Looks like an emergency to me.

We’ve seen this sad movie before: After seemingly incessant traffic violence on our streets, people join together with tears in their eyes and frustration in their hearts to implore our government agencies to do more to make our streets safe.

This time Oregon Walks and the Rosewood Initiative will lead the way. They’re hosting a press conference Thursday morning to draw attention to terrible conditions on outer SE Stark Street after a woman was killed by an auto user at 148th Street last week. That was the third fatal traffic crash at or near that same intersection in less than a year. In a statement (below), Oregon Walks Executive Director Noel Mickelberry is calling on the City of Portland to declare an official emergency on SE Stark in order to immediately reduce the speed limit from 35 to 30 mph.

Mickelberry hopes the Portland Bureau of Transportation will take a similar approach to the emergency declaration they successfully pursued on SE Division last year.

Here’s more from the Oregon Walks press release:
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Mickelberry (with Steve Bozzone) at the Weston Awards in November.
(Photo: J. Maus/BikePortland)

Noel Mickelberry has announced she plans to end her tenure as executive director of Oregon Walks.
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(Photo: J. Maus/BikePortland)

On the same day that 60-year-old Elizabeth Meyers became the 20th person to die while walking on Portland streets this year (the most since 2003), Oregon Walks Executive Director Noel Mickelberry penned a letter to Mayor Ted Wheeler and City Council imploring them to do more — faster — to make our streets more livable.

Here’s the text of Noel’s letter (with her formatting/emphases):

Mayor Wheeler & Portland City Council,

Portland is experiencing a livability crisis in our streets. Today, the 20th person this year was killed while walking. This makes 2017 the deadliest year on record for pedestrians since 2003. Last week, Multnomah County published a new report showing that 80 people died last year while living outside on the streets of Portland. We believe these issues are interconnected and the approach to solving them must take into account numerous factors critical to Portlanders’ safety.
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(Photos: City of Portland)

The first hearing for the City of Portland’s Inclusionary Housing Zoning Code Project took place at city council today and biking and walking advocates showed up to support the proposal and urge council to pass it.

As we’ve reported for years now, there’s a clear intersection between affordable housing policy and cycling: The most bike-friendly neighborhoods are also the ones where we’ve seen tremendous market pressure exerted — and many of them are now unaffordable to many low and even middle-income Portlanders. And according to the National Household Travel Survey, low-income households drive much less than those with high-incomes.

One way to make neighborhoods more affordable is to require developers to build affordable housing units in their new buildings. Otherwise they’ll sell the units at whatever price the market can bear — and that happens to be a lot of money in Portland’s red-hot housing market. The result is a sort of forced migration of people with lower incomes into neighborhoods further away from the city center.
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It’s walking… like you’ve never seen it before.
(Photos: Oregon Walks)

This guest article is written by Noel Mickelberry, the executive director of Oregon Walks

It’s a special time of year for people on foot. It’s a little rainy, there are patches of sun, and it’s the perfect time to prep yourself for Halloween – it’s Walktober, an entire month of walking fun that Oregon Walks has been organizing for the past five years.[Read more…]

The Street Trust (formerly the Bicycle Transportation Alliance) has made a public statement about the death of young Fallon Smart and the serious collision yesterday that left 15-year-old Bradley Fortner with a brain injury.

“We need action now,” says Street Trust Executive Director Rob Sadowsky. “I am deeply saddened each time I hear about another road death. It is all of our responsibility to drive, bike, and walk as if it is our own child, grandchild, or grandparent who will be crossing the road at the next intersection. Simply put, we must slow down and we must be vigilant.”

The statement comes with an announcement of a rally that will be held tomorrow (Thursday, September 1st) at the north end of the North Park Blocks. The rally is being coordinated with — and will include representatives from — Oregon Walks, Oregon and SW Washington Families for Safe Streets, the Portland Bureau of Transportation, and the Oregon Department of Transportation.
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About 300 people at the summit this year.
(Photos: J. Maus/BikePortland)

BikePortland is covering the Oregon Active Transportation Summit today and tomorrow. We’ve been tweeting updates via #ATSummit and you might have caught our previous post with a recap of the action from the opening speech by Lynn Peterson and a few of the morning sessions.

Between speeches and panel discussions, I try to talk with as many people as possible. The summit serves a wide variety of interests — from agency directors to planners, citizen activists to non-profit staff and volunteers. It’s fun to catch up with such a diverse group and find out about the interesting projects and programs they’re working on. Below are just a few of the folks I ran into…

John Landolfe, transportation options coordinator at Oregon Health & Science University

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Oregon Walks Executive Director Noel
Mickelberry.
(Photo courtesy Oregon Walks)

This is a guest post by Noel Mickelberry, executive director of Oregon Walks and a member of the City of Portland’s Vision Zero Task Force.

Transportation advocacy doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Our city’s new goal to eliminate traffic fatalities doesn’t, either.

It’s something that shouldn’t need saying, but I feel it needs constant reiteration. It is entirely too easy, and too common, for us to look at our streets as a series of connections, people divided by mode, unattached to the other issues surrounding us or how our lives are inherently impacted by transportation decisions on a daily basis. The ease by which many of us working in transportation advocacy are able to view our streets — of course a bike lane should go here, of course a crosswalk is the answer there — is in itself a privilege.

As we develop Portland’s Vision Zero policies, I’m asking us to go further. And I’ve got five specific suggestions for how to do so.

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Portland based walking advocacy group Oregon Walks has just released a statement following the death of two innocent people in the past two weeks — Thomas Gazzola and George Carlson — who were killed while walking on local streets.

Their statement, which is co-signed by 10 partner organizations and one individual (see full list below*), directly calls out Portland Mayor Charlie Hales saying, “We need action now… we must take bold steps immediately to protect those who walk on our street.”[Read more…]