]
There are tons of discouraging aspects to my job but if I don’t do them I can’t expect to continue getting paid.
Great comment BTW, and I would appreciate hearing responses from those commenters whose statements have been refuted by you and others — that’s accountability too. Silence is disappointing.
Maybe you need a union.
no doubt
I think the claimed lack of enforcement has very little to do with it. We have more and more drivers on the road as the population keeps growing. More and more drivers are distracted. The uptick in fatalities started before Covid hit. So whats your reasoning for the uptick before the cops went on strike?
The Netherlands has proven that its almost always on how the streets are engineered.
Don’t forget the defunding of the police when they didn’t even have people to even begin to enforce anything.
Except they weren’t actually defunded
Yep, a 62% increase in funding from 2015 through 2025 is “defunding”
Hell, I want to be defunded! Tell my boss, please!
How many more police do we need for “basic enforcement” of traffic laws for the 2 million+ people in Portland’s metro area?
Fred,
Was it PPB “going on strike” or them being told to not enforce our laws?
https://www.foxnews.com/us/portland-police-traffic-stops-consent-searches
Does anyone blame the Leahs?
I have a policy (pick me! pick me!) that would have almost certainly saved the lives of five young men in 2024. Ban police chases. Outright. No more. Young men’s brains are not fully developed. It is young men who usually find themselves at street takeovers, stealing cars and doing other things that trigger a police chase. A police chase ensures there are two speeding vehicles on the road and puts innocent, otherwise uninvolved, civilians at risk. VZ Portland TTBOMK won’t push for this specifically which is a head scratcher. Young men who engage in antisocial and criminal behavior should be held accountable. But they shouldn’t receive a death sentence before trial. And for crying out loud Police shouldn’t increase the overall danger on the road by incentivizing a fleeing vehicle to speed ever faster and speeding themselves in pursuit.
Lets see, that’d mean
<> No more stopping speeders and giving them tickets
<> No more stopping armed robbers
<> No more stopping stolen vehicles
<> No more . . . well you get the idea
The list goes on and on. Funny how trying to improve the police doesn’t involve training them better.
Oh, and who’s going to determine who is “anti-social”? A teacher? You? And then what? Give them a talking to?
It sucks when people die, but its worse to have a society that doesn’t chase and arrest criminals. Look how bad the streets of Portland became when the mayor told the police to stop enforcing traffic laws during COVID. This would just make it worse as every criminal would know is all they’d have to do to get away was jump in a vehicle and drive fast.
This hardly warrants a response SolarEclipse. How you equate banning police chases with no more stopping speeders and giving them tickets and the other things you list defies logic. It’s also offensive to me. Enabling a dangerous police chase is more important than a human life?
What case are you referencing? I did a (admittedly quick) search and didn’t see anything for 5 people killed in a police chase.
If a speeder doesn’t pull over for the police and keeps driving, how do the police stop them? I’m honestly curious.
Do they give up and let the speeder keep driving at an excessive speed?
Hi Jake9 – there were two separate police chases that ended in horrific crashes last year. A June 25, 2024 crash at SE 159th and Division that killed Dylan Brasky and Jayden Rolon-Ekis at the scene. Their friend Cole Johnson died later from injuries sustained in the crash. On August 2nd, 2024 Malcom Barman and Nicholas McGuire crashed during a high-speed chase on NE 122nd and NE Marx st. Look, people are killed as a direct result of high-speed police chases. We can disagree but I think getting a license number and following up later or even just letting the speeder go is preferable to increasing speed, KE and danger on the streets exponentially, Officers have died in chases, uninvolved civilians have too. Is it really worth a human life to apprehend a speeder immediately?
Hi Sarah,
Thank you for the info on the deceased! I’m always happy to have a civil discussion here and I appreciate your candor and assistance.
I think you are right in that we are going to disagree on the value of police pursuits, but I hope you don’t take my arguments as personal criticisms of your views.
Brasky, Rolon-Ekis and Johnson tried to kill a young woman with their car (which everyone on this site agrees is a deadly weapon) while fleeing the police and unfortunately paid the ultimate price for that. It is incredibly sad that they committed that action, but they did. They had murder in their hearts and since they could have literally stopped the violence at anytime, I don’t have any sympathy for them. I am sad for those they left behind and who will miss them.
It is a similar case with Barman and McGuire. The previous street takeover was shadowed by deaths, accidents and plenty of vehicular crime and so the police were determined to save as many lives as possible this time around but were unable too.
I bring this up because there is a sliding scale to a police chase. Is it merely speeding (pretending that any speeding by a multi ton object is harmless) or are the speeders criminals going to or running from some kind of more serious crime such as theft or murder?
How are the police to know?
How do they know in the very short reaction time available to them that it’s just a speeder and not someone running to or from a violent crime?
I’m not being rhetorical, I’m truly curious how you would want them to react to being presented with a situation like that.
Would letting them go to catch later hurt someone else?
Is there any guarantee the speeders will slow down once the police stop chasing them or never started chasing them?
In my perfect world there would be no need for police or high speed chases, but here we are and it is most definitely not the perfect world of my dreams.
There are lots of laws and policies that limit what police can do to enforce the law. These things will generically increase the risk that unapprehended suspects will commit crimes in the interim time they remain unapprehended because of the policy. Nevertheless, the policy can still be worthwhile. I’m thinking about things like requirements to get warrants and proscriptions of racial profiling. A no high speed chases policy may allow some suspects to get away that would otherwise be caught, but I would still support it.
A major problem with law enforcement these days is that the communities they serve do not necessarily believe this. I certainly don’t. There are way too many cases of police shooting people because they are running away in defiance of police commands. I think the cops are more worried about not appearing powerless in the face of criminal activity than keeping everybody safe.
ah yes, fortunately nobody has ever stolen or taken off a license plate. great idea.
I don’t have that one to hand, but I do have a database compiled by reporters for the SF Chronicle for deaths in police pursuits from 2017 to 2022:
https://github.com/sfchronicle/police_pursuits/tree/master/data
From 2017 to 2022, 3,339 people died as a result of police chases nationwide.
A quick glance at the database shows 551 of them have an involvement listed as “bystander”
The initiating incidents in those 551:
162 suspected nonviolent
237 traffic stop
40 unknown
92 suspected violent
14 minor incident/no crime
2 other
4 domestic incident
Police pursuits have deadly consequences.
No…it’s actually worse when people die. That’s the worst.
SolarEclipse, you have said, “I sucks when people die, but . . . .” to the wrong person. Please apologize and take it back.
May you never personally know that particular grief.
Police have already started using UAVs to follow criminals instead of chasing in a vehicle. Are you supportive of this change?
Yes – anything that protects innocent bystanders from death caused by stupid people behind the wheel being chased by testosterone/machismo fueled cops in high powered vehciles.
I am particularly interested in whether City Club will parse out Portland-specific issues vs what we are experiencing throughout the country.
Weird how a decade of removing lanes, narrowing streets, adding barricades and removing reasonable access to homes and businesses has not only failed to force people to stop driving, it’s actually made walking and bicycling more dangerous.
Then throw completely unregulated electric bikes and scooters into the mix, normalize illegal camping, littering and drug use on our car-free paths and effectively halt fare enforcement on public transit.
Stand back and scratch your head. Wonder how this could all possibly be related.
Then go vote for the same failed policies all over again. It’s the Portland Way!
What evidence do you have that “removing lanes [and] narrowing streets” *caused* the increase in cyclist and pedestrian deaths?
As far as I can tell, that statement is not supported by the facts.
If you’d said “removing lanes and narrowing streets in Portland failed to stop an increase in local deaths, an increase which has been mirrored by a similar nationwide trend,” I would probably agree.
What I see is that people cut through my neighborhood to bypass the “calming” that PBOT has implemented.
Bingo!
In my neighborhood our main street received a plethora of speed bumps. There’s a parallel street that didn’t, and you can guess where many people now go.
FIFY:
1000 thumbs up
How many trips will they take to Amsterdam and Copenhagen?
As many as there are tax payer dollars for.
City Club is not a governmental organization and doesn’t have taxpayer dollars.
Yes, I know what the City Club is. Have you ever heard of grants?
There are many organizations in town awash in taxpayer dollars that are not government agencies.
City absolutely loves to give grants out for all kinds of things and never seems to check to see how the money is spent.
Thanks for trying to civicsplain me though.
Always happy to help.
I see that the Club didn’t take any grants in 2023 for a study they will undertake in 2025.
I’m not really sure what you think you are helping me with. Can you explain further?
Just because the City Club itself didn’t take tax payer dollars doesn’t mean that the members of the organization also didn’t.
I love it when commenters on here do their homework, and show their work.
What did they show with their form from 2023? They aren’t coming back to say how that is relevant to 2025. Maybe you can shine some light on the homework?
The smarty pants haven’t figured out yet that flowing traffic is safe traffic. Disjointed traffic (as created by traffic lights) is less efficient and more dangerous. Imagine if we had invested in creating more than a few token roundabouts over the years. https://www.carmel.in.gov/government/departments-services/engineering/roundabouts
“ Roundabouts move traffic more efficiently and reduce the number of fatalities and serious-injury accidents. They work because of their safety record, their compatibility with the environment, their aesthetics and their ability to make it easier for pedestrians and bicyclists to navigate.
The number of injury accidents in Carmel have reduced by about 80 percent and the number of accidents overall by about 40 percent.”
P.S. as a bonus the lower speeds and fewer motorized traffic lanes don’t increase commute times
Roundabouts don’t create flowing traffic – they create orderly, predictable, and above all SLOW traffic.
If “flowing” traffic were safe, then interstate highways would be the safest places, but clearly they are not (https://www.uppermichiganssource.com/2022/05/03/interstate-highways-with-most-fatalities/).
The most useful thing a roundabout does, from a safety perspective, is to slow down traffic so that if a driver misjudges a situation and two cars collide, or a car goes off the road, hits a pedestrian etc, the outcomes are much less serious than they would be if the car had been traveling at a higher speed. And the angles of collisions tend to be oblique, which are also safer.
Anyway, you are right generally about the benefits of roundabouts but I wanted to correct you on the idea of “flow,” which is such a pernicious concept – used by DOTs everywhere to justify four-, six-, and eighteen-lane highways where cars travel really fast and hit head-on.
For years I said Portland has been one of the best bike cities I tend to disagree because they lack so much multi-use Trail as I’ve seen in other cities. Take us off the streets and onto trails that are actually safe. It’s been 725 million dollars on homeless yet ignore this issue in all of its facets.
Do me favor. Pull up a map. Mark a couple of residential areas and a couple of popular destinations. Now connect them with some theoretical multi-use trails. Then consider what’s already in those alignments and how that factors into constructing new multi-use trails.
Worse, our multi-use paths are de facto campgrounds and the “bike activist” community largely accepts and even encourages the abuse.
The Springwater Corridor, 205 Path and Marine Drive are the major ones; none are what I’d consider “safe”.
This is site is one of the worst in encouraging it. No wonder we can’t have nice things in Portland.
Hi Matt P. Please do some research before you throw around allegations like that. Can you point to some examples that BikePortland is “the worst” in encouraging camping on paths? I ask because I have not done that on here. I have covered the issue from all angles in the past, including a post where I did a video that called conditions on the path “unacceptable” and I have been the only advocate and reporter in this city to actually ask top elected officials about the problem and to carry the message that a lot of people are afraid of riding on the paths.
I’ve done stories about the conditions and have even published an op-ed from a reader who felt BikePortland was full of “anti-houseless bigotry”!
So yeah, please take your false assumptions about me and BikePortland somewhere else please. Thanks.
You’ve done plenty of flag waving for the bad actors in this city and like most super prog Portlanders refuse to ever address the real elephant in the room.
No we do not refuse to address the problems. We refuse to accept false dichotomies and bad solutions that only sweep the problem under the rug or into some other neighborhood.
Actually, I’ve seen more articles (dozens) here CRITICAL of camping and other disruptions to multi-use paths than in every other information source combined. And the comments are overwhelmingly NOT accepting of those activities disrupting path safety or use.
This site isn’t “one of the worst in encouraging it”. It’s the best in discouraging it.
It increasingly seems that in our post-liquified brain world, everything is a political Rorschach test.
And we’ve had proposed new trail segments get shot down over concerns about homeless camping. Still waiting for them to fill the gap in the Gresham-Fairview trail, but at this point I don’t think it will ever happen.
Progerssives seem to believe that as long as the intent is good, efforts are above criticism.
Perhaps spending all this money on homelessness is inducing demand.
“Perhaps spending all this money on homelessness is inducing demand.”
I thought that only worked for traffic. Is induced demand relevant to other fields as well? Who knew.
They should just start at:
1) How many of the deceased were homeless. (no, that shouldn’t be a death sentence, but they also aren’t the masters of quality impulse control either). Worse yet, the systems we have in place are likely contributing to more people like this, not fewer.
2) How many of the deceased were driving at excessive speed? This is just very very hard to control for, with adequate police or not. Until you start putting them in jail for a long time, impossible with the populace here that thinks capitalists are worse than these types of criminals, this is here to stay.
3) How many of the deceased were intoxicated in one form or another?
Remove these numbers from the data and then be actually curious as to whether it is worse or not (i.e. looks at per capita and vmt) and the story isn’t nearly as bad as it looks, but of course that doesn’t fuel outrage cycles or partisan ideology, much less major infrastructure changes.
The conclusion likely ends up being that on a per capita basis and vmt basis, residents whose focus is on contributing to society and not participating in anti-social behavior, the risk of dying on the streets is very low. Not zero of course, but the idea that is even possible is ludicrous until we either homogenize our culture or actually get serious about law and order.
I would support a policy that saved people, even if those people were homeless, drunk, speeding, or otherwise falling short of your ideals.
I think we all would (including PS).
What policy would you support given the real world budgetary, jurisdictional, and political limitations PBOT faces, how does it differ from what they are actually doing?
The policy being discussed (suggested by Sarah Risser) was having the cops not engage in high speed chases, so it would be a PPB policy, not PBOT. It would be cheap. Certainly it would not solve all the problems, but it would help with VZ by reducing one kind of death and injury on our streets.
I think PS was referring to the overall death toll on the roads, not just those resulting in high speed chases. As far as those go, I agree that where alternatives are workable, they should be used.
Police chases are a tiny part of the overall safety problem. So while I support your policy on that front, it won’t make much of a dent in the larger problem of the failure of Vision Zero.
Quote from article: “…this vexing challenge of preserving every life on the road.”
Vision Zero doesn’t work and cannot work because its stated goal is unrealistic.
We live in mostly urban places that are populated with more people than we can accurately count.
The landscape is designed so that people often MUST use motorized transport to get to work, school and recreation. It has been this way since long before most of us were born. We cannot wish or legislate that reality away.
The socioeconomic template we live by in this country virtually guarantees that some people will not be able to function effectively in such a society, and those people resort to surviving by any means necessary, even if it breaks the law. The world as we know it will never be completely safe for every person. There are too many of us and we are woefully human.
The best any society can do is to educate for generosity and kindness, hold accountable those who hurt others, and strive for the best balance between community and self-interest that we can.
And we must let go of the notion that every person can be “saved” from death. All we can do is our best.
Some days even our best won’t be good enough to prevent death.
That’s simply part of life.
To pretend otherwise does all of us a disservice.
To pretend we can’t do anything about people being killed in the streets is also a disservice. I agree that no risk of death on our roads is not achievable, but ‘vision zero’ is a concise expression of aspirational policy goals that has the moral advantage of implying that every person is worth protecting. In recent years we have been doing a lot worse than we used to, so I think there is room to improve.
Again, my question: What policy changes would you support given the real world budgetary, jurisdictional, and political limitations PBOT faces, how does it differ from what they are actually doing?
Hi 2WheelIsGood, thanks for engaging.
I’m generally supportive of PBOT policies, I just wish they were more effective at implementing them. Specific PBOT policies that I support are things that lower the speeds and increase visibility of cars and trucks on dangerous streets: lower speed limits, narrowing streets/removing lanes, speed bumps, roundabouts, protected bike lanes/walkways, daylighting intersections, pedestrian islands, etc. I think banning right turns on red lights would be good. I think an effective vision zero implementation needs to go beyond PBOT, though, and include cultural change within and outside the city government. More red light and speeding cameras, ticketing unregistered vehicles, and increased traffic enforcement on the worst streets would all get my support.
I support those things too — and PBOT is doing most of them one place or another, as the budget and public support allow.
It sounds like your major criticism is extent, not direction, but I don’t know how much more PBOT can do with the budget it has.
For sure. You’re much more likely to read my criticism of PPB than PBOT. I got into this thread in response to Jake9, who implied we should accept the toll of high speed chases so the fuzz can catch the bad guys and in response to BethH who implied we should accept traffic violence because it’s impossible to completely eliminate it. I think VZ is worth pursuing even in the face of past (and likely future) failures. I think many BP comments and their authors assume PBOT can accomplish much more than they realistically can. I dig what PBOT is doing, but I’m a little perplexed by how hard it seems to be for them to get things done.
That’s the power of government. And I don’t even mean that in a snarky way — government is limited by money, bureaucracy, and the will of the people.
I agree with Beth that there are limits; I don’t read that as defeatism, but more as the Serenity Prayer.