Just after 10:00 am this morning someone riding an electric scooter died following a collision with an Amtrak train. According to photos from witnesses at the scene shared with BikePortland, it happened at the sidewalk crossing of the rail tracks where they intersect with SE 11th/SE Milwaukie Avenue.
The deceased person’s body came to rest on the sidewalk located just north of the northernmost track, just beyond the Ford Building parking lot. According to photos that show the e-scooter and other investigative markings, it appears the collision might have originated at the eastern end of the crossing. Also clear in the photos is that the person was riding a Lime e-scooter that’s part of the City of Portland’s shared electric scooter system.
Police haven’t released any further details.
This is the second fatal collision at these tracks this year. Back in June, a man riding a bicycle was attempting to cross SE 8th in the main roadway prior to being struck and killed by a MAX light rail train.
Since August of this year there have been four fatal crashes involving e-scooter riders. On August 17th a man died from his injuries after being involved in a collision with a tractor-trailer operator near NE Martin Luther King Jr Blvd and NE Holladay St. One day later, a man hit a pothole near SE 52nd and SE Mitchell while riding an e-scooter and later died from his injuries. And on October 22nd, a woman riding a Lime e-scooter collided with another vehicle operator at N Vancouver and N Weidler and died in the hospital one week later.
This is the 36th fatal crash on Portland streets so far this year.
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Will this death be the motivation (finally) to build a cycling / ped bridge over these tracks? It is the WEST COAST MAINLINE, and it runs through the heart of a major city.
Build the bike / ped bridge and people will use it.
There is one, about a block to the south.
Unfortunately with elevators in frequently a disgusting state. I do take it, but the elevators and the poorly designed bike ramp on the stairs (handlebars get jammed in the railing) keep it from being appealing, at least to me.
There are multiple options in the area if one wants to avoid the conflict with trains completely: SE 14th overcrossing, Powell Underpass (generally sketchy), and the Rhine overcrossing. However, any overpass is going to take longer than an Amtrak train, so I doubt that the availability of an overcrossing at 11th/12th would prevent collisions like the one here. The vast majority of e-scooter and bike riders will opt for a clear level crossing, and it only takes a few seconds for one of these Amtrak trains to pass by, as they are generally doing 40+ mph here.
An important reminder that these multi-track crossing can be especially dangerous with a mix of slow freight trains and faster passenger trains. There is a desire to cross just after the freight train passes, but the train may be obscuring another train on the next track over. Wait for the lights to stop before crossing.
Most cities put up huge fences and barriers to block off streets completely. I wonder, why hasn’t Portland done this yet?
There’s a bridge 3 blocks away at SE 14th (and then the other one at Lafayette as well).
https://maps.app.goo.gl/iWf5tWNZiuM6Nw7r9
How many bridges over the tracks would you recommend?
There is a nearby walk/roll overpass.
One for the train— or for all users along that specific desire line—remains a pipe dream unless you can convince the railroad to shut down for a year and move out of Brooklyn Yard for Marion or Clark County.
The railroad didn’t shut down for a year for the Bob “should have been a ramp, broken elevator” Stacey Crossing.
I agree. Building a bridge that people will encounter and know to use on the most frequently used routes would be much more intuitive and better than an unreliable elevator. Many people will not know all their options or how dangerous an area is. In addition to being safer, it would make this route much more usable.
Heck yeah, SD! I’m sure the grieving family is consoled by all of the comments about how there’s an overcrossing just a few blocks away.
If it ain’t convenient, people aren’t gonna use it.
Even when it is convenient people don’t use “it” . . . look at all the people who will go out into traffic even when there’s a crosswalk less than 50′ away.
We live in a society whose culture is to “screw the rules” because we are so independent . . . yeah does a lot of good when you get hurt.
So your telling me everytime something isn’t convenient they should fix it, what happens if they build a ped bridge and that street becomes inconvenient for everyone. Someone is going to find another route thats better and the problem keeps happening. Also are you going to pay for all these bridges.
So you’re taking the conservative approach to school shooting? It’s too early to talk about it?
Why?
The simple solution is to pay attention. No need for an expensive solution that doesn’t eliminate the problem. Even with a bridge someone on a scooter is likely to continue scooting.
We should have safe ways to travel and we shouldn’t put train crews through this kind of ordeal. The train line isn’t going anywhere and as Fred points out there aren’t really options. If anything train traffic will be moving faster and there will be more of them.
I would:
–Route all buses away from the tracks. Fill in with light rail or more frequent trollies or whatever it takes.
–Make the lower SE below MLK Jr Boulevard car free, with bollards to let trucks in as needed. People act as if a lack of cars would be a problem but it could be an attractor. The big streets already have overpasses so people in cars can cross the area pretty freely.
–Support light industry with freight routes, a bike freight hub, better transit connections for employees, free transit passes, and (reluctantly) some amount of public car parking. There are disused parking garages in SW Portland.
–Build bike and ped ways at bridge level above the tracks, extending E past Grand Avenue. Start a funding authority to support redevelopment of buildings with mezzanine entrances and multiple elevators built to the same design that could be supported locally with uniform spare parts and service people. This infrastructure can be built at a scale that will support bike freight movement with little change from other human scale projects.
–Upgrade sprinkler systems and other on-site fire protection. Acquire fire trucks that readily fit into the new environment
Is that grandiose? I would say, no more so than a baseball stadium, or freeway expansions to serve a mode of travel that maximizes pollution, regularly kills people, and imposes visual blight on the center of every major American city.
Tragic. Condolences to the family and friends of the deceased.
Should we now declare war on trains?
You just couldn’t resist that last sentence huh Angus?
Maybe. If, you know, the “war on cars” is really about saving lives.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2025/10/brightline-train-florida/684624/
The war on trains for human transportation in the US was declared a long time ago.
Combining freight and passenger on the same tracks that run through busy transportation areas for transit, pedestrians and bikes is an outcome of this war. If you wanted to make a more insightful comment, you could say, “should we now declare a war on incorporating dangerous transportation infrastructure into human habitat without sufficient separation or safe guards?”
Wonderful, nuanced comment. The whole “war on cars” approach is so unfortunate, since it sounds like a black-and-white “cars bad” argument.
If you ask me, it’s not all that unfortunate. What is way more unfortunate is the widespread impatience and willful ignorance that prevents the freshly initiated from understanding the concept and movement.
Cars are certainly one of the worst inventions, along with gunpowder and smart phones, to have cursed the globe.
Not to mention sanitation and medicine, that have allowed us to reproduce in such prodigious numbers without getting knocked back by pandemics and disease.
You mean the rail lines that have been there since a few years after the Civil War ended?
Total Fatalities in Train Crashes in US by Year (USDOT)
2023 249
2022 286
2021 337
2020 200
2019 294
Total Fatalities in Automobile Crashes in US by Year (NHTSA)
2023 40,990
2022 42,514
2021 43,230
2020 38,824
2019 36,355
You can do as you like, I’m declaring war on posters of tendentious bullshit.
What I would like is to normalize those statistics by the number of trips or miles traveled — raw numbers are not terribly informative on their own.
Fair enough, but in this case just count the decimal places. Passengers and freight are apples and oranges, trains carry far fewer passengers but a lot of freight over long distances. We have nationwide systems of both train and car transportation, and cars pretty much own the death.
In a car each mile traveled has multiple conflicts. There are many potential crashes with people, other vehicles, fixed objects, curves, and breaks in terrain. You hardly ever get a train going through a 7-11 or your living room.
Train crews involved in a crash like this really unfortunate incident don’t show up in those statistics but if I were in their shoes it would be my worst day. What’s it worth to avoid putting blameless people through that?
I did; if we have just 200x the car/truck VMT than we do train VMT, then the numbers would be comparable. That’s before considering that trains do much of their travel in remote areas away from people, on long straight tracks, whereas motor vehicles tend to be driven in much more complex environments where there are lots of people around.
I don’t think the above presentation of fatality statistics really tells us much of value, besides that we have a lot of room for improvement.
War on ___ is rarely a useful construct.
I disagree. ‘Raw numbers’ (i.e. absolute number of people killed in a given type of collision) are what we should look at if we want to prevent people from dying in collisions. BASE jumping is probably a dangerous mode, but I don’t think we should spend much government budget to improve the safety of it. That being said, this particular rail corridor is obviously a safety concern, which is plain from anecdotal observation.
From a policy perspective, I want to focus our limited collision prevention resources where they’ll be most effective. These numbers do not tell me anything about that, so I don’t think they’re helpful.
If I have $1M to spend on safety, I’m going to look at particular improvements I could make, not start from statistics about how many people are killed nationwide in a year by mode.
In this case, it certainly does look like the rails crossings in SE Portland are dangerous, but would $1M make more of a difference there than fixing an intersection at 82nd & Powell? How about spending that lobbying for slower trains, or enforcing speed limits for cars? For that you need data and context and analysis and an understanding of political feasibility, not the sort of alarmist rhetoric and crazy proposals like closing all high crash corridors we so often hear here.
So no war on trains; no war on cars; no war on BASE jumping.
If you spend your resources on train safety your gains are capped at a few hundred souls/yr. Hence, I think we should go after the cars. That’s how lots of people are being killed.
The point of Vision Zero is there really shouldn’t be any deaths and serious life-changing injuries at all. Train, airplane, and ship/boat travel tend to have the fewest such deaths and injuries of the numerous modes, including walking and bicycling, let alone driving in cars (the main culprit of bike and walk deaths). Trains are still popular in Europe and much of Asia if no longer popular in the USA. There was a long time that boats/ships was a major mode for passenger movement, with lots of deaths during storms, wrecks on a lee shore, and so on, but the technology changed and we got trains, planes, and automobiles now.
I’ve traveled on numerous Amtrak trains many many times, and only on 4 trips has a train hit someone – three were fatal pedestrian hits and the 4th we hit a semi-trailer crossing through a gated crossing illegally (the driver walked away unhurt but the trailer full of agricultural chemicals was wrecked). It often takes a half-mile for a passenger train to stop (unlike MAX), and often half the body is at one location and the rest is elsewhere. The shortest stop for a police investigation I’ve experienced was about 45 minutes; the semi took 9 hours to investigate before our train was able to leave (or rather be dragged away by a UP locomotive – our train engines got burned out by stopping too quickly.)
Know what the impact you feel on the train when it hits someone? Zero. You don’t feel it at all, even when we hit the semi (near Salem OR.)
I’m curious if the emergency braking felt jarring at all. I’m guessing it didn’t, but all of my train rides have been uneventful, so I really have no idea.
Twice when hitting people I was on a Cascades train near Kelso or Centralia WA (2 engines + 8 coupled cars), once on the Piedmont between Raleigh and Greensboro (2 engines + 4 or 5 older renovated passenger cars). The smaller trains take a half-mile to stop, but the train that hit the semi was the Coast Starlight which is much longer and heavier, with two engines up front, baggage car, 3+ sleepers, two observation cars, a diner, and at least 5 and maybe 7 passenger cars, all of the older 2-deck type, each of 100 feet long, so at least 1,400 feet in total length, over a quarter-mile. I think the Amtrak train was moving at 65+ mph when it hit the semi, then it stopped within a quarter mile rather than a half mile or more – the conductor told us that both engines were burned out from braking too quickly. It didn’t feel jarring at all, it felt like a MAX train that was slowing down then stopping – apparently there was never any risk of derailment, but our drivers (who are UP employees and not Amtrak personnel) panicked. According to some passengers I talked with, when the train hit the semi, the heavily-loaded trailer did a huge arc in the air before crashing into the ground. Personally I felt nothing and I didn’t know anything was wrong until the conductor made an announcement; Amtrak trains often stop in the middle of nowhere for more or less no reason at all (usually to let another train pass).
“I’ve traveled on numerous Amtrak trains many many times, and only on 4 trips has a train hit someone”
Doesn’t that strike you as an extraordinary statement? I’ve ridden in cars many many times, and never has the car hit anyone. I’ve flown in airplanes many times, and taken the bus many many times, and never a collision.
No, not really. I never learned to drive, so I’m totally dependent on bicycling, transit, flying, etc. I often take the train because it’s relatively convenient AND I can carry my bike for real cheap, easily, on it. I’ve taken the train every year since 1982, often several times a year, both in the USA and overseas.
The people who were hit, were hit in the middle of the tracks, standing on ties between tracks – they weren’t at gated crossings, on streets, etc – and every train line has lots of signage warning of tracks, speedy trains, private property, and so on – sometimes it’s fenced off but in rural areas it usually isn’t. You can certainly feel a train coming at you even if you can’t hear it – the ground vibrates. Talking with railroad staff over the years, they tell me that the typical victim has head phones on, is often local, often homeless or nearly homeless, and sometimes is heading to a railroad bridge to go fishing (often carrying a fishing rod). I even have a cousin who is a (British) train driver who once hit a guy trying to commit suicide on the tracks, who ducked at the last second and lost his feet – my cousin was traumatized by the experience. It’s really easy to forget that freight railroads are private property – they are NOT public right-of-way even in cities – and that it is illegal to walk (or bike) on the tracks.
The other issue is that trains are fixed on their route, that unlike your car or bus, they can’t swerve, and because they are so heavy, they can’t stop easily, so if some person puts themselves in front of a moving train, they are as good as dead. And so why do we still have trains if they can’t easily stop or swerve? Because they are, by far, the most energy efficient way to haul goods on land.
Heck, I’ve probably flown more often than that, and certainly moved around by other modes much more frequently with nary a collision, much less a fatal one. Four collisions in that period, given that frequency of travel, seems alarmingly unlucky.
I think the inability to swerve probably makes trains safer — their path of travel is entirely predictable, unlike wheeled or winged vehicles.
I agree that trains are very useful, and your experience illustrates that sometimes useful things are also dangerous.
Yeah, you can put it down to bad luck on my part for being a passive passenger on those trains. But I’d rather sit in a huge seat on a waiting train for 2-3 hours that I can easily get up and walk around, even visit other cars and the bistro, than strapped to my tiny seat on an airplane that is sitting at the gate or in line on the tarmac for 2-3 hours waiting to take off. If train rights-of-way were as restricted as airline airports, I dare say there might be fewer deaths on trains – as it is, the national numbers are only in the low hundreds (see the Josef Schneider post above.)
I completely agree with this sentiment. I feel like Amtrak service around here is terrible, but the experience is so much better than flying.
To Seattle, I take Amtrak. To New York, I fly. To Cave Junction, I drive.
Pick the right tool for the job.
If you’re going to Pasco, WA, which is the correct tool?
Drive.
I’ll add one more: If I’m going to Hood River, I’ll take the CAT bus with my (non-motorized) bike.
You talk about normalizing numbers elsewhere (where it wasn’t really relevant), and then say this?
How many times does a trainload worth of people hit someone with their car in a lifetime?
If it’s an Orange Line max train with three passengers, probably zero.
Nonetheless, it’s hard to deny that 4 collisions while riding trains is a remarkable number.
It’s very easy to deny, I’m doing it right now.
It matters that the train is carrying a lot of people or cargo. If 50 average lifetime train riders had been driving their whole lives instead, it wouldn’t be the least bit surprising for there to be 4 collisions between them. It wouldn’t be surprising if it was 20.
Tragic, but those scooters encourage dangerous behavior.
How so? I’m genuinely curious.
How so?
One way that I observed in Bend last month. Two teenagers (appeared to be 14ish) riding helmetless on the Bend rental scooters in Drake Park, the centerpiece park on the river. They were doing wheelies, going against traffic in the bike lane, dodging the many people walking, then to cap it off, they tried to go down some steep stairs (maybe 10 steps). One kid made it, the other crashed, but they both raced away unharmed. Bend has all kinds of rules, laws, public announcements regarding scooter riding, but zero enforcement. The rental fleet is essentially expensive trash; you see them lying around all over town, even now, when nobody appears to be renting them much (getting colder).
That you saw two teenagers trying stupid stuff does not answer the question of how electric scooters encourage dangerous behavior.
It’s the same way that streets encourage dangerous driving behavior.
And how did the scooter encourage that behavior?
I don’t think they encourage it per se, it’s more that motors amplify clueless behavior — which is dangerous.
The entire premise of this thread is the area is unsafe because it lets people who ignore very obvious signals and not looks sufficiently get hit by trains.
No number of bridges will keep people from passing in front of trains for the simple reason that they’re more inconvenient than simply continuing forward. Being on motorized transport makes it easier to be less engaged with one’s environment as well as dart out quickly in front of something.
The consistent expectation on BP is anyone not in a car should be able to do anything they want anytime they want — and the infrastructure is deficient if they get into trouble doing dangerous and stupid things, and an overengineered showcase project that impacts only a tiny area is the solution.
“The consistent expectation on BP is anyone not in a car should be able to do anything they want anytime they want”
Really? I’ve been following this site for 15+ years and I think that’s quite a mischaracterization.
We’ve both been here that long. I’d suggest this may be a case where you can’t hear your own accent.
Take this thread. Someone bypassed bright flashing lights, loud bells, and people waiting behind gates clearly intended to block access when a train was coming and got hit, and there’s serious discussion about what infrastructure improvements should be made to prevent similar tragedies.
That’s fair enough because this is a cycling advocacy blog. But it plays like a Portlandia skit to most people — including a huge chunk of cyclists who don’t identify with the (fairly small) advocacy subculture.
I think two people suggested that another bridge get built and everyone else pointed out that was unreasonable because there’s already a bridge 3 blocks away (self included)
Not really.
The first comment asked if this would be the motivation to build a bridge over the tracks. That’s definitely about infrastructure, but I’d assume part or even most of the motivation for that would be to reduce wait times–not just to avoid deaths.
That was followed by several comments that there are already bridges/underpasses/alternatives nearby. a comment that a bridge would be better than an elevator, and comments saying people should pay more attention, and many other comments that had nothing to do with making infrastructure improvements.
So your description of the discussion is at least misleading. And the comments certainly don’t
That wasn’t even happening in the comments in this article’s comments.
On top of all that, the article itself not only didn’t focus on the need for better infrastructure, it didn’t even have a single sentence saying the infrastructure was inadequate.
One generalization about BP comments that IS true–and certainly was true with this article’s comments, given your comment and the several others about needing to take personal responsibility–is that when people push for better infrastructure to improve safety, there are often BP commenters–including regular commenters–who push back against, well, everything that you just listed as being the consistent expectation here.
You have the authoritative insight to commenters’ accents now? Where has anybody in this article or discussion seriously suggested anyone not in a car should be able to do anything they want?
I think he’s spot on.
Then feel free to point to me one case where the article or anybody in this discussion suggested someone not in a car should be able to do anything they want.
Who is creating the danger here? Clearly, the train is at fault, going fast through our neighborhoods. No one needs overpowered trains that go 60 miles an hour. If we didn’t have trains, a lot fewer people would be killed by them. In America, people can get away with murder if they do it with a train. We put speed regulators on our e-bicycles, but not on our trains? I’ll bet the trainbrain cops won’t even give the train driver a ticket. We should close all train tracks until they can be made safe.
This is good satire but unironically the solution here is grade-separation of the train tracks.
The city shouldn’t have cheaped out when they built the streets in this area. I guess we’ll just bulldoze the neighborhood so we can elevate everything.
Well, it’s just a tricky spot. There’s a railyard at the southern end and the steel bridge on the northern side. I don’t think elevating the railway is practical because of the MLK/Grand Viaduct and all the freeway/bridge infra it has to pass under. I suppose a trench/tunnel could work, but I’m not sure about the grades on either side. Also not sure how practical a tunnel could be with diesel locomotives.
It would really have to be a huge investment that would involve some serious earthworks, and they’d pretty much have to close the big intermodal railyard and move it elsewhere. On one hand, that would be good as it would open up lots of close-in real estate for housing, and get rid of a source of noise and truck traffic for the surrounding neighborhoods. On the other hand, it would siphon jobs to elsewhere, put noise and traffic pollution in another neighborhood, and could harm the industries that rely on that railroad access.
I think the best idea is to put up info signs — not the basic, graphic way finding signs — that explain all 3 options if the gates are down. And it should admit that the intercrossing along Powell can be sketchy with a lot of broken glass. At least then these people who risk ignoring the crossing arms did it knowing what their options are.
As someone who needs the elevators (which aren’t always working) to use the Rhine-Lafayette and Bob Stacey overcrossings, it’s good to know about the 17th overcrossing. Heck I’d go out of my way and use Holgate before I crossed a train. But I’ve seen things I don’t want to happen to me and I guess other people aren’t as afraid of trains as they should be.
There have been numerous studies that the bigger the object coming at us, the less we perceive it as moving fast (or at all), and of course the harder it is for it to stop. This has always been a regular complaint of bus drivers, truck drivers, and train drivers, that car drivers, bicyclists, pedestrians, and yes, scooter users, have utterly no clue how fast the larger vehicles are moving and how difficult (or impossible) it is for them to stop in time before hitting you. There was even a study done once about the kinds of people who will most likely drive around railroad crossing barriers with flashing lights – often drivers with a long crash history and outstanding warrants for arrest or previous felons, usually with a lower IQ, and a history of willing to engage in risky behavior. And this crossing clearly had the barrier and flashing lights.
At the crash scene, there is:
1. A sign a block away from the crash site indicating a railroad crossing is ahead
2. A crossbuck sign at the crossing indicating a railroad crossing
3. Flashing lights which active to indicate a train is approaching
4. A crossing arm which lowers across the tracks
5. Flashing lights on said crossing arm
6. A warning bell ringing in advance of the lights and crossing arm activating
7. A horn blown by the crew to indicate the train is approaching the crossing
I’m saddened to hear of this death. I feel badly for the deceased’s family and loved ones. And I feel especially badly for the train crew and the responders who have to deal with the trauma of witnessing the results of a train hitting a human body.
But I don’t see how the response to this tragedy is to build more infrastructure. If seven different warning systems aren’t enough to let a person know of impending danger, I don’t think adding an eighth, or ninth, or tenth will be enough either. We can’t engineer our way out of people not taking a measure of responsibility for their own safety.
Warning systems wouldn’t work but strict physical separation would. It is not uncommon to have grade separation for passenger or freight trains in urban areas. But that would cost money, so we should build more mega highways because they are free.
The time to grade separation was before the Orange Line was built. It would basically be impossible to raise or lower the RR tracks now without removing the Orange Line.
I do – a simple drop gate over the SIDEWALK at least gets the low-hanging fruit of people thinking the train has passed and it is safe to go regardless of bells and lights. Most of our bridges have gates on the sidewalk/bike path, and it was penny-wise and pound-foolish to omit them here.
Sure, someone will always evade safety measures, but this is an easy fix for this issue.
A few thousand dollars for a ped gate…or a young person’s life?
How many times will this city choose the latter?
You can go around a gate.
the same is true for cage drivers but they get a gate.
If those people think the arms, lights, and alarms are not indicative of danger, why would a sidewalk gate change their mind? I’m not sure it’s a fix at all.
What might help would be some sort of indicator about which way the train was coming from, so if there were two coming from different directions, folks would know and wouldn’t step onto the tracks after the first one had passed.
I don’t know if that’s what happened here, but it’s a real mode of failure, and the solution wouldn’t be overly complex or expensive.
People know the gates stay down and lights flash for some time after a train passes, so they assume ‘train gone but gate still down’ and cross tracks. A gate on sidewalk at least prevents all but the most determined from finding out it wasn’t true.
Or maybe just raise the gates and stop ringing the alarm once the train has passed so people aren’t trained to ignore them.
If people think sidewalk gates are closed unnecessarily, they’ll go around.
funny how there is a gate for cage drivers but no gate for vulnerable human beings walking/rolling.
There are really good reasons why the signals last as long as they do.
And, yes, the tendency of humans to learn the wrong thing from that has been studied and factored in, and it’s still safer to “err long’
Why gates/lights often stay active after the train clears:
Most U.S. crossings are designed to fail safe and therefore “err long” rather than risk a premature raise. Several technical features can extend the time:
Bottom line: the “extra” time is a deliberate safety buffer created by CWT prediction, approach-locking/second-train protection, island-circuit release logic, and conservative gate timing—so the system never raises early. eCFR+2Grade Crossing Toolkit+2
I think the right answer is quite the opposite. The reason people ignore train crossing signals is because they are too imprecise and go on too long. Make the signal stop immediately after the train finishes passing instead of 30 seconds later, and people will take them more seriously. We don’t need more things keeping us from crossing tracks, we need less.
How would that have prevented this crash?
Since we don’t know any of the details about what happened, there is very little we can say about what would have prevented this particular incident.
Note that if a car were involved, that would not stop us from blaming the driver. I don’t know why, in this case, the engineer is escaping blame, and everyone is so ready to blame the victim.
Because physics. Trains, even moving slowly, take far longer to stop than any other surface means of transport and they can’t change direction. Hence, there are multiple warning systems to give others plenty of advance notice. What people outside the train do with that information is up to them, and certainly not within the control of the train crew.
I’d be curious what, as a practical matter, you feel the train crew could have done, assuming they were operating the train within the posted limit and sounding the train horn, and all of the signs and signals were operational as well?
I doubt they could have done anything, except perhaps go slower, but then I’m not one who reflexively blames the driver for any collision with a cyclist, regardless of the facts.
I think this tragic situation shows that sometimes the victims of a crash are not completely blameless.
The engineer is escaping blame for several reasons:
_ Railroad trains cannot stop-and-go like a bus or even a MAX – once they are rolling at speed, it takes several blocks for them to actually stop, they are so heavy and the tracks are relatively so frictionless even with brakes on all the railroad cars – get in front of a moving train and you will almost definitely die; and
_ The train was in its own privately-owned right-of-way – even the “public street” crossings are actually owned by UP, not the city; and
_ There was in fact a gate and flashing lights and an audible horn while the train was passing through – all folks at the crossings are supposed to stop and wait; and
_Railroad trains are not simply “driven” by a person in the cab but also included in the process are signal operators off-site who control signals and tracks along the way – it’s a complex system.
I’ll be the first to admit my bias; but I’ve never seen a train driver run a red light, speed, be high and/or drunk, or harass and menace other people with their vehicle. I’m sure those things happen but there are dire consequences for train drivers who don’t follow the rules, in a way that there don’t seem to be for car drivers not following the rules. I can’t walk to Plaid Pantry down the street without seeing drivers doing dumb shit, so when someone gets hit, I’m inclined to assume the driver is at fault based on my lived experience. I understand how this might be wrong-headed but it’s where I’m an emotionally.
I suspect if training (no pun intended) for drivers was as strict as train engineers; and if consequences were as severe as they should be, there would be a lot fewer car-related deaths.
I have no idea how this crash happened so I can’t answer.
I agree that this could be a good idea. This is the only train crossing where I’ve had a close call (thought it was clear and Amtrak came around the bend at 60+ mph, thankfully still ~1000 ft away), and it’s because it’s truly wonky. Sometimes the gates will close and lights flash for seemingly no reason (not a single train will pass by over 5+ minutes) and then go up, which after several times conditions you into thinking that perhaps just carefully looking both sides and crossing is safe. But then there’s the different speeds on the MAX vs the freight tracks. And the final added factor of once in a blue moon, Amtrak blazing through at high speeds. Crossing logic/intuition that has worked for me elsewhere has failed me here.
Is 60 mph an estimate? That’s about the average speed that the train runs N of Salem and I doubt if it was going that fast in that area with several grade crossings and a very sharp curve coming up.
I understand where you’re coming from but there’s some additional context. The warning gates/bells/lights go on long after trains have passed, as others have pointed out. They also stay down even if a freight train is only blocking 12th and not 11th and 12 for examples. They’ll go on for almost an hour sometimes. So people are basically trained to ignore/not trust them. It’s like my old apartment building; the fire alarm was so sensitive, if someone burnt toast or my dumbass neighbors took bong rips, it would set of the alarm for the whole building. Sometimes it would happen multiple times per week. People just assumed it was the weed boys down the hall and genuinely ignored it. I think a great first step would be not allowing freight trains to block the crossing for so long, and perhaps a gate that lowers across the sidewalk as well.
All that being said, always look both ways when you cross train tracks, regardless of location or mode of transportation.
I think another issue that is also overlooked is that people in Portland encounter a number of rail crossings all over the city. Many, if not most of them, have slow moving max or street cars. At some of these crossings, the signals are routinely ignored by almost everyone on bikes and scooters. If someone hasn’t been through this area much, it may be a total surprise that there are fast moving trains.
People who are hit and killed may not be totally oblivious, here. They may be looking at one set of tracks, or another object and not realize that there could be a fast moving train coming on another track from a different direction than they are expecting. There have been a number of times I have seen people look at the wrong signal and start to move into oncoming traffic because they saw a green light and didn’t realize that signal was for someone else, the car about to plow into them.
Dangerous infrastructure has to be design for the people that we have, not the people that we want. Trimet completely bungled the design of the cycling and pedestrian infrastructure east of the Tilikum bridge, treating the area like it is on the outskirts of a rural town rather than a major multimodal thoroughfare. I get that it seems hard to figure out a way to make this area safer, but can we at least recognize that this is the predictable outcome of this design, and it will keep happening, and when there are major redesigns of areas like this, we should do better.
If we ignore human frailty and the chance of bad crashes for just a moment, a crossing where all surface traffic is held up regularly but unpredictability by fast trains, long slow trains, and light rail several times an hour is disfunctional. It’s crazy that we run buses across those tracks.
High speed rail is coming and it will most likely go through that corridor.
The best argument for a better ped/bike facility is not that that we should protect foolhardy people, but rather that we should have a complete and expeditious network of human powered travel infrastructure throughout the city. People moving themselves should be forwarded the best way possible. We won’t know the potential of human travel until it is enabled.
Scooters are cute and handy but they seem to attract risk takers and empower bad choices. That might sound crazy coming from a bike rider but the physics of a scooter are different. I’m not quite ready to ban scooters but I would certainly charge a premium to use them. There’s already a crash history associated with scooter operations.
If we used available data to inform insurance rates then bike insurance would be easy to get and inexpensive. Bikes are too safe. They don’t create enough havoc for society to mandate insurance and the overhead on operations would be greater than the payout and, crucially, the profit. If bike insurance were feasible and common we’d have better laws and more legal representation.
Given that we know this crossing is problematic, one option might be slowing trains down as they pass through. You know, choose safety over convenience to put it in a more BikePortland friendly phrasing.
Making the crossing slower and more predictable would almost certainly make it safer.
I ride through the Trimet Vortex (this area) roughly 5x/week (sometimes I take an alternative route home).
The UP trains are (typically) going frustratingly slow but surely for a good reason. My office is along this line and the UP operators are also so aggressive with the horns that it almost seems like they have an axe to grind with someone who lives or works along the tracks. If you’re outside and not in a car, the horns are oppressively loud.
The Amtrak trains come through alarmingly fast through this section, IMO. I understand the desire for expediency. But compared to Trimet and UP, they do “sneak” up you.
UP generally blows its horns in the CEID (they have to give 9 blasts for each road crossing), but not at 8th/11th/12th where a “quiet zone” was instituted (requires specific engineering mitigations) when they build the Orange Line (can you imagine the impact on the rare Orange Line rider waiting at the Clinton station from those UP horn blasts?)
The freight trains often “go slow” either because they are being built in the Brooklyn Yard, so are just shuttling around, or have one end on the Steel Bridge, which has a very slow speed limit. The trains are now so long they can have one end in NW Portland and the other south of Brooklyn. It’s insane.
And sometimes the UP or Canadian trains come through at speed, though it’s less common.
If you want to reduce deaths at crossings, slow the trains down. That said, the cyclist who was killed 6 months ago was hit by a nice and slow Max train, so even speed reduction is no panacea. And since no car was involved, we can victim blame all we want.
It will always be unpredictable because the schedule keeping of MAX and the various passenger trains is uneven and the freight trains have a logic that only they know. As people have pointed out, sometimes their operations cause warning signals and gate closings without crossing the street at all.
Slower moving trains will lengthen the closure time and they are interpreted by risk takers as an opportunity. We know those folks exist.
Why shouldn’t we apply design and material resources to a problem that has killed people in very recent memory as well as delaying every person who regularly travels through the area? The delays are tedious. The unpredictability makes every trip a gamble and the only winning strategy is to take another route.
I wonder how many close calls would still be happening at this intersection if freight trains went straight through in a matter of minutes, rather than sometimes stalling on the tracks for an hour or more.
Also, why are there no signs at this intersection letting people know about the very close-by Stacey bridge? You cannot see the bridge when approaching the intersection from the north.