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Portland first adopted the Vision Zero approach to ending traffic fatalities and serious injuries on city streets in 2015. In the decade since, hundreds of people have died in traffic crashes in Portland, and many more have been gravely hurt.
But Portland isn’t giving up on Vision Zero. At least, that’s what City Council indicated last week, when they unanimously voted to reaffirm the city’s commitment to the program, and set up a more collaborative, cross-bureau approach..
Councilor Tiffany Koyama Lane, who brought the resolution to City Council, said she wanted to make it clear to her fellow councilors—and Portlanders in general—that giving up on Vision Zero isn’t an option.
“I think some people only look at the numbers and see the number of deaths are not going in the right direction. It’s important to explain that Vision Zero is not a model, it’s a goal,” Koyama Lane told the Mercury. She says Portland should remain steadfast in its belief that no one should die while trying to get around the city.
“Getting to that number zero is a holistic goal that we can never give up on,” Koyama Lane said.
That doesn’t mean it’ll be easy. In 2024, 58 people died in traffic crashes on Portland’s streets. This marked a decrease from the year prior, when the Portland Bureau of Transportation (PBOT) reported 69 people were killed in traffic crashes. But it’s a good deal higher than zero.
Koyama Lane’s resolution sets out to reaffirm its commitment to the Vision Zero Action Plan, which guides the city’s actions on traffic safety. It also sets out to convene a cross-bureau task force to oversee the city’s Vision Zero work, led by the deputy city administrators of Public Works, Public Safety, and Community and Economic Development, and including staff from across the city.
The recent City Council conversation about Vision Zero demonstrated a significant shift in how Portland leaders talk about traffic violence on city streets. Several councilors, including Koyama Lane, have made transportation and traffic safety a key part of their political agendas. At the September 17 meeting, they talked about the issue with urgency and bluntness.
One particularly notable comment came from Councilor Sameer Kanal, who co-sponsored the resolution. Kanal acknowledged the role city leaders have played in upholding a system that allows so many people to die on Portland’s streets, and equated it to political violence.
“Political violence…is almost never reacted to appropriately when it’s people in suits that do it at a dais like this one, but it should be assessed as such,” Kanal said. “We bear responsibility when we, through our actions or our inactions, let people die.”
Such direct statements have not been typical of previous city councils, especially in regard to traffic crash fatalities. But transportation safety advocates want to ensure their words lead to change.
“This is going to take political leadership. It’s going to take political capital. It’s going to take actual capital, real money,” Zachary Lauritzen, executive director of Oregon Walks, said at the September 17 meeting. “I hope you vote ‘yes’ with the understanding that it’s going to take some real energy and effort from all of us, you included, to make the changes that are necessary to eliminate traffic deaths on our streets.”
In some ways, the Vision Zero resolution is a largely symbolic representation of the city’s traffic safety goals. But it does call for cross-bureau collaboration, which is in line with what Portland transportation leaders have said is needed to make Vision Zero effective. Since its rollout in 2015, the program has largely stayed in PBOT’s domain, even though other bureaus may have been able to contribute to the work.
“Vision Zero demands that we break down silos, prioritize high crash corridors, and protect the places where our loved ones walk, bike, drive, ride transit,” Koyama Lane said before the City Council’s vote last week. One of Koyama Lane’s earliest steps to elevate Vision Zero outside of PBOT took place during the budget development process earlier this year, through an amendment that moved the Vision Zero policy manager role into the administrative office for the Public Works Service Area.
The need to re-tool some aspects of Vision Zero was also evident in an audit released last year by the City Auditor’s Office. In response to the audit’s findings, PBOT and Public Works leaders Millicent Williams and Priya Dhanapal told the Auditor’s Office the traffic violence crisis requires citywide collaboration through “leadership, investment, and commitment from partners beyond PBOT.”
Councilors at the September 17 meeting also brought up the intersection of homelessness and traffic crash deaths. When Portland began tracking the housing status of traffic crash victims in 2021, the city discovered homeless people were disproportionately represented among those killed while walking on city streets. Data continues to show unhoused Portlanders are more likely to be the victims of traffic violence. PBOT says in 2024, 12 people were unhoused at the time they were killed in traffic crashes, with the majority of those being pedestrian deaths.
Last week, Councilor Eric Zimmerman led an effort to amend the resolution to analyze why people experiencing homelessness are at such greater risk of being killed while walking in Portland. The amendment was accepted, but not without some councilors expressing concern that the amendment could be used to further criminalize homelessness.
Vision Zero in action
The cross-bureau collaboration could come in various forms. Street trees, managed by the Urban Forestry department in Portland Parks & Recreation, have been shown to slow drivers and improve pedestrian safety. The Bureau of Environmental Services’ green streets initiative includes stormwater treatments that can double as traffic calming measures.
There’s also the matter of traffic enforcement. Portland Police Bureau (PPB) Chief Bob Day wrote a letter in favor of Koyama Lane’s resolution, laying out the role of the Bureau’s traffic division in reducing crashes. PPB’s traffic division has only been back in action for a little more than two years, after the Bureau effectively disbanded it in 2020 due to budget and staff constraints.
Though the move came in the wake of a major nationwide reckoning about racist police violence, the city didn’t cite concerns about racial profiling in traffic stops as a key reason for rolling back traffic enforcement services. Several years later, PPB Sergeant Ty Engstrom admitted to BikePortland that the decision to drastically reduce traffic enforcement was part of a strategy to “create a stir” to get more funding from the city.
Despite this history, Councilor Dan Ryan suggested at the September 17 meeting that PBOT staff played a role in PPB’s decision to disband its dedicated traffic enforcement team, and that the decision contributed to an increase in traffic crash deaths. PPB Assistant Chief Amanda McMillan seemed to support Ryan’s suggestion, saying that the bureau “did pull back resources in the wake of everything that was coming out of 2020 and 2021.”
“At that time, the numbers in traffic fatalities rose,” McMillan said. “We’ve reconstituted our traffic unit. We have those resources redeployed, and we’ve seen a reduction. I don’t know exactly how that worked, but maybe there’s a correlation there.”
That correlation would be difficult to prove or disprove, given the changes occurred within a relatively short time frame.
Other potential traffic safety solutions that came up during Council discussions: traffic cameras. Research supports the use of these cameras, and PBOT has embraced them in recent years, particularly at certain high crash intersections. But those cameras are currently dark as the city switches traffic camera contractors. PBOT says they’ll be up and running again by November, but that leaves road users vulnerable in the meantime.
Overall, Koyama Lane said she felt the Council’s unanimous vote last week helped pave the way for bolder future investments in traffic safety projects.
“I’ve been trying to help every councilor see that there’s a place for them to care about the lives and safety of everyone in this city. Whatever your lane, let’s make this tent as big as possible,” she told the Mercury. “There was a lot of excitement and celebration, and then also a deep understanding from everyone that the work is just beginning, and we have a lot more to do. This is an important step, but it’s not the only step.”
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Taylor Griggs
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