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.
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.
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.