On March 24th around 8:00 pm, 38-year-old Kyle Stahl was riding his white moped eastbound on the 3100 block of Northeast Sandy Boulevard when the driver of a car made an illegal u-turn right in front of him. Stahl was taken to the hospital where he succumbed to his injuries one week later.
The title of the PPB statement regarding this collision is, “Scooter Rider Deceased After Crash in March in the Kerns Neighborhood.” The local media — like they always do — simply copied that statement verbatim. One even wrote that the moped rider “crashed into” the driver. Unfortunately, most people who scroll by these headlines will assume that this was an example of how dangerous “scooters” and their drivers are.
I put scooters in quotes because, as I shared above, Stahl was actually riding a moped. We have over 3,500 shared e-scooters deployed in Portland and the vast majority of people assume “scooter” is something more akin to a device with small wheels that you stand on. Given that, I don’t think the PPB statement does a fair job describing what happened.
What we have here is an innocent road user who was killed as the result of an illegal turn. Imagine how our traffic culture and understanding of the risks and consequences of our driving behaviors would change if we were more thoughtful about framing collisions.
Again, here’s my headline:
“Driver kills vulnerable road user while making illegal u-turn” (or I could have swapped “vulnerable road user” for “moped rider”).
My headline is 100% accurate, fair, descriptive and clear.
Now compare that with the PPB (and resulting local media) headline:
“Scooter Rider Deceased After Crash in March in the Kerns Neighborhood”
This is unclear and leads to questions like: What type of scooter? Or was it actually a moped? Was it a solo crash where the operator just lost control? Was a car driver even involved?
In today’s media environment, headlines are extremely important. They often end up being the only part of the story a person will register.
I’m glad to see that the driver was cited for violating the careless driving/vulnerable roadway user (VRU) law. That’s a good example of the PPB taking a VRU crash seriously. Now, if we could just get their communications folks to be more careful how they frame crashes, we’d make some progress.
Thanks for reading.
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Does PPB have public relations specialists? If so why is their messaging not held to a higher standard as outlined?
The PPB public relations arm is the DGAF. If you want to know what they care about, you can check out the Portland Police Association’s toxic facebook page. Or you can stick around for the commenters that will start posting about liberal doom loops and Portland is burning/ dying. They are more interested in propaganda than standards.
LOL Mate. Portland has real problems whether you call it a ‘doom loop’ or not. Dismissing that as ‘propaganda’ while running everything through an anti-police lens doesn’t clarify anything—it just narrows the story.
It’s likely they can’t presume guilt in their statements.
The link for the “moped” shows a 125cc motorcycle similar to a Vespa, with no pedals. Since it is over 50cc this is legally amotorcycle in Oregon.
And there are no pedals so I don’t see how it can be called a moped.
Oh! Sounds like I made a mistake. Thanks.
The difference between a motorcycle and a moped in Oregon is truly a distinction without a difference, since both are required to be licensed and also may be operated only by a licensed driver. But Oregon gets it right, IMO, since even 49cc mopeds are motorcycles masquerading as bicycles.
Anyway, your point is a good one since this is Bike Portland, not Motorcycle Portland, unless JM wants to widen his scope and start calling out the almost monthly (weekly?) deaths of motorcycle operators in Portland. Yes – motorcyclists are vulnerable in much the same way as cyclists are and even more so b/c of the speeds they attain.
DMV calls anything under 50 cc a “moped,” pedals or no.
There are few old fashioned true “mopeds” about nowadays.
I saw a “Glider” parked at a bus stop today and sat on it. Not so bad. With 250 watts and 15 mi/hr limit it seems a decent ride for side streets. No pedals, of course–a low power electric scooter!
You criticized the headline “Scooter Rider Deceased After Crash in March in the Kerns Neighborhood” for not specifying what type of scooter. Yours did not specify what kind of vulnerable road user, so I’m not sure I understand this element of your critique.
Both headlines would have been improved by just using the word “motorcycle rider”.
Frankly, the best headline of the lot (including yours) is “Scooter rider dies after crash with car in NE Portland, driver cited for illegal U-turn”. That is the best summary of all the salient facts.
Yes but I think the important message is that a person was killed by another car driver
charged with. Not guilty at the time of the charges were applied.
Charged with reckless driving and killed a person. The nature of the offense does not determine whether someone was killed.
I said it was the best of the lot, not that it was the best that could be done.
But my real point was that if you’re going to criticize a headline on a specific basis, and you offer an alternative, it should at least be superior in that regard.
“Driver cited in March crash in Kerns that killed motorcycle rider.”
Factual, neutral, and complete.
“Driver cited” sanitizes the result of the action, which was to KILL the motorcycle rider. JM wants to emphasize the killing, which is bold and probably not something most newspaper editors would go for (they are advised by lawyers – you may be one).
I realize that JM wanted to insert his views into the headline (and that’s his right) but it is my view that news should be factual and the presentation neutral, one reason I don’t get my news from Fox or MSNBC.
If you prefer your news to be opinionated, that’s ok, but it’s not how I roll.
But once again, my critique of JM’s headline is that it did not actually address the concern he raised.
JMs version is not an opinion, it’s what happened. It isn’t spin or a personal view.
Attribution is assigning meaning to the facts. But I don’t really care about that and it’s not important that we agree. As JM keeps saying, this is a blog and not a news site.
what does that mean?
This is absolutely a “news site”. Why can’t a blog also be a news site? It’s 2026 my friend.
I don’t know, but you’ve said it many times. I interpret it to mean that you are giving your spin on things rather that just reporting the facts.
I’m not sure they do. The linguistic conventions I encounter here are atypical and would sound strange in other environments I find myself in.
It would never occur to me to call the device the victim was riding anything other than a scooter, nor have I heard such devices referenced using any other term except here. The association of that word with a small electric device found only in certain urban areas is recent.
I’m not a huge fan of PPB, but they have the headline right. If PPB gets guff for using the “accident,” they definitely have no business using the emotionally charged judgmental language in the suggested alternatives.
He was my friend, and now he’s gone. That is all that really matters. RIP Kyle, you will be missed.
Very sorry for the loss of your friend. My heart goes out to you and his friends, his family, and all who knew him. RIP Kyle.
The thing that stood out to me is that a VRU citation was issued at all. I can recall several crashes involving a pedestrian or a person on a bicycle where the offending motor vehicle operator was not cited in violation of the VRU law.
Is it different in this case because the killed VRU was operating a motor vehicle, and therefore in the eyes of PPB, a ‘legitimate’ road user?
I suspect it is different because the police were able to establish the prerequisites for applying the law.
Perhaps, but you have to admit it’s a tad ironic that PPB could apply the law in this case but they have been unable to do so in many cases involving cycllists. I’m too lazy to google it but go back and find JM’s story about the motorist who plowed into a female cyclist in SE and PPB refused to charge the motorist at all. In that case the motorist “was sorry” and that was good enough for PPB.
I know the story you are referring to.
The PPB is not a monolith; cops are different, and different incidents differ, as does the evidence available about exactly what happened.
Two anecdotes do not establish much of anything.
What I do know is that the law is pretty clear about what needs to be established to apply the VRU sanction, and it is not what people here often think it is.
If you think people killed in road traffic while operating or riding in a motor vehicle are treated better by the police I have some property in Florida you might be interested in buying.
My condolences to Kyle’s friends and family. The very touching memorial for him on Sandy makes it easy to see he was a light for lots of folks. Wishing you peace as you process your loss.
This is terrible. I frequently encounter disrespect from road users when I am riding my electric quadricycle. It’s like they know I have made the morally correct choice for use on our shared spaces and they resent me for it. Thankfully the collision avoidance and adaptive braking has been there to save me a couple times I’m not sure what I’d do with out it.
Dave
It hasn’t been funny the last 200 times you make this post. Maybe this is the one! Hope springs eternal.
Have you considered the possibility that he is not referring to a car?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzRPYqzKtLM
He’s not, he goes out of his way to make it obviously a Tesla or something. He’s describing a car for irony points.
The words “collision avoidance and adaptive braking” are a pretty big hint that it is, in fact, a car.
This is easily as funny as Angus’ filtering of posts as Australian and just as hilarious as Lois’ righteous indignation at everything from the ivory tower of academia.
The police headline was the worst. The media ones that added info about the illegal u-turn were big improvements over that one. What I particularly like about yours are the first two words–“Driver kills”. Whether that’s followed with “vulnerable road user”, “moped rider”, “motorcycle rider”, “man” or whatever isn’t that important because “driver kills” immediately sets the message in the right direction.
I dislike police statements casting things passively. It seems like a habit that started with trying to shield police from blame–instead of “the officer shot the man” it’s “at this point in time, the officer’s department-issued firearm discharged”. That habit seems to have spread–not just into police statements but to PR statements in general. It seems like people believe that you need to talk or write like that to sound more official and objective.
Sure, passive voice is annoying—but it’s impressive how your every road somehow leads back to ‘police bad.’ Starting to feel less like critique and more like a standing reservation
I’m often critical of police when I comment here because I’m commenting on articles that are describing poor police behavior. And it’s often this same topic of poorly written police reports.
I’ve personally had good and bad experiences with police, and I’ve commented about the good ones also. Of course it may feel like “your every road somehow leads back to “police bad”” is true if you ignore all my comments that don’t fit with that view.
In regard my passive voice criticism, I even wrote that it’s a problem not just with police statement but with PR statements in general–hardly what someone who wanted to make the police look bad would say.
This is such a shortsighted comment–the misguided idea that criticizing an aspect or aspects of something is the same as saying or thinking the whole thing is bad.
It’s an especially shortsighted view when the criticism is aimed at an aspect (writing public incident statements) of an organization (Portland Police) in which the aspect being criticized undermines the work of the rest of the organization.
Most police traffic work is almost invisible to the public, other than, say, the person getting a ticket or the few people involved in a crash. But the reporting is seen by thousands of people.
When the reporting is faulty–say giving the impression that a victim caused their own crash–that can have a much greater negative impact on how police are perceived in the community than things individual officers may do in the field that are typically nearly invisible to the public.
Even if only a small portion of the community thinks a police report is faulty, that’s still far more people than how many are involved in any typical police traffic interaction.
I (and Jonathan, and other commenters) have had almost your exact comment aimed at us for criticizing PBOT, ODOT, engineers, etc. In many cases, the criticisms are aimed at particular actions, stances or people who are undermining the overall work of those groups.
Those criticisms aren’t saying “police bad” (as you wrote), “PBOT bad”, :”engineers bad” etc.–they’re pointing out ways the good work of those groups is being undermined by sloppy work in specific areas of those groups.
Not only is criticizing specifics far different than thinking a whole organization is bad, NOT criticizing specific things that could be done better by an organization–the police or any other–isn’t doing that organization any favors.
You deleted an entire article and discussion. Why?
It’s not deleted. It’s just unpublished. I still have the draft and the discussion is preserved. The reason was because I had enough feelings to be concerned that the author was not being transparent about his background and I need to do a bit of work and thinking before deciding to keep the story up or not. And given that it’s the weekend, I’m not gonna do that work until Monday morning. Stay tuned.
This is what following distance is for, regardless of your mode of transport. It is part of building safe space around you which is imperative in case of situations like this.
This is also why I look both ways after the light turns green before proceeding. It might be their fault but I am paying if they do something dumb.
Winner!!!
First one to imply it’s the vulnerable road user’s own fault.
Congratulations!!!
I read several of the articles, and none of them give any evidence that the victim was following the vehicle, or even that the vehicle was traveling in the same eastbound direction as the victim. Based on those articles, there’s nothing to indicate the driver wasn’t heading west, and suddenly turned mid-block straight at the victim. Or maybe the driver was heading east, paused at the curb as if they were parking, then suddenly swerved out in front of the victim. “Following distance” may have been irrelevant.
How in a euclidean geometry can a U turn lead to a driver hitting someone who is following too close?
“the driver was cited for violating the careless driving/vulnerable roadway user (VRU) law. “
Isn’t it wild that outside driving a car, if you do something careless and illegal that kills somebody, there most likely would be more than a citation as the punishment?
For topic background: ORS801.608 includes moped / motorcyclist operators (and even rural farmers operating a tractor) on a public roadway as a ‘vulnerable user of a public way’ (VUoPW?) for purposes of traffic enforcement, see https://oregon.public.law/statutes/ors_801.608. [Though ODoT / USDoT may not always include these users in planning and reporting…]
Illegal u-turns have been a huge problem ever since the pandemic. Of course have never seen a single person pulled over for one.