On October 29th, the unthinkable happened: three people were killed in three separate crashes in East Portland, all within just one mile of each other. The tragic night struck a nerve for District One City Councilor Jamie Dunphy, who shared a video on social media that expressed both sadness and indignation.
I talked to Dunphy on the phone today about those deaths, what he thinks will prevent them, and how they might influence his approach to transportation safety in the future. The following interview has been edited slightly for clarity.
Jonathan Maus/BikePortland:
How did you feel when you heard about those three fatalities?
Councilor Dunphy:
I was in the middle of a city council hearing and I opened up The Oregonian to find out about it. I was not independently told about any of this from the police or the transportation bureau, and it just literally stopped me in my tracks. I mean, we just finished talking about vision zero, and the for the city to be completely silent on the fact that within a two-and-a-half hour period, three neighbors were killed in a 20-block square radius. It was shocking.
There was no nobody in the city seeming to be paying attention to that. Nobody seemed to flag that, or maybe to have pointed it out to the councilors in charge. And it felt like such an aberration from what we would be expecting, that I was just shocked and heartbroken, and I felt compelled to say something.
It’s unbelievable that we’re at this point. I’ve walked those streets. I know the infrastructure there is piss-poor, and the visibility is terrible, and the way people drive on our streets is a complete disregard for human life. It is a failure of government. It is a failure of environmental design. It is a failure of individual behavior. It’s all of those things.
I wanted to just draw attention to the fact that there are consequences happening in our community.
To the mayor’s credit, and specifically to the director of PBOT director’s credit, they got some infrastructure out there. Well, not infrastructure. They got some signage. They got some light pole cameras. They got some some temporary lighting solutions within a few hours. They started putting things out to try and draw public attention to the fact that we’re approaching the dark season and daylight savings time, and the rain makes visibility worse for everybody, and that vision zero isn’t just about people crossing the street downtown or in, you know, inner Hawthorne area or some of the cooler parts of town — people are dying on the streets of East Portland, and it’s a failure by everyone.
Jonathan/BikePortland:
What is the infrastructure like on those streets in your district?
Councilor Dunphy:
These main thoroughfares — Holgate, Halsey, Glisan, Powell, Burnside, Foster, all of them — these are treated and built as four or five-lane highways. It is my firm belief that the federal infrastructure of I-84 is a failed piece of infrastructure. It has no on-ramps or off-ramps from 84 west for the entire length of the District One. And so people don’t have a way — and there are not enough family-wage jobs in District One — so everybody’s in their car and they’re trying to get downtown or out of the district, and they’re driving like crazy, and they’re trying to avoid traffic, and they drive insane.
And there’s wildly insufficient sidewalks. Even if we have the sidewalks at all, they are outdated in many ways. They are unsafe. They are affected by disuse and damage and tree branches and tree roots.
The few safety infrastructure upgrades that we do have, like what has happened to the traffic calming at outer Division Street, is leading to even worse behavior. People are literally flipping their cars when they’re trying to turn off of Division and hitting one of those concrete barrier things. That section of Glisan [where one of the people was killed] recently got some dedicated bike lanes. And you know, they’re not safe bike lanes. There’s not sufficient lighting there to actually make those bike lanes safe. There’s not sufficient lighting to make those crosswalks safe and walkable. And when you pair that with the lack of human infrastructure, the lack of public transportation and the failure of the city to address the homelessness crisis — especially around 122nd and Glisan — we have folks who are putting themselves into dangerous positions and drivers who are making those positions even worse. And it’s obvious the outcome there is going to be a collision, and the pedestrians and the bike riders will always lose that.
The infrastructure in East Portland is not designed for the people who are living there. It is designed to get people and freight through it, and it shows. And it’s crazy. It’s 100 years of disinvestment materializing, right?
Jonathan/BikePortland:
I hear what you’re saying. You’re listing all the reasons why I think a lot of people feel like the issue, especially in East Portland, is overwhelming. It’s hard to know where to start. That being said, what happened that night is unprecedented. Has it changed you? Has it changed the way you want to advocate for transportation safety on city council?
Councilor Dunphy:
I wouldn’t say it has changed me. It has made it clear to me how much more acute and urgent the problem is, and how it is intertwined with all of the other things that we are working on. I was one of the key co-sponsors of the vision zero work at the city, but that was sort of high-level, and clearly was, you know, fancy words without a lot of follow through. And I hate that. I hate performative nonsense and it’s clear that the city’s work on vision zero hasn’t been serious. It hasn’t been effective.
It also drove home for me that, as we are talking about homelessness, we have to talk about transportation infrastructure. As we are talking about economic development, we have to talk about transportation infrastructure. We will never meet our climate goals if we don’t talk about getting good jobs in East Portland because everybody’s trapped in their single car and having to drive that district. We will never reduce the deaths on the streets of folks who are sleeping outside, if they are also getting hit by cars, if we are putting human lives in the same physical built space as vehicles, if people are sleeping in tents on streets and don’t have a place to be safe and they don’t have sufficient sidewalks, of course, that is going to lead to direct conflict with vehicles.
No, I didn’t change, it just drives home for me that infrastructure and the built environment are core to almost all the rest of our goals that we are trying to accomplish.
Jonathan/BikePortland:
What you said earlier tells me that, in some ways, you’re happy with what the mayor, city administrator, Portland Police Bureau, and PBOT did as an immediate response. Is there anything else ongoing in terms of something more substantial? For instance, when Sarah Pliner was was killed over on Southeast Powell, there was a listening session at the school. There were commitments from ODOT to do something about it. Is there anything like that in terms of follow-up from those folks that you mentioned in your Instagram video? Is anyone in your office reaching out to them? Or was the message board sign PBOT put up (with “Traffic Death Here – Use Caution”) enough of a response?
Councilor Dunphy:
No, that cannot be the response, putting up a sign and saying, ‘Traffic death, slow down,’ or whatever it said. That can’t be the response we need. I’ve asked specifically for the traffic engineers and the PBOT infrastructure folks to come up with a plan for improving some of the deficiencies on that stretch. Specifically, I want better lighting. I want to see what we can do in terms of actual division between where the vehicles go and where bikes and pedestrians go, some sort of physical median.
And I think to some extent, some of this is also bad behavior by drivers that we’re not seeing enforcement on. Every single day I see people running red lights or doing enormous amounts of speeding. I think we can demonstrate to the public that we have a social contract we need to be following, and we have actual laws that we need to be following, and that there are consequences for not following those laws. We need to be intentional about it also being the built environment.
I’m not interested in having a community listening session and envisioning what neighbors want to see — neighbors have told us what they want to see. They want to have their kids walk home from school safely. We know that. We know what these solutions are. And we see that infrastructure spending benefiting other parts of the city. We don’t see it benefiting East Portland.
[Dunphy then explained how he recently received a district-by-district breakdown of Parks and PBOT investment. He cited an example of a promise to spend $6 million on street sweeping, but worried that in places without sidewalks, PBOT won’t sweep because there’s no curb. “That doesn’t mean you don’t come sweep my neighborhood,” he said. “My neighbors still deserve beautification. So I want to see where that where those dollars are being spent and my team is actively looking at the report and asking for some follow-up on it.”]
Jonathan/BikePortland:
You mentioned the built environment and you’ve laid out the problem. It often comes down to the incongruity of fast moving vehicles being operated near where people live, work and play. And there’s an obvious way to prevent that, which is to make it impossible to travel at such high speeds. But that often comes down to a political question: Are you willing to support a project that creates more friction for drivers, makes driving more difficult, slower, and less convenient as a trade-off to making roads safer? Would you support a design solution that included things like narrowing the street, or chicanes? The design solutions are there. They’re obvious. They’re in use all over the world. But would you support them?
Councilor Dunphy:
I think absolutely. Especially in the obvious high crash corridors and areas where we know those conflicts are happening. I mean, it’s obvious: We can demonstrate it. It’s Sandy, right? It’s Glisan. It’s Burnside, Powell, it’s Division. We know where those are. The way the traffic calming has gone on outer Division doesn’t seem like it has reduced the levels of pedestrian and bicycle conflict, compared to the level of undertaking it took to change the built environment. I’m absolutely open to that; but it also has to come with more reasons to keep people from getting into their car, and it has to come with something I’m specifically working on: how do we attract better jobs so people don’t have to get into their cars in the first place? I’m supportive of additional mass transit and for trying to make it less convenient to drive and more convenient to take a bus. We’re seeing the opposite from TriMet, we’re seeing some service pullback. We’re not seeing service levels in East Portland of transit ridership at the same level that we see in other parts of the city. It’s one of those things where they say, ‘Well, nobody’s doing it, so we have to cut back.’ And when you cut back, nobody’s going to use it. But yeah, I think the built environment needs to change.
Jonathan/BikePortland:
The problems that you mentioned — getting people more housing, improving transit — those could take a long time to do. Meanwhile, three people were killed in one night. So, I would just ask you again: If there was something put on the table that said, ‘This is a crisis of public safety, and we’re going to do some things with this street that are going to dramatically slow it down. You might not be able to turn left here. You might not be able to make a u-turn there.’ Would you be willing to face your constituents and try to help them understand why that’s necessary, even if it doesn’t come with a fix to their housing or transit needs?
Councilor Dunphy:
I wouldn’t be supportive right now of what the city previously did with Division. That was sort of a broad brush when trying to address something that I think was done in a ham-handed way. We have clear data about where these pinch points are and these are the places where people are colliding — so yes, absolutely, make those areas safer through the built environment and that specifically means making it less convenient to drive. Not on every major thoroughfare, because I think that ultimately that is going to just make it that much harder to live in East Portland right now. But I think if we did it in a way that was specific and targeted and data-informed, absolutely.
Jonathan/BikePortland:
I’ve been saying for many years that, while they’re spending a lot of money, PBOT is not doing projects in East Portland that will actually move the needle for safety. Some projects might start off strong, but are too compromised by politics and pushback once they hit the ground. So then the activists are not happy and the drivers are mad because they feel like there’s money being spent on stuff they don’t care about. So everybody’s pissed.
Councilor Dunphy:
There is a school of thought that is prominent in city hall — especially under the old form of government and those who have followed us over from it — that if everybody is angry, then you’re probably doing good politics and I think that’s absolutely bullshit.
Jonathan/BikePortland:
As an elected official, you have to be comfortable with who you’ve made mad, because not everybody’s anger should be valued the same. And I know that’s tricky, but it’s up to you as an elected to understand who you should not want angry, versus who it’s okay to make angry.
Councilor Dunphy:
This job is hard, but it’s supposed to be hard. And these decisions are supposed to be controversial, because if they were easy, they would have been made before it got to my desk. And so it requires a level of bravery that, candidly, I don’t think most of the people have had who’ve been elected to city council in the past. I don’t care if it makes people angry if I’m saving lives. My top priority should be that everybody gets home safe tonight.
My [13-year-old] daughter walks to middle school in Parkrose and does not have an option of walking on sidewalks the entire way. And while it’s getting better in places, I just want to know that when she’s walking home from her classes after five o’clock when it’s dark, that she’s not going to die. And I think that’s a basic thing and I am willing to take on a certain level of pushback in the name of saving lives.
Jonathan/BikePortland:
Is there anything else you want folks to know regarding your feelings about all this?
Councilor Dunphy:
I want people to slow the fuck down. Just stop driving so damn fast. I got a little bit of pushback from folks saying, ‘You know, this is not an individual problem. This is a collective, social problem.’ And I agree. And it is also an individual problem. It is a responsibility for us all to fix it; but also, people need to take responsibility. To take responsibility in their vehicles and drive differently.
Jonathan/BikePortland:
Do you plan to attend the World Day of Remembrance event coming up on Sunday?
Councilor Dunphy:
Yes, I’ll be there. I’m speaking too.
— For more on World Day of Remembrance, which coming up this Sunday (11/16) from 11:00 to 12 noon at Luuwit View Park at NE 127th and Fremont, visit the event website.
Thanks for reading.
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“Slow the fuck down” is exactly the #1 answer!… #2 better infrastructure and so on.
This is the #1 answer! Why have we been waiting for close to one hundred years for people to voluntarily choose the right answer while building a system of incentives, 1000 times louder to “speed the fuck up?”
A NYS senator recently showcased a speed governor to garner support for a bill called “Stop Super Speeders Act,” which would require anyone over 16 speed camera violations to have it installed on their car. To my knowledge this is the first bill containing speed governors since the failed 1922 Cincinatti speed governor bill, which would have been on all cars and limited speed to 25. Voluntary regulation of speed and educational campaigns, particularly with cars that can now top 60mph within a few seconds, has been an epic failure. Speed governors should be the norm in urban settings.
Do you have a governor on your car? If not, why not?
This is right up there with specious comments when people suggest raising taxes of “you can donate to the IRS if you want to pay more.”
Speeders are most likely to kill themselves and their passengers, so installing a governor is first and foremost a safety precaution for drivers themselves. That’s very different than your IRS example, where the benefits of individual action are so diffuse as to be all but meaningless.
So not a good comparison.
When a local campaign launches for speed governors – aka “intelligent speed assist” — I will go all out to support it. I think it’s an amazing tool that we need to start deploying ASAP. Begin with super speeders or city fleet operators, or whatever… But just get a pilot out there and let’s go. Just like “stop as yield” for bikes, I feel like the way things are going, speed governors are an imminent policy.
Agreed. Why not start the city fleet with ISA? It’s also possible insurance companies might even see the data on reduced crashes and lower premiums.
Why don’t you try it yourself and see how you and your family like it in practice? Wouldn’t you feel safer knowing your wife and teenagers had that safety equipment on the vehicles they drive?
That’s not a “gotcha” — that’s a legitimate question.
oh I would absolutely use it and put it on all my kids cars. Is the tech actually available for that?
To be fair, I don’t know, but if it’s being mandated (or proposed to be mandated) for chronic speeders, then it must exist. I’ve heard so many people post about it here that I assume it does.
But, to be honest, I don’t really know because I would never consider getting it for myself (or my family). For me it’s firmly in the “great for other people” category, where I assume it lives for most of us.
And if it turns out the tech doesn’t actually exist, maybe we can stop talking about it as if it’s a real solution.
It certainly exists as NYC has used it in their fleet for some time now.
And I’m curious: Why wouldn’t you consider using it with your family?
If you know the tech exists, why did you ask me that?
I wouldn’t consider it for my car primarily because I’m a sane driver so it would add cost and complexity for no gain (and if I were an insane driver, I wouldn’t want something that interfered with my insanity). My family is likewise sane.
But I’m special. The tech would be great for other people.
Existence and (consumer-level) availability are two different things.
Refers to the latter, while
refers to the former.
We don’t normally expect this kind of inattention to detail from you, Watts.
You’re right. Too much speculation.
Here’s a link to one such product, and AI will offer you many others:
https://www.lifesaferisa.com/
So yes, readily available, from multiple sources.
I don’t know. Pretty much everyone drives too fast sometimes. I do. Probably you do too, occasionally.
Like most of us, I’m in the top 5% of drivers. I’m not interested in a governor for myself, and not advocating one for others.
I do think that if you believe it would be a useful piece of safety equipment, that you try it out for yourself. If nothing else, you might get some insight about whether it is something the general public would accept.
Can anyone explain why Teslas accelerate so incredibly quickly? Is it a feature of the “self-drive” system?
I recently rode in a Tesla to the airport (with Lyft). The car would slow down in traffic but the second there was any open road ahead, the car would leap forward like some kind of dragster – kinda made me feel nauseated.
Also I’ve noticed that when I’m riding my bike on a street with no bike lane, a Tesla will slow down and move over to pass me from behind. But the second it passes and there is open road ahead, it accelerates like mad. Is this how self-drive works?
I can — when Tesla started up, electric cars were seen as underpowered and as sexy as Al Gore on a Segway (or, for our friends from the Antipodes, a munter on a moped). Tesla deliberately overpowered their vehicles (and gave them a luxury feel) in order to change their image and show that EVs could be even better and nicer than gas powered cars.
I’d say they successfully changed the image of EVs, and that it is a very good thing they were because EVs have become a viable and growing category of vehicle sales, which is critical to those of us who care about climate change and ending consumption of fossil fuels.
Doesn’t that reflect on the driver rather than the car?
I saw a video of that, which was awesome. A senator in California tried to pass a law requiring “passive speed limiters,” basically alerts when 10 mph over the speed limit, but it was ultimately vetoed by Newsom. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/28/business/california-speeding-car-alert.html
This is really where the rubber hits the road. Every car should have this. Initially, high risk groups, including children 16-18 years old, people who post more than 10 comments/ week on bike Portland, and official government work vehicles should be required to have this technology.
I’d buy that for a dollar!
I’ve been wrestling with the whole three-crashes-so-close-together-in-one-night as somehow worse than the steady drumbeat of fatalities and serious injury crashes we’ve been living with for decades. I agree that it is jarring. But I wonder if this is more about the somewhat (with exceptions that I won’t go into) randomness of road fatalities and our tendency to respond to multiple people getting killed (we do this with gun violence too). Let’s compare two different scenarios. Let’s say there is a total of 52 road fatalities in Portland over the course of a year. In the first scenario they occur steadily throughout the year. One per week. All four districts are affected but some more than others. In the second scenario there would be the same total number of fatalities – 52. But in this case there are a couple weeks where nobody gets killed and others in which three or four people are killed within close geographic and time proximity. Is the ultimate outcome of one worse than the other? I don’t think so. Although the shock value might be. I understand that it lands in a different way when the fatalities come so close together. But for my anyway, it’s no surprise. I think we will continue to see a steady drumbeat of fatalities. Every once in a long while we will see them clustered closer together. This is to be expected.
But given that it takes these situations – where fatalities are clustered closer together – for people who don’t follow the issue so closely to feel shocked and concerned, we’d be smart as road safety advocates to leverage that concern when it arises. I wish it didn’t take a multiple fatality event for people to care more deeply. But let’s use these horrific instances to get more people involved
Yeah, Jonathan called it “unthinkable” but I consider it instead “statistically inevitable” (if we continue to fail to fix the underlying problems).
I knew some of you would pull out my use of “unthinkable”! Trust me I get what you are saying, but I also think it’s possible for me to understand that this type of thing is inevitable while also being shocked that it actually happened. I would have never thought I’d see this many deaths so close together in such a short timeframe… thus the word “unthinkable.”
Back in 2013 or so, 3 bicyclists were killed on a beautiful summer day on 148th by a drunk van driver; a couple months later a pedestrian was killed by a (distracted) school bus driver at 148th and Division; that was a few weeks after a pedestrian was killed at a flashing crosswalk on Division at about 140th. Every year lots of people die at East Portland intersections.
What surprises me JM, is that you yourself are surprised. You compile crash statistics and monitor their geographic locations. You attend various PBOT meetings and briefings. You’ve seen their maps of “high crash corridors” hundreds of times – 102nd, 122nd, and Glisan are always on those maps – so why would it ever be “unthinkable”?
Oh my god David. I type one word and have to defend myself several times here in the comments. It’s exhausting! It was one word. It doesn’t perfectly encapsulate my entire worldview. Sorry if this comes off as rude or abrupt, but I feel like some folks on here just get way too hung up on little things. I’ve explained myself. It’s not necessarily unthinkable or surprising to me… But I felt in that moment of typing that word, in those few seconds, I felt like using the word “unthinkable” and I don’t feel like it’s a big enough deal to go back and change. Thanks.
You didn’t have to defend yourself; you chose to.
I think David and I are just saying that this kind of bloodshed is exactly what we would think would happen given the status quo of our roadways–the opposite of “unthinkable”.
Maybe we care more than most people about exact word choice and the implications thereof. But it’s coming from a place of caring, not nitpicking.
I interpreted a totally different definition of “unthinkable” when I read the article. I did not think the author meant that the coincidence of three fatalities violated Poisson statistics or that it was surprising that there would be trouble in an area with a bunch of people traveling on foot in and around super busy roads. I thought he used “unthinkable” to mean that the tragedy of three people dying was hard to wrap one’s head around.
I have to remind myself, every now and then, that humans didn’t evolve to be rational thinking machines.
We evolved to take in sensory data that was relevant to evolutionary success (such as visual signs of predators or willing mates, olfactory signs of rotten food, etc) and even, to some degree, *ignore* other kinds of data that are not obviously related to immediate survival and reproduction (such as data that would pertain to forecasting distant or potential future events).
Humans literally had to invent numbers- and some amount of humans still have trouble understanding them!
While I have to remind myself this in order to give other people some grace… perhaps more importantly, I need to remind myself this in order to curb my own lack of rationality!
As it relates to the three deaths, I do think it’s worth taking human psychology into account with regards to transportation safety planning and policy.
I think there are two most important psychological effects for us to remember:
1. generally people don’t care about the steady drip of deaths on the streets, because these deaths feel distant from their own life, or even irrelevant
2. impacts to car drivers’ ability to drive around quickly and conveniently feel very close, personal, and relevant!
I think that’s why Dunphy isn’t willing to stake his politics squarely in the camp of “make the streets safer by adding infrastructure that makes driving slower and less convenient.”
I would bet that a large majority of his constituents believe that dangerous driving is something “other people do,” and that they are personally not at great risk of killing anyone, or getting killed on the streets. Many of them also probably believe that they deserve the right to drive quickly around town without any inconvenience and park close to their destination without any inconvenience.
Many of these voters would perceive any government efforts to slow down driving speeds or reduce vehicle miles traveled as an inconvenience at best, or even a personal attack on their freedom and agency!
I’m not even sure these voters are totally incorrect: is it possible that many of the dangers on our streets are associated with a relatively small number of faster, more aggressive drivers… say, young men? I don’t know the statistics, but I can imagine the Venn diagram of “drivers who kill” and “voters who drive” actually might include only a small overlap.
“War on cars” style rhetoric and systems-level-thinking might poll well in southeast Portland, but I take it that Dunphy knows his constituents: a tough love message of “slow the fuck down” aimed at speeding drivers probably lands really well in with voters who think the problem has more to do with anti-social drivers than concrete transportation systems.
So Dunphy blames people for not taking responsibilities?
He voted this morning against the mayor who is trying to get people to take some responsibility.
Between his total lack of judgement in hiring people and his stand against the environment (every single environmental group in Oregon opposed his silly vote today).
He is a completely unserious person and his district can do much better.
He could explain to his voters why he hired a person who treats women like dogs before he lectured us about taking personal responsibility.
He could also explain why he supports keeping people sleeping on the streets and getting run over by cars…
Such compassion…
Nowhere near as compassionate as Wilson’s fake shelters that are empty every day. How much waste and fraud will it take for you to stop supporting this kind of cruel thuggery?
Cruel thuggery”? Mate, your pivot was so sharp I think you left skid marks. As if keeping people in squalor on the streets is the compassionate option.
If you’re going to change the subject, at least pick one that doesn’t trip over your own point on the way in.
The 1000 Friends of Oregon, Willamette Riverkeepers, Oregon league of Conservation voters and the AFSCME Local 189 union workers disagree with you.
Also 7 council members and the Mayor.
Most reasonable people think cleaning up biohazards is a good idea.
Most reasonable people think that a warm shelter for human beings beats sleeping in the mud on Freeway embankments.
You must enjoy seeing human misery on a daily basis.
Empty fake shelter =/= warm housing for human beings.
Always the false dichotomy of leaving people to live on the streets and doing sweeps. As if there aren’t many different versions of getting people off the street that could be better **or worse** than leaving them to live in tents.
It’s easy to come up with feasible ideas that are worse than shelter, so it’s not really a dichotomy at all; more a range of choices, of which shelter is probably the least bad.
If I could, I’d buy everyone on the street a country estate. That sounds like a great alternative, but it fails the viability test. If you have ideas about something better than shelter that is actually doable, please share.
I am sure the Mayor would like your opinion on how to do it better.
If sweeps don’t occur the camps become a toxic waste dump and a real health problem.
The broke down vehicles are just biohazards.
It is a human tragedy that Morillo and Green are apparently Fine with.
They are not offering any solution except to keep punting.
They want to use money for “refugees” , whatever that means instead of dealing with the people who are struggling Now!
They are just a couple of failed Social Justice Warriors who are past their time.
They’ve been embarrassed by the community teaching them what some of the City bureaus actually do when helping the community when they, if they had taken the time, to learn. But they live with the false narratives that are out there.
Such as what other versions, JohnV?
If the places the homeless are sleeping weren’t completely unsuitable for human habitation, investors would already be charging $25 /sq ft per month for it.
that whole debate is so sad to me.
I think politically the Morillo move was really bad. I agree with her in spirit, but that was not a smart way to go about getting it done. I wish we would see more collaboration and cooperation among influential elected officials who care a lot about this stuff and who are smart enough to figure it out. But instead, I was sad to see, yet again, a confrontational approach.
Wilson and Morillo both have massive popularity and influence. Imagine if they worked together on this important issue instead of the same old back-and-forth, zero-sum, binary approach. Portlanders are sooo tired of this! We just want shit to get better. Wilson and Morillo both want shit to get better, but the politics needs to improve or they’ll both just waste their respective mandates on infighting and pleasing their bases.
I think this is spot-on.
I think that with a more collaborative approach we might have found a way to fund Morillo’s priorities without dismantling the centerpiece of the mayor’s work, and everyone would be better off.
One thing this episode did was clarify to Portlanders that recent improvements (modest and uneven as they may be) are fragile and cannot be taken for granted, so Morillo may have solidified support behind Wilson’s approach. It may also have given others running for D3 seats next year a clear and concrete way to differentiate themselves.
Centerpiece of Mayor’s work: Fake shelters that waste the people’s money.
The shelters are fake in the same way the moon landing was fake.
What do you mean ‘fake’?
Fake and fraudulent.
In contrast, Multnomah County shelters have occupancy rates in excess of 92%.
https://www.opb.org/article/2025/10/23/portland-mayor-keith-wilson-addiction-recovery-shelter-beds/
Seem real to me, just under utilized.
Repeating things over and over that you want to be true isn’t the same as them being true.
Underutilized because these crappy and inhumane piles of cots stacked on top of each other were never intended as shelter, as you know very well “FlowerPower”.
First you claim the shelters were fake, now they are NOT fake but they are “piles of cots”, as if that is worse than sleeping in mud and feces…
You just make stuff up as you go along. It’s nice to work in warm office buildings while acting out as a Socialist on the internet.
The whole point is that they are real. I’m glad you can admit reality sometimes.
If people are truly desperate those cots and safety would look pretty good. Since they are underutilized it suggests to me that many of the houseless in Portland are that way by choice. No bills, free food, free tents, money to spend on drugs, free to abuse women and children without any intervention. It’s a nightmare.
Way past time to start jailing the houseless for vagrancy and triaging them to separate out the unfortunates from the addicts from the mentally ill and from the predators. Help the ones who want it, apply the law to the rest.
Your point is that because a shelter is only 20% occupied that it is a Bad Thing?
Most of Wilson’s new shelters are 50-60% full.
Which means there is room for a lot of people to get a step up from tent camping.
Apparently that is terrible news for you.
“80% vacant on average night over a recent two-month period”… as opposed to >90% vacancy for Multnomah county shelters.
For all their hot air about getting people off the streets, apparently BB does not really give a **** up about their neighbors who lack shelter.
I wonder if the changing seasons will move the needle at all for the next “two-month period”.
She is a terrible politician. Attempting to throw a wrench in the works at the last second. Wilson was mad as hell and deservedly angry about what a child Morillo is.
She thinks governing consists of having the most likes on various social media pages.
It is embarrassing.
Now on that we disagree. I think she’s much smarter than you think. And much better at politics.
Jonathan , if Morillo is “much smarter than you think and much better at politics,” it’s in the same way Donald Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene are “smart and good at politics” — heaps of noise, bugger-all results. Being good at setting fires isn’t the same as knowing how to build a house.
The whole thing was just sad to watch. She lobbed that last-minute stunt like a kid chucking a tantrum in the lolly aisle, and somehow we’re meant to call it strategy? Please. All it did was firm up support for Wilson’s plan and remind everyone how fragile the progress is.
Portlanders are knackered from this style of politics. We don’t need another influencer-with-a-title chasing likes , we need adults who can work together long enough to actually fix something
Given what he thinks about Division’s redesign being “ham-handed” and the hypothesis that “better lighting” is the solution, it’s pretty clear that, despite the best intentions, he doesn’t quite understand best practices regarding safe street design. And who can blame him? He’s not an urban planner—that’s PBOT’s job.
But it might behoove him to read the fundamentals of Sustainable Safety: https://mobycon.com/updates/sustainable-safety-the-dutch-approach-to-safe-road-design/ – there’s actually a whole body of knowledge about how to get people to “slow the fuck down,”—there are empirical best practices! You don’t have to just guess!!! And yet that’s what he’s doing here.
Can this be comment of the week? There is so much empirical evidence for how to slow people down and to improve safety overall and pbot has various strategies the politicos just need to read these plans and understand the strategy. The hard part is building the political will for raising and spending the necessary public dollars and tradeoffs to mass automobiity that people have grown accustomed too.
yeah that’s why I followed up to try and get him to clarify that if those best practices were put in front of him, would he support their implementation. And he said he would (to some extent).
What matters more than if he “would” in the abstract is if he does when concrete projects that his car-driving constituents oppose are before him.
My money is on “nyet, comrade”.
True! Now someone ought to put something in front of him!
I thought his comments about the mediocrity of outer division were interesting, in the sense that:
-There seems to be a common opinion that bike lanes on division don’t really make sense
-but because of the fact that the neighborhoods aren’t on a grid really in east Portland, the only direct east-west routes are major thoroughfares like division
-having ridden on those bike lanes, they don’t actually feel that safe because obviously cars will frequently turn across them to get into businesses driveways
-they also aren’t really a viable commute option to downtown or the inner neighborhoods because you have to cross the freeway on-ramps and obviously all ODOT infrastructure is a dangerous hellscape
-i think the solution for bike infrastructure is either cycle paths that are at the same grade as sidewalks or else build a bike path network that cuts direct bike/pedestrian routes through the lower traffic neighborhoods, but both of those options are probably prohibitively expensive
-it is also interesting that yet again the concrete medians get some heat, it is incredibly easy to navigate them with about the same amount of planning that a bike ride to somewhere unfamiliar requires, and I have never been less sympathetic to a complaint in my life. It does highlight that we expect people using sustainable transportation to perform a layer of mental labor that drivers are seemingly incapable of.
I do also wonder, obviously we have changed zoning to make it easier to build dense housing in east Portland, but have we also changed zoning to make it easier for their to be good jobs in east Portland?
I use Division to bike to and from work every day. They absolutely do make sense and it’s kind of astonishing that you would come to the conclusion that they don’t. Yes, there are turn conflicts but every street/bike lane has turn conflicts. I don’t really experience many right hook close calls, at least not any more than anywhere else in town. A lot of the mitigation for turn conflicts they put in seems to be working as intended. It’s definitely way better than it was before.
Councilor Dunphy talking about people “flipping their cars” trying to turn is so disingenuous – he wants consequences for bad behavior but isn’t damaging your car a great, direct, and cost-effective consequence for bad behavior behind the wheel?
My issue is that there’s a lot of gaps in the protection, blocks that double as loading zones, and a couple spots where the bike lane gets extremely narrow, like right here. There’s also the intersection at 82nd, that they have rebuilt about 5 times in the last 5 years, but there is only protection for the bike lane on the far side where it’s not needed as much as where the bike lane/right turn conflict happens. Drivers also aren’t very good at following “no turn on red” signs but getting better I guess. People generally drive too fast, and honestly I think they should have just made it 1 through lane in either direction with the rest of the road space reserved for transit and active transportation. In the meantime, I would like to see lots of speed and red-light cameras.
Much of the hulabaloo about outer Division is just chronic carbrain but there are some genuine criticisms. Really, it was first and foremost a re-paving and driver safety project; secondarily a transit project; with active transportation taking a back seat to the movement of cars.
I left town in late 2015 and only briefly visited East Portland in 2017 after several years of bike advocacy there, including helping to get outer portions of Powell and Division designed and funded, so I’m asking for y’alls firsthand experience in using the newer infrastructure there – how do they each compare? What improvements would you like to see on outer Powell & Division that you’ve seen elsewhere?
Like I said previously, I generally like Division and think it’s an improvement. Could be better. Outer Powell is hit-or-miss, but I’m waiting until they’re finished with it to pass judgement.
I could write a novel of nitpicks, but I think the biggest thing I’d want changed is the interchanges with 205. On Division specifically, I would want to see no turn on red for all signals, blocking off SE 98th on the South side to get rid of right turn conflicts, sharpening of the turn on the NB onramp to slow drivers down, and a traffic separator bounded by the onramps to prevent eastbound drivers from cutting across to the Northbound onramp. Oh, and put curbs on the bike lane.
The Powell interchange could use a better connection to the 205 path.
I used to ride the new bike infrastructure on Division when it was under construction and afterwards. Nowadays, I stick to the 4M greenway which isn’t perfect but is located on calmer streets and a shorter route for me. I do like the work done on Division and agree with dw’s overall characterization. It’s very usable and a good example for the city to build off. I think that it is a lazy, but popular analysis to criticize it with a broad brush.
The streets along the 4M were originally a set of Multnomah County designated bike routes, with signage but no pavement markings, prior to annexation in the late 1980s – you can find the streets marked as such on old county bike maps from that time. The “4M” moniker came later in the 2010s when EPAP was trying to get PBOT to upgrade the route before it got crowded with car drivers looking for a shortcut – the city wanted to upgrade it as “low hanging fruit”, an extension of the Lincoln-Harrison bikeway, but they kept dragging their feet on funding it.
Oh – and sorry to double comment but one thing that I remembered this morning. When the Division redesign was being pitched, the city shared a bunch of renderings that showed a tree and flower-filled median the whole way. That only actually exists from like 85th – 86th. I think people were hoping for that beautification and it never happened. As I understand it, it was because there is a water/sewer main that would have needed relocating in order to accommodate the planting beds, which would have pushed the budget way up. I don’t think they communicated this change very clearly, and the damage is already done as far as what people feel like they were promised versus what was delivered.
I remember the original drawings and later discussions about the tree-lined medians. BES was pushing the trees, part of a federal program at the time to reduce urban heat island effects in poorer areas of cities (which outer Division certainly qualifies). There are three huge aqueducts that move Bull Run water between Powell Butte and the West Hills, far larger than water mains: one that roughly follows SE Caruthers; a second one under the north side of Powell which affects sidewalk and bike lane designs; and a third right down the center of Division which precludes light rail among other things. They were all over-built well over 100 years ago when the area was still rural, for a 500-year lifespan, and are very hard to maintain let alone move. Certain high-ranking staff at PBOT, BES, and Water all knew about the pipes (it was an official city security secret until the outer Powell project came about), but it sounds like their lower-level planning staff were completely in the dark about it when they made the proposal – the city is very bureaucratic and it’s quite common for the right hand to not know what the left hand is up to until it’s far too late.
Everyone still agrees that Division from 82nd to 174th still needs a lot of trees, but no one is sure how to do it.
I love all information in your posts.
This explanation is simultaneously illuminating and demoralizing. If an organization cannot get it together to grow trees in Portland, I’m not sure what task of significance it might be able to accomplish.
Meanwhile, other parts of Portland’s government have been making it easier to remove mature trees, even proposing to pay permit fees for tree removal on private property using PCEF (i.e. anti-climate change) funding.
You can’t make this stuff up.
FWIW I am not saying bike lanes don’t make sense there, I am saying that is a common opinion in the sense that it seems to be councilor Dunphy’s opinion, and I think Dan Ryan has said something similar. Obviously those bike lanes are much better than what was there before! But I think if the standard for truly excellent bike infrastructure is “you would feel safe letting your child ride their bike unsupervised there,” there is still a lot to be desired. And I think that is the standard of safety that will get a lot of folks actually riding out there
Oh yeah, sorry, didn’t mean to come across as adversarial. I meant more that one could come to the conclusion that bike lanes don’t make sense. The adjacent greenways are windy and don’t really connect west of 205.
I do agree with you here. However, I see a lot of kids, ranging from upper elementary to high school riding their bikes in East Portland. I think that child autonomy is a bit subjective and something that will vary from parent to parent how safe they think a place is for their kids to be on their own.
In my experience talking to people out here, a big concern when it comes to kids being on their own is personal safety/crime/homelessness. I think that’s a valid concern to have, but traffic safety is often a huge blind spot (no pun intended) for families. Especially those who have chosen to live in a more car-dependent suburban setting. A kid getting hit by a driver in their car feels like an “accident” or statistical anomaly, but someone getting attacked physically is a really visceral and targeted act of violence. Not saying I agree with that, but that’s where a lot of people’s minds are at. Suggesting changing the infrastructure doesn’t really resonate because people don’t view it as a problem in the first place; even if they do, they understand that taming a stroad like 122nd isn’t likely to happen until their kids are grown, if it ever happens at all.
Though, the biggest safety concern for many East Portland families in this moment is ICE thugs who are terrorizing neighborhoods and waiting outside elementary schools during dismissal.
Would you “feel safe” letting your child go to the park unsupervised? For most parents of not-yet-teenage kids, the answer would be no. That doesn’t mean that parks are dangerous, just that, in this hyper-protective day an age, that’s an unrealistic question.
Is it just me, or did he say a whole lot without really saying anything?
He said something important. Jonathan asked him about supporting changes in street design that would create more friction for drivers and he responded that he would support those changes. I thought that was a great question and the answer was not only clear but well informed.
He didn’t really say that though. He went off on a whole tangent about jobs and transit service, then talked about how “major corridors” shouldn’t be touched because that would make it too hard to live (aka drive fast) in East Portland. He wants people to “slow the fuck down” but also want the city to preserve the ability of East Portlanders to drive fast to “get around traffic” and “get to work”. He also complained about Division four times in the interview.
Dunphy seems like he’s at the nascent stage of figuring out why traffic deaths occur and what we can do about them. The outrage, interest in change, and the will to do something is there. That basic level of addressing traffic deaths is something we have rarely seen in Portland. So good on him. He frequently bases his reasonings vis-a-vis various projects (e.g., Division, Halsey) on beliefs or popular views, not evidence or best practice. That’s unfortunate. But he certainly seems open to learning.
You can tell he’s not familiar with a lot of this stuff from his wording, but his heart is in the right place, and some of what he wants may actually be effective. In D1 that’s unprecedented.
But he used the F word to show how mad he was, did you not enjoy his performative display of attempting to be mad and appeal to every demographic under the sun all while suggesting every solution as well? I feel bad for politicians who have to walk this tight rope especially when his colleagues on council hate enforcement and business equally, good luck actually having jobs where people live and having those communities be safe.
Even Chuck Schumer is swearing now. The memo says it is a way to demonstrate “authenticity”.
Tight rope is exactly correct! If Dunphy wants to be an effective legislator, he’ll have to work with peacock councilors (half the Council!) who are more comfortable with “transportation justice” language, and less comfortable with police enforcement. At the same time, if he wants to get re-elected, he’ll need the votes of pro-car and pro-police voters.
It’s got to be tough to thread that needle while still sounding authentic! If you paid attention to last year’s presidential election, you’d have heard Harris make a valiant attempt. It’s so easy to come across as phony.
I think that’s why we’re seeing more cursing. It allows one to show some passion, while allowing one to take centrist, or even contradictory positions (as his votes and answers clearly show). “Slow the fuck down” does exactly that.
Isn’t that standard operating procedure for a politician?
Why isn’t the city installing photo radar cameras on the high crash corridors?
They are. They’ve installed a bunch of cameras. Currently going through some sort of upgrade and switch of vendors, but they have a solid program of speed cameras going.
Ah yes, more incompetence from the city of high taxes and low services. They have been offline since July.
https://www.opb.org/article/2025/09/18/portland-speed-enforcement-cameras-offline/
Did you read the article? It’s actually saying the opposite. PBOT wants a company that is effective in quickly expanding/procuring speed cameras and the prior company was poorly suited for that. That’s an exemplary case of competent governance.
Off line for 5 months and counting ….you call that an “exemplary case of competent governance”? Portland the city of low expectations…
I’ve started to see the replacement cameras mounted. Don’t think they are functioning yet though.
The bridge and bike path recently installed next to the Springwater Wetlands makes SE 115th Ave a good candidate to become a greenway in East Portland. It would connect the Springwater Corridor to the SE Bush St Greenway, providing a quiet alternative to the bike lanes on SE 122nd. The street is already calm, but it needs a signed and striped crosswalk going across SE Holgate Blvd. Here is an annotated map of the proposed greenway route on SE 115th Ave:
SE 115th Ave – Future Greenway? · Ride with GPS
Or they could build protected bike lanes on 122nd. North-South streets in that area are all over the place, 122nd provides a direct and convenient connection. For the record I think the answer is “both”, not either or.
Definitely both! I think it’s important we have safe, fast ways to travel farther distances and also have easy, safe local access to neighborhood businesses. That second one is missing too often in Portland.
The new wetlands are incredible and everyone should check them out if they’re riding by. The bird activity is OFF THE CHARTS and I love it. Can’t wait to see how much water is there after a few months of real rain.
I live on 114th between Powell and Holgate and routinely cross Holgate when heading to Powell Butte or Mt Scott when I’m running. It *absolutely* needs crossing help. You can get stuck waiting in a seemingly never ending flow of cars sometimes. It blows my mind in the worst way. Also, Holgate right here is way too dark. Too wide, too dark. No street lighting on the south side of the street and there needs to be. Also there are no sidewalks just muddy trails.
Meanwhile, Councilor Dunphy spent this week voting to reduce funding for the city’s homeless cleanup program—an action that will likely result in more people living in unsafe roadside encampments and more blocked sidewalks that force disabled residents into the street. The cognitive dissonance among the DSA members on the Portland City Council continues.
This bothers me, too. It’s like we live in different cities or something. I still feel like East Portland, and since I’m in outer SE, I feel like Deep Outer SE is still a dumping ground for the rest of the city. Holgate has, oh, easily 6-10 RV camps right now between 104th and 122nd. The Springwater is better these days but still hit or miss. There’s just so many weird lots and and dead ends and under trafficked zones that more often than not still attract guys and the inevitable garbage piles and chopped cars they collect. We can’t go back to Mega Camps like we had just a year ago. We can’t. I’m stoked the funding decrease didn’t pass.
The Peacocks are trying to save the world one pointless grandstand at a time when their total focus should be local issues. It’s what we elected them for isn’t it?
I’d like for some tech jobs out in East Portland. I would really like to move that direction, but everything is in Beaverton/Hillsboro…
Especially jobs with good opportunity for advancement but a low barrier to entry. I have an old coworker who worked his way up in the Hillsboro Intel fab, and he doesn’t have any college/advanced degrees.
I know that the Division project is politically unpopular. But, there is data that is showing that crashes are down. Pedestrian crashes are down 66% after the project. All crashes are down. Serious crashes were up in the one year of data currently available. But, 2/3 of those were the result of seriously bad driver decisions. Overall, safety aspects like crash reduction and speed reduction were down the most where there are center median islands. You can read it all here: https://www.portland.gov/transportation/vision-zero/documents/outer-division-safety-project-evaluation-report-2024-updated/download.
There’s only been a year of data (2024) since the project was completed. There was an increase in serious crashes that year. But, PBOT lays out the situation in all of the serious crashes and summarizes them this way: “Summary Ten of the 15 crashes include egregious behavior that is difficult to design against such as reckless driving, signal disregard, and pedestrians standing in the roadway. Two of the remaining crashes involve left turns, one where PBOT already prevents left turns with concrete, and another where PBOT will be preventing the left turn soon. Staff will continue to monitor crashes for possible improvements in the future.”
Having someone flip their car requires a lot of speed and aggressive turning. That’s not an infrastructure problem. That’s a driver problem.
Dunphy has the pathos, but I am worried he doesn’t yet have the logos to be truly effective. Everyone who sits in traffic automatically thinks they have the solution to “fix” transportation, and 9 out of 10 times their instincts are wrong. I would love to see a councilor say “I didn’t come into this position with expertise in transportation and urban planning, but now I realize how crucial this understanding is, I am going to sit down with PBOT and other experts to determine the best way forward and what I can do to make this happen faster.”
Dunphy has, from my perspective, a real point about I-84: it really does his district no good.
Because I both drive a car *and* ride a bike, I feel comfortable saying that, while many streets should be made safe and comfortable for bike riding, I am very open to the existence of some routes that are primarily convenient for driving.
If we accept that some people will use a car, should we not also accept that we should funnel those drivers to well designed, hardened roads that contain such use?
In other words, if we expand on the familiar metaphor of the “car sewer,” wouldn’t we agree that it is actually good to have a sewer system, rather than spreading out human waste equally over the urban landscape? Sure, it would mean sacrificing a certain amount of money and land for sewers, sewage treatment, plumbing, etc., but wouldn’t that sacrifice free much more of the landscape from the problem of rotting sewage?
A concrete example: when I’m commuting north from Sellwood to Portland, I’m glad highway 99 removes traffic from the neighborhood bikeways: if 99 weren’t there, I’d surely have more aggressive commuters driving around me.
Another example: when living in southeast Portland I was continually annoyed by Cesar Chavez. It’s the longest north-south route between SE Grand and SE 82nd! If we assume that some people are going to drive, and some number of trips will need to go north or south, shouldn’t that route be kind of attractive to drivers? The alternative creates a messy situation: lots of people driving through the neighborhoods to avoid the backups on Chavez.
I know induced demand complicates this principle, and that there must be some limit to the number of routes or roads I’d be willing to sacrifice. Traffic congestion isn’t something we should necessarily try to eliminate.
But Dunphy is right that I-84 would be a more sensible route for people to take into town than the neighborhood streets they currently have to use.
East Portland was developed by the county between the 1950s and 1980s based on “best planning practices” of that time – moving car traffic away from parks and schools in the center of superblocks and towards higher-order arterial stroads on the edge, the more traffic towards freeways. 122nd, 148th, 162nd, 182nd (now in Gresham), outer Division, and outer Stark all used to be 7-lane stroads (3 lanes traffic in each direction, center turn lane, and painted gutter bike lanes), with no on-street parking allowed. Near the inner areas only low-density housing was allowed, no businesses; towards the arterials there was a steady increase in housing and business density. The idea was to “traffic calm” the neighborhoods and make them pedestrian and bike-friendly even without adding bike lanes and sidewalks, but requiring sidewalks along arterial stroads where bus service was presumably available. The county was implementing a master plan to make the area even more bike-friendly when Portland and Gresham (very controversially) annexed the area in 1986-1991 and immediately made major changes such as adding on-street parking on the stroads (most of which is still not used 35 years later) by removing travel lanes and encouraging more neighborhood through-traffic.
Not to get off topic, but what an amazing cast of charactcers weigh in on BP articles and how informative are their comments. The deficiencies with our transportation system are the end result of ignorance. What an education I get from BP!
Making friends inside the City, County, and State bureaus gives you an even bigger education on what’s going on behind the news releases, press conferences, and ribbon cutting ceremonies.
This is the Pacific Northwest, and a drivers’ visibility in dark, heavy rain and fog is negligible no matter how cautiously they drive, and there are too many people sharing the same roads for the city to effectively do anything. The city is not going to be re-designed from scratch – it barely has the funding to fill potholes. So if you’re not encased in steel with airbags and a seatbelt yourself while in a roadway, and you’re competing with 5,000 pound vehicles that are lit up on all sides, please illuminate yourself so drivers can see you. Wear a vest with multi-colored reflective gear and multi-colored blinking lights on all four sides, (just like a vehicle has), and carry a flashing light to wave at any oncoming traffic when walking through a crosswalk in the dark. DRIVERS WANT TO BUT CANNOT SEE YOU AND YOUR SINGLE WHITE HEADLAMP until you’re illuminated by their vehicle’s own headlights, which is too late at any driving speed to register more moving trajectories on the roads. Plus, Portland drivers are generally a-holes or just under life pressure to get to their own jobs or DMV appointments or kids to school on time, and lay on their horns if another driver pauses long enough at an intersection to look for or yield right of way to anyone not driving a tank. Add in the automated tracking of UPS and Amazon delivery trucks with insane delivery quotas in residential neighborhoods full of children chasing balls into streets, and the massive trucks for city-mandated recycled and composting collection sharing the same roads, and the developers putting up housing all over the city with no mandated free parking for residents within the footprint further crowding the streets with parked cars of residents. Light yourselves up people! Black is not cool at night on roadways.
If you can’t stop your car within the distance your headlights illuminate, you need to reduce the speed until you can. One cannot rely on all possible obstacles to be illuminated. That’s your responsibility as the operator of a heavy, dangerous vehicle.
And it’s my responsibility to stay alive. I’m never going to trust laws written in a book to keep me safe on the streets.
When I’m out I wear a safety vest, have flashing LEDs, reflective stripes on my bag and clothes.
Sounds like you’ve got a good system, which is likely effective at reducing the probability of a collision. Reducing the auto traffic speed is effective at reducing the probability of collision and also the potential for injury or death in any collision that might occur. I’ve got no issue with suggesting lights for nighttime walking and biking.
Micah, you’re absolutely right that drivers have a legal and moral responsibility to adjust their speed to what they can safely see. No argument there. If visibility is limited, slowing down is essential.
But it’s also okay to acknowledge that conditions in the PNW can get so dark, wet, and foggy that even a responsible driver going slowly may struggle to spot an unlit person until the last second. That doesn’t excuse unsafe driving; it’s simply the reality of physics and human perception.
So reminding pedestrians and cyclists to increase their visibility isn’t shifting blame. It’s adding an extra layer of protection in an environment where limitations on either side can have serious consequences. Drivers need to drive to the conditions, absolutely. And people outside cars can improve their odds dramatically by making themselves easier to see. Both responsibilities can coexist, and both help keep everyone safer.
Totes. But I want to point out the asymmetry of the risk involved in the situation and attendant efficacy of the suggested risk reduction strategy. From my POV, it seems that fast driving causes a lot of the risk and that slowing down is the simplest and most effective way to reduce the risk.
The problem is that slowing down is not something that I, as a pedestrian, have any control over. So that’s not an option for me.
And yes, absolutely, build the roads so people drive slower. Something else that I, as a pedestrian, have no control over.
There’s a flip side to your calculus: bedazzling your person while traveling by bike or foot in low vis primarily reduces your risk of injury or death. The risk of fast driving in low vis is primarily carried by other people. That makes me evaluate them differently. (Perfect analogies and extended accompanying hand wringing exist for hiking, climbing, and skiing. I might not condone solo backcountry skiing on ‘considerable’ days or not using a bike helmet during a riding interview of the mayor of Portland, but, when the risk is almost exclusively to the individual recreationalist, it’s OK with me.)
I wasn’t making a moral argument, but a practical one. You control what you can control, and helping people understand how to be safer when walking at night is not victim blaming any more than teaching avalanche safety is.
Your argument about what you can and can’t control may not be a moral one, but the claim that it’s not victim blaming to tell folks to get lights to mitigate dangerous and inconsiderate driving certainly has moral dimensions. If it didn’t it wouldn’t be controversial. FWIW, I think folks should get lights. Performance and price of high quality lighting has improved a lot in recent decades, and I think it’s an effective and practical way to improve biking and walking.
It’s only controversial among a tiny sliver of the population, many of whom hang out here. The vast majority of people understand it to be a rather obvious reminder about how to be safer when walking around at night.
As someone who has driven more than I’d prefer this past month, I can assure that that single white headlamps (or other bike lights) are absolutely visible from inside a car before the rider is illuminated by the car’s headlights