The sense of safety and protection from drivers Portlanders usually associate with the annual Bridge Pedal ride was shattered this morning when a truck driver struck and injured a bicycle rider on the Morrison Bridge.
According to the police, just before 8:30 am this morning, driver of a four-door Toyota Tundra, “struck the bicyclist from behind, knocking him to the road. The driver of the pickup pulled alongside the driver, stopped briefly, then fled.”
BikePortland reader Shawne Martinez rolled by just after first responders arrived and shared the photos below…
Below is the full crash statement from the Portland Police Bureau:
“A hit-and-run driver is being sought after he struck and injured a bicyclist on the Morrison Bridge this morning. The bicyclist was believed to be on his way to the Providence Bridge Pedal event when the crash happened.
Portland Police officers from Central Precinct and the Traffic Division were in the area of the Bridge Pedal event when they were alerted to a crash involving a vehicle and a bicyclist midspan on the Morrison Bridge. They responded and found the adult male bicyclist with serious injuries. He was transported by ambulance to the hospital. His injuries are not believed to be life-threatening.
Officers learned that the suspect driver left the scene, and several officers from both Central Precinct and the Traffic Division searched the area for the suspect vehicle, but were unsuccessful in finding him.
Preliminary investigation suggests the adult male bicyclist was westbound on the Morrison Bridge in the left (center) westbound lane. At the time, the westbound lanes were open to all traffic (eastbound was closed for the Bridge Pedal). The suspect driver struck the bicyclist from behind, knocking him to the road. The driver of the pickup pulled alongside the driver, stopped briefly, then fled.
According to his family member, the bicyclist was on his way to the Bridge Pedal, but was not participating at the time of the crash.
The suspect vehicle is pictured. It is believed to be a white Toyota Tundra pickup 4-door crewcab, with black wheels, a black (or possibly missing) left side gas cap, and no license plates. It was described as “dirty” and had objects in the truck bed. The truck had and may have damage to the front grille. The driver is described as possibly a “middle aged” white or Hispanic man, described as “taller” and bald. This image is altered to obscure the bicyclist in the interest of the privacy of the victim.
If anyone has information about this vehicle, is a witness, or has evidence related to this crash, please e-mail crimetips@police.portlandoregon.gov attn: Central Precinct and reference case number 25-215805.”
Of you have more information about this collision, please contact me.
UPDATE, 4:01 pm: A reader has sent me the video below that shows the collision. Trigger Warning: Video contains footage of person getting hit by a truck driver and being thrown to the ground.
Thanks for reading.
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I am a bicyclist who occasionally works on the Morrison Bridge. The cyclists made a poor choice of routes — the Bridge Pedal often brings out inexperienced riders. The driver was (at minimum) grossly distracted and speeding. No license plates? That’s sketchy.
Then there’s the issue of the Morrison Bridge itself. Many have just come down off the freeway and haven’t always adjusted to city speeds yet. But the 5-lane layout (3 East-bound, 2 West) just invites motorists to speed. And they do. What the hell is that tangle of overpasses, viaducts, and local exits on the East side?
None of the bridges downtown are earthquake resistant. So the current plan is to tear down the Burnside and leave the Morrison. In my opinion that’s the wrong choice. Tear down the Morrison: It’s dangerous, ugly, confused, and a bigger maintenance headache for the County than Burnside Bridge.
Long-term, we should remove I-5 and 405 and route freeway traffic around the city. There’s no reason to send cars and trucks traveling between Washington and California through the center of Portland. This was misguided violence done to the city in the 60s and 70s. It was unnecessary, and a choice. Canada did not carve freeways through the center of all their cities.
There’s more causes to this crash than just one cyclist’s naïve route choice and a motorists negligent operation of a dangerous machine. Cars ruin cities.
Perhaps…but this pales in comparison to the driver illegally smashing into a human being, leaving them severely injured in the roadway, and running away.
Hit and run is not “negligence”, it’s a violent and profoundly immoral crime.
Agreed. I’m just focusing on what led to the crash happening. Not the criminal behavior of the motorist afterward. I had the same feeling of outrage about his actions.
But then my mind went to how much injury and death there is on our roads. The details of each case vary. But I think there’s things that can be done. Helsinki had zero bicycling deaths last year. How do we get there?
Asking for people to be better won’t get us there. I don’t think Finns are fundamentally better people than we are. People are gonna do what people do. I also don’t think criminal laws are much help. Cops aren’t the answer. So that leads me to think of a) the immediate details of the built environment that led to this and b) How we choose to structure our entire transportation system.
This sort of thing doesn’t happen on the Burnside because there’s a generous West bound bike lane on the right. It can’t happen on the the Tilikum because there’s no cars on it.
Yes, but it could very well be that Finnish drivers ARE better people than U.S. drivers
Finland is better at weeding out the bad ones, through things like traffic fines based on income (can result in $100K+ speeding tickets,) lower drunk driving threshold (.05) with high penalties if caught, etc. This isn’t to downplay the importance of infrastructure, town planning, etc. that Finland also does well.
You may be right about the need to alter the built environment on a widespread basis and fundamentally restructure the transportation system.
Those are generational projects. I hope there are things we can do in the shorter term.
See Soren, sometimes we’re in agreement.
it’s not that deep. that truck driver purposefully tried to kill a person (who happened to be riding a bike). end of story tbh
It is inevitable that if you ride a bike enough and attempt to get to new destinations, you end up riding on routes that are not ideal. Sometimes at the advice of apps. It looks like the coned-off Bridge Pedal route is just on the other side of the bridge. I wouldn’t assume that the people biking fully appreciated the risk. That said, they were riding appropriately by taking the full lane and being highly visible. If they were a stalled car or a pile of trash, the truck driver would have avoided them.
My kneejerk reaction was “That’s such a dangerous lane to bike in” and then I remembered the time Google maps told me to take the Morrison bridge and I ended up in about the same place on a dark rainy day.
Totally agree that the Morrison bridge is a confusing tangle, mixing local traffic and long-distance highway vibes. It looks like the driver had about 3 seconds either to brake or switch lanes, and they ran out time/space to brake when they couldn’t switch lanes. (Obviously, none of that excuses a hit and run!)
Sounds like you’re excusing unsafe driving. Please don’t.
Sounds like Becky is offering an analysis and is not excusing anything.
I’m guessing the idiot driver was looking at a device or was otherwise distracted for those 3 seconds which is why he stopped upon hitting the cyclist, panicked when he saw what he’d done and drove off.
Please note that I am not excusing unsafe or violent driving either. Intentional or not, the crime is the same and needs to be punished to send an example to other motorists to wake the frick up and pay attention!
I drove over the bridge today. He had way more than 3 seconds. Sight lines are not obscured by the hill.
He had at LEAST that in the video, but may have had several seconds more before the video started (and DID unless he’d just changed into that lane, or someone in front of him who was blocking his view forward had just moved out of the lane, or the bike riders had suddenly switched into the lane).
And he SHOULD have had at least 3 seconds, since that’s the old “3-second rule” for following distance.
So, he had at least 3 seconds–possibly several more–and perfect visibility, in daylight with the sun at his back, on a long straight stretch of road.
Yes, he had no excuse for a hit-and-run, but it’d be hard to think of a situation where a driver also had less of an excuse for hitting someone
Looked to me like the driver was drifting to change lanes, though I didn’t see a flasher to indicate that intention, and the truck was accelerating rather than slowing as safety requires for such a merge.
Pretty sure the driver had longer than that.
PBOT could act immediately to help clarify the route to the cycle path coming from the East. Re-stripe the green crosswalk at Morrison/Grand, and put in a sign saying “Morrison Bridge Bike Path” with an arrow pointing to the bike lane on the right that goes down away from the viaduct.
The Morrison Bridge is a MultCo road, not a PBOT road. And MultCo has proven time and time again that they’re the most actively hostile to cyclists of any transportation agency in the region. I wouldn’t get your hopes up for this one…
Yeah, good point. Although I believe ODOT owns/maintains the highway ramps to the bridge which essentially negates any design improvements to allow access to the viaducts for peds/cycling. The biggest impediment to bridge safety (not to mention quality of life for the CEID) is the existence of an inter-state freeway in the middle of an urban area, something the US hasn’t yet learned is inherently poor transportation/land use.
Also, Mult Co isn’t necessarily more hostile to cycling than the city (judging by its mediocre ped/bike infra on all the bridges it owns). They are just as ambivalent and scared to do anything substantive as the Mayor/Council. Like, have we heard anything from the Mayor on these recent deaths/injuries??? So folding Mult Co into Portland might simplify local govt, but have negligible effect on road safety/mode share.
ODOT still has my vote! I wish BP would run a public survey so we could all vote on it.
Okay, well, whoever is in charge of it. Hell, an org like Strong Towns or BikeLoud could go out there and put up homemade signs directing cyclists to the westbound bike path. It really is a convoluted route.
Are you saying that’s what this driver did? How can they be in the left lane coming down off the Freeway here? The video starts too late, but its hard to imagine anyone making that many lane changes in such a short distance.
That’s a bit of an overreaction.
Outrage is an overreaction? What is a middle-of-the-road moderated and appropriate feeling to express in response to a blatant disregard for human safety and well-being?
No. But suggesting that all the highways be removed because of the actions of a single negligent jerk is an overreaction.
No one is “suggesting that all the highways be removed because of the actions of a single negligent jerk.” This is just the latest “single negligent jerk.”
Excuse me, what? An overreaction? Are you even serious?
Thanks covering this. It was painful but I watched the video from IG 20+ times. Driver may have been trying to get ahead of the cyclists and move ahead of the sedan in the middle lane and misjudged. Either that, or it was attempted murder, assault, and felony hit and run. Why did he stop next to the crash and open his door momentarily?
I wish Morrison Bridge wasn’t such a drag strip. I’ve been punish-passed on it twice in that exact lane.
Hoping for a quick recovery!!
I think your first scenario is probably what he will claim happened, if he’s caught. It would still be grossly negligent though, and I don’t see anyway he can argue out of a hit-and-run charge.
Like Chuck McDowell I’m not a lawyer, but it’s clear to me that both the collision and, especially, the failure to stop are clearly criminal. I hope the driver faces legal repercussions for such a despicable and violent act. Even if hitting the cyclist was unintentional.
The video is sickening to watch — and scary AF. The actions of the driver are completely inexplicable. (Was the collision intentional? Why was the truck steered partially into the middle lane before hitting the cyclist?) I wish the struck cyclist a full and speedy recovery.
All of the other vehicles were able to stop easily without even coming close to hitting the stopped cars and trucks. No excuses.
Hit and run drivers are the lowest of the low. It’s absolutely unconscionable to harm someone else and leave them.
Also a great example of why we need stringent enforcement of vehicles without plates or current registration.
Those vehicles should be booted and towed.
“no license plates” this needs to end, any car with no plates should be impounded
We used to impound any vehicle being driven without insurance; of course to get to that point we’d need to stop people for traffic infractions.
Also any car with tinted license plate covers. These illegal covers are designed to obscure license plates and prevent identification in a hit and run and other crimes. Despite this, they enjoy widespread use in Portland. Both of these should be grounds for immediate police stops. Come on PPB, they are out there driving around right in front of your face, go get them!
Illegally tinted front and rear windshields, too, are common as dirt, leaving the driver no visibility. If the Portland cops wanted to enforce the regulations, it would be like shooting fish in a barrel. Are there not enough police to take traffic enforcement seriously? Did no one in the DA’s office want to prosecute traffic violations?
Recently I spoke to a cop on 82nd. Some teens were on little tiny motorcycles (like a GMB100, look it up, I see these goddamn things all the time) ripping up 82nd. A cop passed them heading south. He pulled in to a parking lot I thought he was gonna Adam 12 and follow after them north. He did not. I rode over to him and said, “hey surely those teens on tiny dirt bikes, they’re easy to pull over, right? Come on, what are you doing?” He told me that at the moment in his precinct there were 5 on duty cops. He said that’s low and he didn’t know why that was the case. He also said there were like 53 open calls he could respond to. The last thing he said, very specific to his copping at the moment, was that if he ended the shift with a ticket for kids on dirt bikes on the street, he’d probably get his ass chewed for wasting time when there are other calls to respond to. All in all he seemed pretty mellow even though I pulled up to him clearly giving him shit for what I wanted him to also give a shit about. I didn’t have any reason to not believe anything he said. I don’t know what cops do in Portland these days. I see them all the time but goddamn if it seems like they are ever doing anything. It sucks, I want cops to take care of all this low hanging fruit regarding traffic compliance. Really makes riding around town feel a little sketchy sometimes when the road rules are basically “anything goes!” I don’t understand why we’re here.
Used to be if you didn’t have plates, had expired ones, or had obscured ones, stuff like that, you’d come back to your parked vehicle to find a nice ticket awaiting you. Even if you had fully paid parking. Definitely helped keep people honest. Whatever happened to that?
Comment of the day. Pay this man
Hopefully the cyclist will fully recover. Even if s/he gets back to 100%, the process will be awful.
Even without plates, I’m hopeful they catch the driver. There are a lot of other ways to identify that truck.
On the photo at the top, the other biker looks younger. A daughter maybe? Either way, in the video she looks completely traumatized. What a nightmare.
The truck has an automatic side step on driver’s door – you can see the shadow below truck swing out and back in when driver opens/closes door, One more thing to look for to ID right truck.
This is such a scary video! To me, this really highlights the shortcomings of PBOT’s “bike network” The Morrison bridge shows up on bike maps as having bike facilities in both directions, and PBOT is happy to include this in the self-touted claims about miles of bike lanes, etc. But in fact, the connections to and from this bridge are abysmal. The facilities are not there, Signage ranges from terrible to non-existent. Without safe, direct connections, the meager facilities they have are closer to being an “attractive nuisance” than useful infrastructure. The design of the bridge is horrible: too many driving lanes, lanes too wide, highway-style ramps on the west end, zero enforcement of speed limit. PBOT (and Mult. Co and ODOT) are stuck in a 1950′ mentality. Those ramps on the west ed should be removed immediately. Those blocks could be housing or parks- even surface parking lots would be better. The speed limit should be 30 mph at the fastest with cameras. I think the ramps to and from I-5 should be closed. The bridge needs sidewalks on each side that connect all the way from SW 2nd to SE Grand. The ramp to Water may be valuable to keep, but I would remove the ramps on the east side, too.
If ODOT is successful as widening I-5 at the Rose Quarter, it is pretty obvious that this the next area that will “need” to be widened and seismically upgraded. The ramps to and from the Morrison and all the horrible highway spaghetti connecting to I-84 and south across the river is going to be ODOT’s next “choke point” along with the stretch north of the RQ to the IBR. IMO, it is critical to stop the widening at the RQ and the IBR, but also to advocate hard to safe, connected bridges that are suitable for pedestrians and bikes. The terrible, disconnected sidewalk next to driving lanes that are functionally freeway ramps is not safe, or sustainable.
While the connections are abysmal, Morrison does in fact have protected bike facilities in both directions – the south side is a 2 way cycle track.
Having ridden it a least 200 times before we moved our location from the SE 11th and Morrison location I *HATE* the connections, but once in it, it’s a really low stress section of bikeway.
I’ve also walked across the Morrison a great deal and crossing on the north side as a ped is not really great at all either – you can either run across an off and on ramp, or use the stairs underneath and deal with the campers that are so often taking over the entire space.
I don’t know if it’s as bad as it was 6-7 years ago when I crossed it so often, but I stopped using the north side after nearly falling down those steps because some moron had put a barrier across the stairs to keep people out of his camp.
All in all the north side should just have a No Ped/No Bike sign and directions to the south side.
It’s too bad because the north side takes you over the freight trains.
The driver’s behavior is really disgusting on all fronts here. I am keeping the victim in my thoughts and hope they can heal physically and emotionally.
What’s really frustrating to me about this, and the tragic incident on MLK last week, is how people are responding to it. It is showing me just how uncritically accepted bad driving behavior is in our culture.
In the case of the MLK incident, people were quick to speculate that it was some type of medical emergency or vehicle malfunction. I am skeptical of that, I think it was intentional but I am biased. Even if it were not intentional, is it not up to drivers to make sure they and their vehicles are in proper condition to drive? I am incredibly dilligent about preventative maintenance and regular inspections by mechanics on my car. Aviation is one of the safest ways to get around because there’s so much operational safety baked into the cake to make sure planes are in good shape mechanically (despite Boeing’s best attempts otherwise). Why do we still jump to letting irresponsible car owners off the hook?
On the other hand, we have a clearly negligent driver hitting someone on a bike and the first response is “why were they biking there?” IDK maybe they got confused. That’s always the excuse when cars end up on bike paths or bike lanes, right? Never malicious intent, just some good, honest driver who got confused and deserves all of our sympathy and grace. Maybe they’re hardcore vehicular cyclists and want to exercise their rights. Who knows. Or cares. Sometimes people do annoying or unexpected things at the grocery store; does that make it okay to ram them with your cart? I am feeling very cynical and highly doubt there will be any justice for the driver if he even gets caught.
Roads and streets need to be redesigned to prioritize the safety of vulnerable users. But that will take a generation. Cracking down on the worst drivers can happen now. IMO supposed “safety advocates” are the ones most guilty of excusing this kind of driver behavior at the moment. It’s incredibly blackpilling for me to chat with people from the supposed advocacy orgs who can’t grow up and let go of the ACAB meme. The outliers will still be a danger to society no matter what changes are made to the built environment. The only solution to those people is to punish them, that’s the only language they will ever understand. Do you really think that guy in the green-wrapped BMW doing burnouts in front of the NW diverter protesters would respond to anything other than a huge ticket, or better yet, getting his precious car impounded?
Urbanist darling Netherlands has incredibly strict traffic enforcement and steep fines. Scandinavian countries that make headlines for achieving vision zero have strict licensing requirements and very visible traffic enforcement. Why is it that we can only copy their structural safety and not their operational safety?
As full capital projects sure. As interim projects with paint and boulders, as NYC typically builds it’s first phase, we could likely do that on the current budget+volunteers. The primary problem isn’t funding. It’s political will, and the refusal of PBoT to build interim projects that need light maintenance (in coordination with business/community groups.
We’re not doing either to any significant degree. But advocates (maybe not council members) are starting to recognize the importance of traffic cameras and moving toward the idea that a carless network connecting neighborhoods might be a prerequisite for any significant growth in mode share.
COTW!!
“Roads and streets need to be redesigned to prioritize the safety of vulnerable users. But that will take a generation. Cracking down on the worst drivers can happen now.”
This just seems like an incredibly sensible view to have. Well said!
I don’t care if an app sent these people here– and even that’s a big assumption. It’s ultimately your responsibility, as a sentient bag of meat, bone and water, to take care of yourself. About to hop on a 4-lane flyover with no bike facilities? If something makes you uncomfortable, stop and think about it before proceeding.
Y’all would cheer if a car driver followed Google Maps into a lake, right? You’d say it was their fault, they should have used common sense, etc. Stupid cagers!
Yet there’s literally no bone-headed action on a bicycle that the BikePortland posse won’t defend.
It’s quite incredible you could read the story and view the video, and the only behavior you wish to castigate is the bike rider’s and the only group you wish to denigrate are bike users.
Let’s just say for argument’s sake that the bike riders were not where they should be, how does that alter the responsibility of the driver not to plow into someone they clearly would have seen? And how does that explain the auto user pausing for a moment over the body of a badly injured person, and then simply driving off? Was this acceptable (or not worthy of indignation) because the bike wasn’t where you believed it should be?
At times, on this board, it feels like folks with an axe to grind against bicyclists will use the flimsiest excuse to vociferously vilify a bike user even when the evidence mocks their frothy venting.
I mean, sure – honk, swear, flip them off, whatever. An annoying cyclist might deserve scorn, but nothing those two did calls for plowing them down with your truck and leaving them to die.
Not killing your neighbor/friend/family-member is your responsibility as a driver.
Not abandoning the person you severely injured is your responsibility as a driver.
Referring to a person as a bag of meat is dehumanizing to an extreme.
It’s a city bridge with a 25 mph speed limit.
Yes. If you think commenters are ganging up against the truck driver, and not criticizing the bike rider, that’s exactly why.
The truck driver poses a danger to the “BikePortland posse”. The bike rider does not. A main way to take care of yourself on the road is to do what you can to keep people like that driver off the road.
How about a less ridiculous comparison than comparing following an app’s advice to ride in a traffic lane across a bridge with a 25 mph speed limit to driving into a lake?
What if, say–instead of driving into a lake–the app directed a driver to drive across a bridge in the inside lane instead of the curb lane? Would people here cheer? I doubt it–especially if the driver were injured.
And the reality is that apps routinely direct drivers into less-than-ideal lanes, or at least don’t give them adequate time to switch into the ideal lane. But nobody notices, or writes about it, because other drivers don’t typically run over them, then flee the scene.
From the front end design, this is obviously the 3rd generation Tundra which came out in 2022. Since 2018 Toyota comes standard with a collision avoidance system they call the Pre-Collision System (PCS). PCS is a sophisticated 3rd generation collision avoidance system with improved pedestrian and cyclist detection. Toyota specially highlighted and promoted the new system as having improved cyclist detection. The PCS uses a combination of radar, cameras, and sensor data. After detecting an imminent collision, it gives an audible alert in case the driver is distracted, and a visible dashboard alert. If the driver does not respond then PCS will apply the breaks. If the driver also breaks, but not hard enough, PCS will apply further breaking to avoid the collision.
PCS comes standard, and is on by default. It can be disabled from the steering wheel, but it will turn back on again every time you restart the vehicle. The other way to disable PCS, after its activated, is to use a combination of a sudden turning motion of the steering wheel with acceleration. The system will then assume the driver is taking control. Testing showed that upon audible/visual activation of the system for an eminent collision, the vast proportion of drives will hit the breaks. Its just instinctive. However, you can see in the video that around the time that you might think PCS should be activating, the vehicle moves to the right but does not slow down yet. This likely would be enough to disable the PCS.
There is no need to speculate though. Any PCS alert will activate the storage of a truly massive amount of sensor data to the Event Data Recorder (EDR), which is like the black box. Another system called the Vehicle Control History (VCH), logs telemetry data over time such as hard acceleration or braking, activation of ABS, activation of Traction Control, and Vehicle Stability Control (VSC), vehicle speeding history, as well as previous activations of the PCS. This only goes back about 5 events per event type, but this is enough to compare to a large baseline of other people to asses driver behavior such as aggressiveness.
Also since 2018, the Tundra comes with satellite “Connected Services” (like OnStar), which is on by default, and which transmits location data among other data. This can be turned off in the advanced software settings, but they found that most people will leave this on so the vehicle can be easily found if stolen. A simple narrow geofence warrant for the immediate collision location and time sent to Toyota will reveal the current GPS location and EDR/VCH data. In the case of a hit and run, exigent circumstance, or emergency, Toyota may share the data without a warrant, especially if needed to prevent imminent danger. An officer in a patrol car should be able to get the current GPS location from Toyota within minutes for a hit and run like this (near a large event), which should easily meet exigent circumstance criteria.