From Crisis to Opportunity: Reimagining Our Deadly Streets for a Prosperous Future
Let’s work together to transform Oregon’s streets into safer spaces for everyone.
Earlier this year, we wrote about a chilling reality on our streets: one traffic death was occurring every five days in the Portland Metro area. Sadly, as of July 27th, we’ve seen the rate surge to one traffic death every 2.4 days on average. That includes an increase in the number of youth killed in crashes, and over half of fatal crashes involving speeding. Meanwhile, at the state level, Oregon is projected to be among the top three states with the highest year-to-year increases in pedestrian deaths.
On Monday morning, City of Portland Transportation Commissioner Mingus Mapps hosted a press conference to highlight the urgency of the situation.
The scheduled speakers included City and Multnomah County representatives and The Street Trust as the community representative. Both agencies expressed a commitment to work in partnership and alignment with each other to ensure state and federal funding opportunities are maximized.
The Street Trust executive director Sarah Iannarone also highlighted funding as an important consideration as we move forward together.
Funding plays a key role in transforming our transportation system for safety. We must align our transportation budgets with our safety goals and plans. Current spending primarily facilitates faster, easier driving, while depriving communities of safe streets funding. In addition to changing our spending habits, the revenue supporting a safe system must adapt as well. As the way people choose to travel evolves, we must explore multiple alternatives to the gas tax to pay for our system.
Multnomah County Chair Jessica Vega Pederson emphasized the county’s role as the local public health authority, and described how its supportive housing and behavioral health programs contribute to traffic fatality prevention. Brendon Haggerty also spoke on behalf of the county, announcing today’s release of a two-year data report on regional trends and contributing factors in traffic fatalities.
Remarks from Mapps and Portland Police Bureau Sgt. Ty Engstrom made clear that ramped up armed law enforcement presence is part of the City’s strategy.
Traffic enforcement alone will not reduce crime or deaths
Despite some intuitive appeal, bolstering law enforcement's response to traffic violations is an incomplete approach to ending traffic violence. It fails to address other significant factors like incomplete road design, inadequate infrastructure, and unsafe vehicles. It also risks unintended consequences like over-policing and profiling, which disproportionately impact people of color. Furthermore, law enforcement can be unreliable (staffing levels tend to fluctuate with politics) and even dangerous (law enforcement officers are hurt and killed each year conducting traffic stops).
An excellent article by Jeremiah Hayden for Street Roots published last week cited results from the Multnomah County REACH Crash and Safety Report (2021) that Black adults in Multnomah County were four times as likely to have encounters with the criminal justice system in comparison to their white counterparts. The report attributed this disparity in part to a higher frequency of vehicle stops by law enforcement, which led to increased interactions with the justice system. Hayden connected with Charlene McGee, a 2022 Alice Awards winner, about the issue. She explained that she and her team see racism as a public health crisis, and how traffic policing plays out differently across the community is an aspect of that.
We need to enforce speeds in a way that does not disproportionately harm BIPOC or low-income community members. This includes significant investments in automated traffic enforcement, such as red light and speed cameras (which aren’t contingent on police staffing levels since we enacted civilian review of citations in 2021). We also need to issue citations with appropriate consequences, such as the proposal in NYS in which drivers with multiple speed-camera violations would be ordered to install aftermarket speed limiters on their cars.
We absolutely need to address impairment on our streets. We must dispel the misconceptions surrounding impaired driving and implement proactive measures to curb such practices. Let's look to Utah as a case study. In 2017, Utah reduced the legal blood-alcohol concentration limit for drivers from 0.08 to 0.05, the lowest in the U.S. This single change led to a significant decline in traffic-related injuries, crashes, and drunk driving incidents, without impacting alcohol sales.
A harm reduction model of street design
Here at The Street Trust, we are committed to advocating for equitable and safe streets. While we understand the desire for enhanced enforcement across the transportation system, we believe in addressing the root causes of the problem.
Some public health practitioners focus on “harm reduction,” which means implementing practical strategies to reduce negative consequences associated with less than optimal human behavior. Dr. Susan P. Baker, who founded the Johns Hopkins Center for Injury Research and Policy puts it quite bluntly: “The bottom line is if you make the world safe for drunks, you make it safe for everybody.” Given Oregon’s high rates of alcohol-related fatalities, substance use and addiction, and housing and houselessness crises, this is no laughing matter, and we’re certainly not arguing in favor of public intoxication; but our point is this: streets designed around users who may be at increased risk of injury or fatality are safer for everybody.
Do you always buckle your child into a safety seat before a drive or bike ride? Have you ever appreciated smooth sidewalks and ADA curb ramps when you’re walking the dog, stuck using crutches, or pulling kids in a wagon to the park? Do you appreciate when you push the button on the post, a bright light flashes, traffic stops, and you get not only a signal, but a feeling that the street is safe to cross? These are all examples of safety investments that serve our most vulnerable street users, and make life easier for all of us. They don't necessarily prevent human errors, but they can reduce them and reduce harm when crashes occur. We can and must apply this same logic to our entire transportation system.
Join us as we champion for a safer, equitable future
Our fight isn’t just about immediate fixes but about setting the stage for systemic change. In the 2023 legislative session, street safety funding was disappointingly deprioritized. In light of this, we're laying the groundwork for a comprehensive safe streets investment funding package in the 2025 legislative session. This package must prioritize people and safety at the heart of our infrastructure decisions.
As we lead this fight for safer streets, we need your support. In addition to investing in infrastructure, we need to address systemic inequalities contributing to traffic fatalities. This includes poverty and lack of access to affordable transportation. We must ensure that our transportation system serves everyone, regardless of their skin tone, travel mode, or zip code.
Let’s work together to transform Oregon’s streets into safer spaces for everyone.
Here are a few actions you can take today:
Learn More: Multnomah County’s Public Health Data Report provides important context for understanding traffic violence as a public health issue.
Take a Survey: The PBOT Budget & Revenue Survey invites community member perspectives to help inform priorities during this time of constrained resources.
Submit a Comment: A draft of the Regional Transportation Plan for Greater Portland is up for public review! Share your views through August 25th.
Volunteer: The Families for Safe Streets Resource Guide Working Group is an opportunity to support local traffic victims and their loved ones.
Yes, let's work together.
Your "...Reimagining..." commentary has some important perspectives on our crisis of deadly streets.
Yet beyond inadequate infrastructure or vehicle safety, seeing PDX-area decay as connected to a nearly unprecedented rise in vandalism & neglect of our critical public facilities reveals a broader crisis -- which is not just structural but also CULTURAL. And it poses a challenge to The Street Trust vision -- and that of many engaged community members -- as we may need to consider more varied urban theories & policies. On one hand, especially since 2020 we've indeed seen the top-down negligence & abuse by authorities with misplaced enforcement or overpolicing -- which in many ways came from excessive application of the Broken Windows model of social control/policing.
But on the other hand, recently rampant mob-like assaults on our basic public infrastructure -- such as defacing/destroying Speed Limit, Do Not Enter, & Stop signs -- suggests a level of widespread antisocial nihilism that not only threatens the City of Roses' basic fabric but also corrosively undermines our legitimate grassroots community resistance to the abuses of top-down policing noted above.
To stem this decay -- from the bottom up as well as the top down -- we must collaborate to deftly and strategically deploy a culture of 'caring community resistance'. Such community reclamation & rebuilding requires collective 'eyes-on-the-streets' to call out not just the breaches of public trust by authorities from police to moneyed interests. It also demands an unflinching willingness to call out & confront the profoundly destructive & antisocial conduct seen in unprecedented levels of vandalism, uncontrolled waste disposal/ dumping & mob-style occupation of public spaces -- to the extent that DISABILITY advocates must file class action lawsuits to reclaim our access to public rights-of-way that have been repeatedly blocked by 'campers' who in many cases are running open air narcotics markets, from meth to fentanyl.
As a Portlander since 1972, I know that many factors on the cultural side can converge & set the stage to enable a downward spiral in our streets, sidewalks & public spaces. Beyond the well known (& often misunderstood) cycles of addiction &/or mental illness, two distinctly antisocial behavior patterns common to America, and now widespread in post-2019 PDX, include: 1) the aggressive, 'toxic masculinities' often seen among street subcultures, & 2) the recently proliferating, face-glued-to-the-screen, instant gratification of the technophile generations, who often seem quite blase about the cruelest of abuses & public harms -- as long as these don't impair their Uber Eats app, game downloading bandwidth & screen resolution.
Confronting such anti-social and self-destructive collective behaviors & cultures/subcultures will require broad coalitions & leadership. From the NGO community like Street Trust & neighborhood associations, to public schools, churches & regional governments, we must expressly unite under a shared 'eyes-on-the-top' as well as 'eyes-on-the-bottom' vision of caring community resistance.
As such, I hope we can look forward to future words & actions from Street Trust to advance a community-centered vision like the great Jane Jacobs. In recognizing that our eyes-on-the-street are a powerful social force, Jacobs demonstrated how we can & must insist on 'decent behavior' by powerholders 'on top' as well as by the powerless 'on the bottom'.
An afterword: Having just returned from 4 weeks in France, the UK & Iceland (my latest of around 3 years total living/traveling/working in diverse locales outside the U.S.), I have experienced many examples of a functioning culture-meets-structure -- which thrives largely by the dispersed power of community members' eyes-on-the-streets.
So let's work together & renew PDX!