With unanimous support, Portland reaffirms commitment to Vision Zero

Portland City Councilor Tiffany Koyama Lane succeeded on many fronts last night: she made good on a campaign promise, she strengthened the city’s commitment to road safety, and she earned unanimous praise and support from all of her colleagues in passing her Vision Zero resolution.

Wednesday’s council meeting came after Koyama Lane hosted a rally and walk from Salmon Street Springs to City Hall where she was joined by advocates and other councilors — many of them wearing traffic safety orange.

Back in November, before Koyama Lane took her seat on the dais, she was moved to tears during a speech at a World Day of Remembrance event. “This shouldn’t be normalized,” she said. “This isn’t a topic that we’re just supposed to talk about when we’re running for office and it’s cool to go to Bike Happy Hour… we will keep fighting.” And keep fighting she did. Koyama Lane took what was merely a budget note in June and turned it into an official resolution that makes key administrative changes.

For years now, as deaths piled up and frustration grew, staff and leadership at the Portland Bureau of Transportation pushed the idea that in order to end fatal crashes, Vision Zero must transcend transportation and the commitment to safe roads must be integrated into the work of other bureaus. But talk only goes so far. Councilor Koyama Lane has now put that idea into action by moving PBOT’s top Vision Zero staffer, Dana Dickman, into the deputy city administrator’s (DCA’s) office. As we saw with the diverter removal plan debacle, when the administrative wing of city government makes decisions about road safety, bad things can happen. With Dickman ensconced at the DCA, that shouldn’t happen in the future.

Koyama Lane’s resolution also stands up a new task force that will include staff from multiple bureaus and develop a new action plan. A document shared with city councilors ahead of last night’s meeting includes examples of possible, “cross-bureau Initiatives for increasing traffic safety” from six city bureaus: Environmental Services, Planning and Sustainability, Fire and Rescue, Police, Fleet and Facilities, and Parks and Recreation. Further evidence of this cross-bureau collaboration came from the fact that all four of the city’s DCAs — the leaders of the City Operations, Community & Economic Development, Public Safety, and Public Works service areas — attended last night’s meeting.

Two amendments to the main resolution passed last night. One, from Councilor Candace Avalos, had to do with the make-up of that new task force; the other, from Councilor Eric Zimmerman, concerned the issue of how homeless Portlanders are overrepresented in fatality statistics.

Avalos wanted to make sure the new task force does not leave out community members. PBOT’s plan to make the task force an internal one — without nonprofit representatives or outside experts — has caused some heartburn among advocates in the past few weeks. Avalos’ amendment, which was accepted with unanimous consent, will make sure PBOT seeks, “meaningful community engagement in the development of its analysis and action plan.” PBOT Vision Zero Policy Manager Dana Dickman reinforced that intention during testimony last night. She said advocates and subject-matter experts will be brought in to working groups and will have other opportunities to influence the work of the task force.

Councilor Zimmerman said he feels it’s, “incredibly concerning” that of all the people killed while walking on Portland streets, about half are people who live on them. He passed an amendment that calls on the new task force to, “specifically examine the over-representation of traffic fatalities involving people experiencing homelessness, conduct an analysis of the underlying causes and recommend targeted strategies to reduce and prevent these deaths.”

In addition to the two amendments, there were a few other notable comments and exchanges from the councilors.

Councilor Dan Ryan spoke up to support automated camera enforcement and more policing. “[Vision Zero] Actions have been largely focused on road and traffic design and attempts to reduce car reliance… We need proactive and visible enforcement of traffic laws, and we need to address the unsafe activities occurring in our roadways,” he said. Ryan also tried to connect what he says were “added restrictions on police enforcement activities, specifically profiling and limiting traffic stops” in 2021 with a spike in fatalities. “It was not clear how these are related to Vision Zero’s original mission,” he said. Ryan wanted to know how why a city committed to Vision Zero would reduce traffic enforcement.

When PBOT Director Millicent Williams said police should answer, PPB Assistant Chief Amanda McMillan approached the microphone. Asst. Chief McMillan supported Ryan’s contention that there was a correlation between less policing and more traffic deaths and said that the PPB, “Did pull back resources back to the precincts in the wake of everything that was coming out of 2020 and 2021 [a reference to the George Floyd protests] and at that time the number of traffic fatalities rose.” “We’ve [since] reconstituted our traffic unit and we have those resources redeployed and we’ve seen a reduction now in traffic fatalities,” McMillan continued. “Maybe there’s a correlation there.”

Seeming pleased with the supportive testimony of the assistant chief, Councilor Ryan concluded the exchange by saying, “Since that [additional traffic policing] went in, you see a correlation when they’re going down. So I hope that becomes more and more of the dialogue.”

What Councilor Ryan nor Asst. Chief McMillan mentioned was that the PPB chose to pull back traffic enforcement as a political stunt to pressure council to increase police funding. Councilor Angelita Morillo worked as a staffer in city hall for the former commissioner-in-charge of PBOT when all that went down, and she was not going to let Ryan’s comments stand without a response.

“Part of the reason that Traffic Division was partially removed was because we found that they were disproportionately stopping Black Portlanders… So we need to put that into context as to why some of those decisions were made,” Morillo said. “This idea that our officers were not able to pull people over who are committing traffic offenses is not true, and it actually ended up being a political issue. BikePortland ended up interviewing an officer, who said, and I quote, ‘We needed to create a stir to get some change, to get the city council to fund us back up. And I mean, that’s the honest truth. I know that could make things more dangerous, but at the same time, we needed some change.’ So they were publicly talking about the fact that they had less traffic officers and that they weren’t going to enforce traffic violations in order to politically motivate the council to get more funding, and that is a dark history of Vision Zero that we need to address.”

When it comes to which of the 12 councilors spoke most strongly about Vision Zero, I’d give that honor to Councilor Sameer Kanal. He shared that in conversations with road safety advocates during his campaign, he learned there was a feeling that while “Vision Zero has been a nice commitment that people support, the feeling was broadly that nobody in power was willing to say at the time it was a numerical goal.” What Kanal is referring to hear is the reticence among some elected officials and policymakers to stand behind the “zero” part of the conversation.

“I think it’s important for as many of us — and some have already done so — to say zero is a numerical goal. It is a literal target for me,” Kanal said. He also mentioned a hot button issue of the day: political violence:

“Political violence is sometimes, but not always, reacted to appropriately when there’s a person outside of a system conducting it. It’s almost never reacted to appropriately when it’s people in suits that do it at a dais like this one — but it should be assessed as such. We bear responsibility when we, through our actions or our inactions, let people die.”

What actual steps is Kanal prepared to take to move the needle on Vision Zero? “Street design is the primary method that will achieve this,” he said, “and I intend to pursue implementing this over time with budget allocations through modal filtering, through support for transit — especially rail — and for converting select streets to car free completely and permanently.

We need to work to make the last traffic death we had, truly the last traffic death in Portland.”

For a taste of the public testimony, watch the powerful remarks of Portland dad and bike bus leader Rob Galanakis.

— View the resolution and supporting documents on city council’s website.