By Sarah Risser
After Portland committed to Vision Zero in 2016, things only got worse. The statistics have gotten better recently, but if we want to reach zero we must acknowledge current shortcomings to our approach and be laser-focused on the true risks.
First, let’s rewind…
For nearly a decade, road fatalities in Portland climbed (aside from small downticks in 2018 and 2022) until culminating in a three-decade, panic-inducing high in 2023 when 69 people were killed. Vision Zero was on the hot seat. People wanted to know when the carnage would stop. To outraged cries of “Vision Zero isn’t working,” City of Portland staff held firm. “It is working,” they’d say. Where the city invested in safety, fatalities were down. Not everyone was convinced.
Are we trying to make a dangerous system safer, or reduce the danger itself? They are not the same thing.
– Sarah Risser
Then, to everyone’s relief, fatalities dropped in 2024. And in 2025, they dropped sharply. The narrative flipped. PBOT issued a statement declaring progress, and many road-safety advocates put 2023 firmly in their rear-view mirror with a sigh of relief. But the two-year decline could simply reflect a post-Covid surge correction, rather than a structural shift. Moreover, Portland’s trends have closely mirrored national trends: a surge after Covid followed by a decline. This suggests larger forces are at play.
And still, the core question remains: Why are Portland’s roads so deadly?
Portland’s Vision Zero staff have quietly answered this question with a disclaimer on the first page of every Vision Zero Action Plan, Update, and Addendum: ‘Achieving Vision Zero goals depends upon available funding… Optimal performance depends on funding.’
Portland is cash-strapped, and its budget reflects its core values. Until the city consistently prioritizes human life through sustained investment, road fatalities will persist. Based on this, everyone should immediately moderate their expectations. I could end here, but there’s more to say.
Funding is only part of the problem
The program lacks authority as evidenced by its notable silence on politically sensitive issues that directly impact safety. There are many examples including but not limited to: not speaking up for dedicated bus lanes on 82nd Avenue or against high-speed police chases, refraining from weighing in on the possible widespread adoption of Autonomous Vehicles (AVs), and watching in silence as traffic-calming concrete planters are removed. A program tasked with eliminating deaths can’t sidestep policies that shape risk simply because they are controversial. To fully succeed, Vision Zero needs the courage and authority to engage in politically controversial policies and the unwavering support of Mayor Keith Wilson and City Administrator Raymond Lee when it does.
In September of 2025, City Councilor Tiffany Koyama Lane introduced a resolution to reaffirm Portland’s commitment to Vision Zero and created a cross-bureau task force (which has yet to meet) to build momentum for the program. This work should be applauded.
Ensuring city council is fully behind Vision Zero is important; however, the most successful cities had a mayor who provided inspiration and championed Vision Zero. Hoboken, New Jersey offers a compelling and well-known case: Former two-term mayor Ravi Bhalla was inspired to act after he was forced to push his child’s stroller dangerously close to traffic. Bhalla worked tirelessly to daylight intersections, reduce speed limits, and upgrade infrastructure. Similarly, in Paris, former Mayor Anne Hidalgo transformed the city by taking space away from motor vehicles and giving it to bikers and walkers. The result has been a much quieter, cleaner — and safer — city. Having a Mayor who cares about road safety and is motivated to consistently prioritize safety over motor vehicles and throughput is extremely important to the success of the program.
Limits of the Safe Systems approach
The adoption of the Safe Systems approach by the City of Portland represented an important paradigm shift and step forward from the more top-down “Three Es” of Education, Engineering and Enforcement. Safe Systems incorporates public health principles which formally acknowledge that humans make mistakes and aims to reduce the consequences of human error by ensuring multiple systems — people, cars, speeds, streets, and post-crash care — are safe and work to reinforce each other. This ensures that if one system fails, other systems will compensate.
But the Safe Systems approach isn’t perfect. Its ‘Safe People’ pillar calls for shared responsibility among road users, directly contradicting the central tenet of Safe Systems: that humans will make mistakes and these mistakes should be anticipated. The focus on shared responsibility also enables potential back-sliding into a victim-blaming mentality and confusion over what is ultimately responsible for harm. For example, Portland’s unhoused population, as well as distracted or inebriated pedestrians, are often cited as part of the problem. They are not. These groups do not contribute to road traffic violence. They are at risk of being harmed by road-traffic violence.
More importantly, the Safe Systems approach doesn’t clarify the cause of fatalities and serious injuries — the ‘pathological agent’ — nor does it provide a framework for prioritizing interventions.
Vision Zero needs more clarity on what actually causes harm
Recent work by Jessie Singer and David Ederer informs how Vision Zero programs can become more effective. In the video Singer produced for the nonprofit Families for Safe Streets, she argues that the safety science principles used in the workplace should be applied to road-traffic safety. Singer suggests applying “The Hierarchy of Controls” framework used in the workplace to prioritize interventions by effectiveness. Within this framework, the most effective intervention is physical elimination of the hazard (kinetic energy and the cars that convey it) with the least effective being personal protective equipment and education.
Ederer reframes road-traffic safety with an epidemiological lens where the agent of harm, kinetic energy, is transmitted by motor vehicles to inflict harm on relatively fragile human bodies. He presents the Safe Systems Pyramid which encourages interventions that have a widespread public health benefit and require little individual effort.
Both Singer and Ederer’s contributions call for clarity and focus on what needs to be controlled — the agent (kinetic energy) and vector (vehicles) — and how to prioritize interventions.
Vision Zero won’t succeed until it is empowered to clearly and unapologetically name the problem: kinetic energy, transmitted at dangerous levels by motor vehicles. Until the city fully commits to reducing that energy by lowering speeds even further and reducing the number of, and collective reliance on cars, fatalities will persist.
By skirting around the cause of harm, Portland’s Vision Zero program is too deferential to motor vehicles, which are not only the vector of death on our streets, but bring a host of negative externalities that extend far beyond traffic safety.
Are we trying to make a dangerous system safer, or reduce the danger itself? They are not the same thing. We need to reduce danger at its source. If we continue to focus on increasing safety while allowing more and more kinetic energy and large vehicles onto our streets, we will keep getting the same results.
— Sarah Risser is a member of Families for Safe Streets and a dedicated road safety advocate.
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How would you suggest that we as a community or that the city “reduce the danger itself” legally and within the context of local politics? (That is, without the usual absolutist “solutions” we usually see on the BP comments that are either unconstitutional or politically unlikely to ever happen?)
Is a community legally obligated to permit cars and trucks? I would prefer to live in a community that doesn’t allow them, but in the USA we’ve gone the other way, it seems. Someone else’s “right” to drive supersedes everyone else’s right not to be endangered by motor vehicles.
There are a couple measures that cities have successfully used to limit trucks/SUVs. London has a ULEZ zone where most trucks and older SUVs are required to pay high fees to enter. Paris and a few other cities have increased parking and other fees for specific types of vehicles such as SUVs. Fees are based on weight and/or emissions. NYC has higher fees for entering the congestion pricing zone for trucks. All of these are possible in Portland given political support, and are much easier to implement than an outright ban.
Yes, all possible given political support. Which is, of course, the crux.
No. Mackinac Island is an example of a small American community that has no private cars or trucks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mackinac_Island
“Politically unlikely to ever happen” is an extremely broad and lazy argument to discount all policies that would be perceived of as limiting car overuse. If this were a real controlling principle, all of the progress that has happened almost anywhere in the world would have been unsuccessful.
The answer is literally in the quote. Stop allowing more and more kinetic energy and large vehicles onto our streets. Exhibit A: Bus lanes on 82nd. Exhibit B: Diverters on every greenway every few blocks. Both of those things would reduce kinetic energy and vehicles on the streets.
Last I checked they are constitutional and only maybe the diverters are politically unlikely. The bus lanes are an easy dunk since it was politics that transferred 82nd to the city in the first place. And honestly the diverters aren’t as hard as everyone acts like they are. Especially since no one has even tried.
The thing that can be difficult to understand about the hierarchy of controls is that it’s not an absolutist approach. If it were, you’d only have to have one level to the hierarchy, eliminating the hazard. But whether it’s a factory floor or a city square, that’s often not actually feasible, as the hazard provides some critical purpose or function. Rather, the idea is to use the hierarchy as a decision tool in implementing corrective action that a root cause analysis has identified. Here’s how traffic safety might be improved by a control at each level in the hierarchy:
Elimination: Get rid of the cars on the road, and maybe even the road itself, altogether. E.g. remove a waterfront highway and replace it with a public park.
Substitution: Change what cars are on the road. This one is harder to do directly in the transportation environment, like you might in industry by changing out a dangerous solvent for a safer option, but anything that gets people into smaller cars or out of a car altogether in favor of a different mode could fall under here.
Engineering: Make design choices that provide physical separation or protection from cars. E.g. protected bike lanes, continuous sidewalks, modal filters, backup cameras, etc.
Administrative: Change the rules and how they’re enforced. E.g. lower the speed limits, mark a crosswalk, broadcast a PSA, change licensing requirements, put more police on the traffic beat, etc.
Personal Protective Equipment: Wear day-glo and wear a helmet
It’s not feasible to remove every car from Portland, not any time soon anyway, so you’re right in your implication. But the next step isn’t to throw up our hands, give up, and lay down in the middle of 82nd. Rather, that’s when it’s time to get informed on what kinds of controls work best and how they might best be implemented on any given street segment.
NO! NO! NO! WRONG! WRONG! WRONG!
The problem is,always has been and always with be HUMAN BEINGS!
Humans on bike, food, scooter, skateboard, driving cars, trucks, busses, motorcycles are fallible, distracted, unfocused. poorly educated/trained on how to safely move around an ever changing situational landscape puts one’s power of attention, training, motor skills, reaction time & response to the test in any given moment.
Yes, mass & velocity matter, but it’s human beings who are or aren’t in control of said mass & velocity. I can think of many examples of humans in control of tons of mass at high speeds that have a much greater safety record than Vision Zero could ever imagine.
And it ain’t about more laws, law abiding people and scofflaws.
There was a traffic research study in Germany some years ago, where they took away all the traffic signs and discovered that it was generally safer when different modes of travel intermingled.
Most people don’t leave home intending to injure other people.
Firstly and foremost, human behavior has to change and as we all know from our own lives, we often don’t change our behaviors until we suffer some negative consequences.
If traffic laws aren’t enforced with some negative consequence, points on license, fine, suspension and revocation of driving privileges behaviors won’t change and the carnage will continue.
Your thinking reflects the outdated 3Es of Education, Enforcement, and Engineering approach to road safety. Nearly all Vision Zero programs have ditched this for the more forward-thinking Safe Systems Approach which is somewhat grounded in public health principles. Trying to improve road safety by modifying human behavior through education and enforcement works only to a small degree compared to other interventions.
If the past is any guide, there’s going to be a lot of ideas here on what sorts of technical measures we could take to improve the situation. Most of these ideas have been well discussed, and some might work, but most would require political (and thus popular) support to implement.
How can we start building the type of popular support that would make possible the types of technical measures that could move us forward more rapidly? It seems to me that without that, everything becomes an uphill slog that usually results in little to no real progress.
The one measure I’m aware of that is both likely to make a significant advance in safety (by removing the most dangerous element in driving), and is also likely to happen is AVs.
How do we build the political and popular support to move other “likely to work” strategies into the “likely to happen” column?
I’m so glad that we have the famous example of Hoboken (pop 50k) to show the world the power of the Swedish Vision Zero safe-systems approach.
Small nit to pick: Anne Hidalgo is still Mayor of Paris until March 29.
As far as the substance of the article goes, I am in full agreement that the principles of occupational health and safety have a home in the city planning sphere. Safe Systems is a great concept to shift how transportation systems are fundamentally thought about, but that’s only step one. The root cause analysis is how you dig into the details of what’s going wrong, and the hierarchy of controls is how you figure out the best things to change given practical constraints.
Let’s pick a budget, plan on it being 5x more than antiipated, and then get the same result in another 10 years.
Thank you for this powerful piece, and for explaining Safe Systems, and Ederer’s epidemiological reframing of it. I agree with his reframing.
Now on to politics.
Anna Hildago has transformed Paris, and thank goodness her first Deputy Mayor, Emmanuel Gregoire, has won the recent Mayoral race, so hopefully her policies will continue. They are both from the same Socialist party.
But don’t leave out the very capitalist Michael Bloomberg, and his transformation of NYC’s streets.
Bringing it home to Portland, you wrote:
In September of 2025, City Councilor Tiffany Koyama Lane introduced a resolution to reaffirm Portland’s commitment to Vision Zero and created a cross-bureau task force (which has yet to meet) to build momentum for the program. This work should be applauded.
Although I agree with the goal of a cross-bureau task-force, I can’t applaud Koyama Lane’s methods. How you win matters, and this resolution was passed in an underhanded way. That harms the cause of road safety by antagonizing colleagues and creating “winners” and “losers” when really what is needed is the hard work of consensus building. The Portland chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) has yet to add consensus building to its tool box.
Let me take readers back to last year’s budget marathons. The DSA/Progressive Caucus (Peacock) gamed these meetings by engaging in a secret text message chain from the dais. This allowed them to manipulate Robert’s Rules of Order, and coordinate procedural votes all behind the public’s, and their colleagues’, backs.
The Vision Zero resolution was a sneaky one-two pass between Kanal and Koyama Lane. I watched it live, and had no idea that they were coordinating with text messages. Neither did anyone else (except for Avalos, Morillo, Dunphy, and Green).
It was sleazy and I don’t want to win that way. More importantly, it is detrimental to creating a strong movement for street safety.
In my opinion, PBOT made a critical error when adopting Vision Zero: they created a vision zero program with dedicated staff and projects. This means they will compete for budget and have a relatively limited impact. I believe that adopting VZ could and should have meant adopting VZ as a metric for each and every PBOT project- planning, design and maintenance.
By way of example, when the Greeley MUP was getting built, I worked really hard convince PBOT to address a few design flaws, including lowering the speed limit. I met with the project designer and her supervisor and we reviewed my requests. They agreed with my suggestions, but declined to make revisions. They acknowledged that not fixing them would likely bake them into our system for 10-20 years until they would work on it again. Their explanations is that the project was funded by “freight” dollars so needed to consider/prioritize freight needs. A young family had recently been hit and 2 girls died, but PBOT explained that VZ did not apply to this because it was a freight project.
If VZ is not a metric to evaluate success of every project, I cannot see how PBOT will ever make meaningful gains. All of PBOT should receive VZ training to understand how to incorporate VZ principles into their work and how to evaluate proposals against VS before they are adopted/implemented