BikePortland

PBOT: Bike lanes on Hawthorne would be bad for climate change, racial equity

Screen Shot 2020-09-01 at 11.19.27 AM — PBOT is concerned about how these bike lanes might impact transit and racial equity.

Screen Shot 2020-08-31 at 1.57.42 PM — Site of a “profound volume of citations” says Tigard’s mayor.

It only took 17 days for Tigard’s two new traffic enforcement cameras to rack up over 800 citations. And just a few minutes for that city’s mayor to draw a line between this rampant, normalized lawlessness and death.

The new cameras started issuing citations on July 14th at 72nd Avenue and at Hall Boulevard on Highway 99W in Tigard. By July 31st, the 72nd Ave location had snapped 662 potential violators.

At a Tigard City Council meeting on August 11th, Police Chief Kathy McAlpine recounted some of the dangerous behavior behind the numbers. McAlpine said the cameras caught one person doing 74 mph in a 35 mph zone and in more than one occasion drivers have been cited multiple times at the same intersection — including one person who was caught going one way and then caught again on their way back. Another driver was dinged four separate times in the 17 days.

Driving through crowds and macing out of vehicles at SW 4th and Washington. pic.twitter.com/dCNJxYlkYn

— Cory Elia (@TheRealCoryElia) August 30, 2020

SE 80th and Mill — The lane on the right used to be someone’s front yard.
(Photos: Jonathan Maus/BikePortland)

Screen Shot 2020-08-27 at 2.31.04 PM — Gerald Scrutchions
(Photo from Instagram video)

Northeast Portland resident Gerald Scrutchions says a white man used a racial epithet and threatened him with vehicular violence while he biked home from work in Irvington on Tuesday. Scrutchions, who is Black, claims the man drove his car into the crosswalk he was using and then purposely swerved towards him.

And he’s not going to stand for it.

After the confrontation on the street, Scrutchions recognized the car parked at a house around the block from his so he knocked on the man’s door to have a conversation with him. After a brief back-and-forth, Scrutchions claims the man called him “nigger”.

He then posted a video on Instagram to share what happened and warn his neighbors by sharing the man’s name and address.

H/T Latisha Jenson, Willamette Week

Screen Shot 2020-08-27 at 1.30.54 PM — Traffic Division HQ in St. Johns.
(Photo: J. Maus/BikePortland)

In the first eight months of 2020, Portland Police Bureau (PPB) officers made 20,990 traffic stops. According to police data, between New Year’s Day and August 1st, 17.7% of the people stopped were Black — a significant overrepresentation of Portland’s Black population which was 5.8% as of 2019. Over the same time period, 64.9% of those stopped were white, a number that underrepresents that demographic by by over 12% (whites make up about 77% of Portland’s population).

Between April 1st and August 1st, Black people accounted for 12 of the 57 people (21.2%) stopped by the PPB who weren’t driving.

These numbers come to light less than a week after police in Kenosha, Wisconsin shot Jacob Blake seven times in the back as he stood in the street outside his SUV and amid a tense public dialogue about systemic racism and nightly protests against racist polices and police brutality.