The Portland Bureau of Transportation is falling short of meeting some of its safety goals, according to a new city audit. Vision Zero is an international effort to completely eliminate traffic fatalities and serious injuries. The city of Portland adopted this philosophy in 2016, and while traffic deaths declined soon after, in 2021 they reached the highest they’ve been in the past three decades at 64. In 2023, those numbers are expected to be even higher, with early data standing at around 69 deaths. KC Jones is the audit services director for Portland. He joins us to share the details of the new audit. Dylan Rivera is the public information officer for PBOT. He also joins us to share the changes the agency will be making in response and the challenges of reaching Vision Zero.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. The Portland Bureau of Transportation is falling short of meeting some of its safety goals, according to a new city audit. Vision Zero is an international effort to completely eliminate traffic fatalities and serious injuries. The city of Portland adopted the goal in 2016. Traffic deaths did decline soon after, but then they shot up. 64 people died because of traffic collisions in 2021, the most in three decades, and early data suggests that last year’s death toll will be even higher.
KC Jones is the audit services director for Portland. Dylan Rivera is a public information officer for PBOT. They both join me now. It’s good to have both of you back on Think Out Loud.
KC Jones: Thanks, Dave.
Dylan Rivera: Thank you.
Miller: KC, I want to start with you. You wrote this as part of your summary: Even with the safety projects implemented by the bureau in the span of the 2019 update of the Vision Zero Action Plan, there were more traffic fatalities in 2023 than either 2022 or 2021.” It’s a long look you guys did and a big audit. But broadly, what do you see as the biggest reasons for that increase?
Jones: As we noted, the bureau reported completing more actions in some of its strategy areas than others. We focused on the strategies to protect pedestrians, reduce speeds and design safer streets. And then another component that we saw as being pretty important was the lack of systemic evaluation, learning about outcomes to identify which things have the best impact at whatever safety goal they were related to.
Miller: Dylan, did this audit tell the bureau anything that it didn’t already know?
Rivera: It helps with public awareness. It helps raise certain issues, maybe different priorities. But we were working on a lot of this already. Evaluation was already something we were working on, and for lack of resources, didn’t get that done in time. We’ve got more than half a dozen evaluations on our website now.
Miller: Well then, KC, what exactly do you mean when you say that there hasn’t been a systemic understanding at the bureau level of whether or not the various safety improvements have yielded better safety? What do you mean when you say that?
Jones: Sure. We’re expecting this to be a very data-driven process. And as Dylan noted, they haven’t always had the resources to go back after something is put in place, study what happened, whether it was successful at reducing speeds, or funneling cars to a different intersection, or whatever the improvement was intended to do. So understanding those outcomes were kind of important pieces of information that we thought the bureau could benefit from, especially as it maybe approaches tough budget times. Knowing what you get out of a particular safety improvement is an additional valuable piece of information.
Miller: Dylan, the audit notes that 70% of all traffic fatalities in Portland’s streets in a recent four-year period were in low light conditions, but also that the bureau didn’t finish installing lighting on two of the city’s especially dangerous roads, or complete layout plans for lighting dangerous roads in East Portland. Why not?
Rivera: The audit looked at project delivery of construction projects in 2020 and 2021. The whole world was dealing with a global deadly pandemic at the time and construction projects, private sector and public sector, were thrown off schedule. We’re doing our best to get back on schedule with all our projects, and we appreciate the observations and how important these projects are.
Miller: What has happened since then? Are our lighting goals more on track? Have you made significant progress since 2020 and 2021?
Rivera: We believe we have. We’ve added lighting as a factor in the project design phase when it didn’t used to be. And a lot of that comes from community input, that lighting was something that people felt could make a big difference.
Miller: KC, what patterns did you notice in terms of where traffic injuries, serious injuries, or fatalities were most likely?
Jones: There’s a map both in our report and on PBOT’s website, you can see where many of the most dangerous intersections and streets are in areas of Portland where higher concentrations of low income households and communities of color reside. Many of those top high crash streets are on the east side and in North Portland, and many of the most dangerous intersections are in outer East Portland.
Miller: Dylan, how do you explain that – the concentration of these serious incidents, either serious injuries or deaths, in neighborhoods that have either more People of Color or more people with low incomes?
Rivera: East Portland was built in the post-World War II era. The bulk of Portland, closer in neighborhoods, were built in the streetcar era. And so those streetcar neighborhoods have narrow streets, they have sidewalks, they have housing within a short walk of a lot of destinations. East of 82nd, east of I-205, you’ve got very large blocks, you’ve got maybe 1,000ft in between intersections. And so we’ve had to go in and retrofit and add a safer crossings, because we know that when you have to walk 1,000 ft to go to an intersection, it’s just too far, and so then people risk it. We want to add more safe crossings. We need to narrow those streets, add protective bike lanes.
Miller: One of the things that stood out to me is it’s not just the high traffic corridor areas and then high crash corridors that are of concern, but something like one in five of the crashes you found were in places away from that. What I took from that is that it’s a more diffuse problem. And it’s one thing to say we’re going to focus on these areas because we can make that have the biggest impact for our dollars. But a good number of fatalities are happening away from those. What do you do with that as a bureau?
Rivera: Well, thanks to Vision Zero, we’ve reduced the speed limit citywide on those residential streets to 20 [mph]. That took a change in state law, but we were persistent, we got it done. And we’ve continued to reduce speed limits citywide off of the high crash corridors.
Miller: Are people driving slower? It’s one thing to say that it’s 20 miles an hour throughout the city, except for on highways, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that people are obeying it.
Rivera: A PSU study found that they were, that the odds of you seeing someone driving 10 miles or over the speed limit on one of these narrow residential streets, where it’s 20 miles an hour, is greatly reduced since we changed the speed limit.
Miller: What about the flip side of that, the lawlessness that many of us have seen in terms of street takeovers, or drag racing, or donuts in the middle of seriously busy intersections?
Rivera: The lockdowns and all the measures we took for public health in the pandemic emptied our streets, so you saw the street racing and really excessive reckless speeding that was unheard of previously. That’s actually a national thing. We talk to our counterparts in other cities, national studies, that’s happening coast to coast. And so that is contributing to the rise in traffic deaths nationwide, across Oregon and in Portland.
Miller: KC, the city as a whole is facing a big budget shortfall in the coming year. The outgoing mayor has talked about a 5% across the board cut, for example, as something that folks should, should think about. Does your audit suggest the best way forward for the bureau when it has a smaller budget?
Jones: We think that the evaluation component can yield a lot of good results in terms of better understanding the outcomes as compared to the costs of specific safety projects, to be better informed and maybe make a pitch for “this is necessary at this scale, at this intersection,” those sorts of things.
Miller: Dylan, can you give us a sense for what you think should be prioritized? And then the flip side of that – what you think would be great, but there isn’t money for that right now. What are the tough decisions that the bureau is going to be making very soon?
Rivera: A year ago, we were looking at laying off 100 people. The audit mentions small projects off of the high crash corridors, 823-SAFE, the advisory committees where we hear from the community for those projects, those were going to be cut a year ago.
Miller: Am I right that it wasn’t because of PCEF money, because of climate fund money?
Rivera: PCEF came in and rescued many of our critical safety programs. Also, increased parking enforcement we hope was going to get more revenue through the meters, and then also some additional funding from the general fund. We’ve got a budget that’s held together with band-aids and borrowed cash, and we are not keeping up with inflation. City Administrator Michael Jordan said a year ago, February, transportation is slowly going out of business.
And in that context, public expectations keep getting higher and higher. So we’re prioritizing high crash corridors. We’re also building safety improvements on residential streets, we call neighborhood greenways, with speed humps and traffic diverters. But we need everyone to do their part to make our streets safer today. And that is by slowing down, following the speed limit, don’t drive impaired. We can all make a difference today in reducing and eventually eliminating traffic deaths.
Miller: Dylan Rivera and KC Jones, thanks very much.
Jones: Thanks, Dave.
Miller: Dylan Rivera is public information officer for the Portland Bureau of Transportation. KC Jones is the audit services director for Portland.
Contact “Think Out Loud®”
If you’d like to comment on any of the topics in this show or suggest a topic of your own, please get in touch with us on Facebook, send an email to thinkoutloud@opb.org, or you can leave a voicemail for us at 503-293-1983. The call-in phone number during the noon hour is 888-665-5865.
