A recent report by the Portland City Administrator shows traffic deaths in the city have continued to fall after a spike during the COVID-19 pandemic. Are Portlanders driving differently now than they were when the streets were emptier? Are earlier state and federal investments in traffic safety now just taking shape? Nonprofit leaders and city officials agree there are multiple factors involved in the decline. But as pandemic recovery continues, and the future of Gov. Tina Kotek’s road funding bill remains unclear, it’s an open question whether the city will be able to keep the trend line down.
We’re joined by Dana Dickman, the Vision Zero policy manager for the City of Portland, to unpack the latest data and discuss how the city is working to make roads safer. Also joining us are Sarah Iannarone, executive director of The Street Trust, and Zachary Lauritzen, executive director of Oregon Walks.
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. A recent report by the Portland city administrator found that year-to-date traffic deaths in the city have fallen from their post-pandemic peak. The previous four-year average was 53. This year it was 32. So what is behind this decrease and what work remains to get the city closer to its goal of zero?
Dana Dickman is the city’s Vision Zero policy manager, Sarah Iannarone is the executive director of The Street Trust, and Zachary Lauritzen is the executive director of Oregon Walks. They all join me now. It’s great to have all three of you on the show.
Dana Dickman: Thank you.
Sarah Iannarone: Hi, Dave.
Zachary Lauritzen: Thank you.
Miller: Dana, first – So, as I mentioned, the previous four-year average of year to date traffic fatalities in Portland was 53. This year [it’s] down significantly: 32. What do you think is working?
Dickman: I think there’s a lot of things that have changed. But a big thing that we’re starting to see is some of the investments that we have made in street design changes are starting to catch up. It takes multiple years to get a project on the street and see those changes that we’re starting to see. So, where we’ve been able to invest, we’re seeing success. We’re seeing speeds coming down, we’re seeing crashes go down in those places.
I also think, during the pandemic, we saw some sort of fragmentation of social structures that you saw across the country, and that contributed to crashes here in Portland through people driving really aggressively, people interacting with the streets in ways that we wouldn’t typically expect. And that’s changed, we’re seeing those types of the most aggressive behaviors of drivers coming down on our streets.
Miller: Sarah, how do you think about that second part? And not to diminish the importance of what we can control – speed limit or road design, transit policy, money going to safety. Those are all real things that we’ll talk more about. But that second part, which seems like it’s both a Portland and a nationwide question [about] the societal cataclysm of the pandemic leading to, it seems – it’s hard to pin this down exactly – maybe fewer cars on the road and then faster driving, more deadly accidents … They seem like such big societal levers. I’m curious, as somebody who is focused so much on preventing these deaths, how you think about the fact that there’s so little we can do to control a gigantic societal shift like COVID, and yet that affected traffic deaths?
It’s a long-winded question, but I’m just wondering how you think about what’s not even in our control?
Iannarone: Let me tie it to the first one and maybe we can tie it together. When we think about systems, they all broke down during COVID, right? Transportation is a system. That system, the way we’ve built it, results in many inequities during a pandemic or not. We can use our investments in the system to get the things we want. The Street Trust and everybody here, we love safe streets as a place where communities gather. Portland loves its streets. We have Sunday Parkways, which PBOT puts on. Oregon Walks does walks with the community, we do bike rides. All of these things, we gather in the streets and those help increase social cohesion.
But we also know that there are people who are drinking and driving. And we can design streets that even if your wildest neighbor makes it home alive at the end of the night, then we’ve done our job. Human behavior we can’t control. But the designs we put in, whether those are guard rails, or streets where people can’t go fast, or plenty of access to transit and walking so you can walk to the neighborhood pub instead of driving, all of those things help control for bad human decisions.
And then we’re using our infrastructure investments in our design investments to make sure no matter what anybody’s doing, we’re all getting home to our families at the end of the night. So Dana’s point about the investments on the front end, that really does tie to the human behavior on the second part.
Miller: What is a specific investment where you think it’s made a difference? So, if the first point, where we, as a society, have the most control is the design of our streets, what do you think has made a recognizable difference in Portland?
Iannarone: Well, let’s talk top to bottom. Because the USDOT under Buttigieg took a safe systems approach, ODOT took a safe systems approach, Metro took a safe systems approach, and so did PBOT. Everybody was aligned. We were putting the dollars where they mattered in hardened infrastructure that made it harder to drive fast and recklessly, and easier to walk, bike, roll or access the bus safely. We know that’s the baseline. In Hoboken, where they’ve reduced traffic fatalities to zero, that’s how they did it. They reduced the speeds and they hardened up the protections for people who are outside of cars. It’s a simple formula.
City of Portland passed a gas tax, the voters passed it in 2016, and then more recently in 2024. And that is where we get money for projects like this. Now, we’re looking at threats at the state level, where there are people who are trying to defund safe streets, they’re trying to defund paving potholes and they’re trying to defund transit. And we know that paving potholes, having good sidewalks and robust transit is actually what saves lives. So, I always tie it back to those simple pennies. It’s not thousands of dollars, it’s pennies at a time.
Miller: Zachary, how do you think about what made the biggest difference this year, compared to the average of the previous four? It’s a sizable difference.
Lauritzen: Yeah, absolutely. I really appreciate what Dana and Sarah showed and shared. I would add another thing, which is I think there should be some credit to advocates who have been tooting this horn year after year after year saying this has got to be on people’s radar, we have to change our behavior. Electeds have been now – we’re seeing at the dais – talking about safe streets, safe streets, safe streets when we show up to meetings.
Miller: In a way that feels different?
Lauritzen: It feels different, absolutely. Through the legislative session, for example, it started with safety first, that is our priority, what are we going to do? I think it’s media too, folks like you, Dave, that are covering these issues. People in our society need to hear just how critical the crisis was and is, and that they can have an impact on moving forward.
Miller: Alright, so let’s get to where you see the most work that’s still to be done. Dana, you’re the Vision Zero policy manager. So to say that the number of traffic fatalities – I should say again, year to date, not year total – went from 53, as an average, to 32. It’s a great improvement that we should celebrate, but 32 is not your goal; it is zero. Where do you think right now the city is falling short?
Dickman: I just want to say, just to follow up on one thing, that as we change our streets, they will be more resilient to things like the pandemic. So just keeping that in mind as we think about that question about what [are those] cataclysmic things that we need to prepare for, we are creating that resiliency in the system to prepare for things we can’t foresee.
Miller: Do you mean, like for Sarah’s example, if there is somebody who drinks, it is unsafe to drive but they’re driving, you’re saying that if roads are designed better, there’s a better chance that that drunk driver is less likely to hurt themselves or others if the roads are designed in a better way?
Dickman: If we have streets that are designed for people to go slower, if we have a culture of people going slower all over the city, if we have places where folks can’t make a turn that might be unsafe, a left turn that, yes, even if somebody makes a mistake, has drinks and drives home, the streets will help it to be more resilient. We don’t believe that we can stop all crashes. The goal is to stop serious injuries and fatal crashes. So we’re trying to build that resiliency into the system.
Miller: I appreciate that you divided that up into two different parts: the rules of the road or the way that the roads are designed that can prevent physically speeding, and then the culture of speeding. Because I imagine they’re connected, but they’re not the same.
Dickman: Right.
Miller: How do you get people to choose to go slower?
Dickman: Part of it is setting the right signals with road design, having that space where people don’t have a wide open, five-lane street that indicates to them that they should go fast. But then it’s also things like work on changing law where we can now have 20-mile-per-hour local streets, starting to change that culture of what it means to move around an urban area. It’s advocates like Sarah and Zachary really talking about why speed matters and how important that connection between travel speed and safety is [and that] starts to shift that culture over time.
Miller: Has the average speed that Portland drivers drive on the streets that are now 20 miles an hour … How close to 20 miles an hour is it? Is that something that PBOT checks?
Dickman: We did a study not long after we dropped speeds down to 20 MPH in collaboration with PSU that did show a drop. We don’t have that level of data we’re checking, where we know across the city the average on all local streets. But we do see, overall, the temperature of speeds coming down, even when we just drop posted speed limit.
Miller: What do you see as next for the city?
Dickman: I think continued investment in infrastructure. My role has changed a little bit within the city. We’re now working outside of just the transportation bureau and really looking at that systems approach, bringing all of the different bureaus into this shared outcome. [We’re] looking at how we leverage all the resources investments across the city to help us achieve the goal of Vision Zero.
I think you’re gonna hear this echoed with the advocates though as well: it’s funding. We can look at how much funding there is and make a commensurate improvement in the fatalities as we have more funding, we can invest more in programs and in infrastructure, and you’re going to start to see those changes or those results in the outcomes if we invest.
Miller: Sarah, let’s divide this up with the funding into two different big pots: federal and state. Looking at federal first, what are you looking at in the coming years in terms of federal funding for transportation and transit?
Iannarone: What we see, as I mentioned before Dave, is public and active transportation actively under threat in ways that we have not seen in my time at The Street Trust. Historically, at least in the last couple of decades across the United States, there was general consensus among practitioners, advocates and decision makers that increasing safety was great, increasing walking, biking and access to transit was a good investment, we’ll slowly make our way there. Portland was an outlier in that they took it really serious and tried to get there faster than other places.
But what we’re seeing, just like on every policy front with this federal government, is a complete reversal and turnaround on the best practices, the best science that we know in terms of what we fund to get the public economic and health outcomes that we want to see as a community. That does trickle down. It makes it harder when Dana and her colleagues are applying for grants and they can’t talk about the racial equity concerns – which are very pervasive here, still, in Oregon. They can’t talk about certain things that we’ve been able to talk about. And so everyone’s having to adjust their systems to accommodate this attack – I would call it – on what we know is the best practices.
You bring that down to the local level and it’s increasingly challenging. What’s happening is the conversation is shifting where people are being seen as sensible when they want to defund transportation. And I’m over here and I know my colleagues on the panel will agree, we’ve been fighting for these basics. We want kids to get to school without dying. That’s not a radical perspective from our opinion, but it’s being framed that way. It’s being framed as sensible that we defund things like public transportation and safe routes to school, where for a while, it was pretty much assumed across our society that kids should be able to get to school by walking safely.
Miller: I’m glad you brought up pedestrians … and Zach, I want to turn to you. In three of the last five years, including this year, pedestrians made up the highest percentage of those traffic deaths that we were talking about. And there was a big drop actually this year in traffic fatalities from people in vehicles. This is just one year, but there are some patterns we can start to look at that are important, potentially. Pedestrian fatalities, in other words, they’re not dropping significantly. Why not?
Lauritzen: Well, we say everyone’s a pedestrian. There’s a lot of us, we’re out there all the time, whether you’re getting out of your car and running across the street to the hardware store, whether you’re walking to school, whether you’re on a, on a stroll trying to get to work, there’s a lot of us. And we’re the most vulnerable, we’re the slowest moving. Everyone who listens to this has been around Portland where there’s often no sidewalks or they’re right next to these fast moving multi-thousand pound vehicles. The risk is just high and the exposure is really, really high. So that would be one component, and that hasn’t changed fundamentally.
I would also suggest that we hear often “if pedestrians would just look both ways or if they would get off their phones or … ”
Miller: “Wear brighter colors.”
Lauritzen: “Wear brighter colors.” And we say to that, sure, pedestrians have a role in their safety, of course they do. And someone who makes a mistake or someone who is intoxicated or whatever, the consequence shouldn’t be a death sentence or severe maiming. We need to build streets that are safe so that anyone who makes a mistake that’s going to happen still walks away and is safe.
Can I make one quick point about what we can do right now, which is we are right at the crux of making a decision about 82nd Avenue. It’s one of the few projects where there’s real funding to do something. We’re gonna decide how much we’re gonna prioritize transit the length of 82nd Avenue, and we need our leadership in this region to say we are going to prioritize transit. We’re going to put bat lanes the full length of 82nd Avenue, change it from a highway to a main street, be the housing and transit spine of East Portland.
Miller: Dana, just briefly, how much have your efforts changed because of the change in government structure? Sometimes it’s hard for Portlanders, I think, to really see in meaningful ways the way this huge charter change has been leading to policy changes. So, has that been the case for Vision Zero? And if so, can you help us understand briefly how the government change has led to meaningful changes for our lives?
Dickman: It’s new still. Even though we’re almost a year in, it’s still pretty new in the world of government. My position has changed, that’s just a small thing. I was in the Bureau of Transportation. I’m now sitting to work across all the service areas.
I think fundamentally, what has changed is some of the thinking. When the city council unanimously [recommitted to] Vision Zero on September 17, what I heard from them is this deeper recognition that it is a public health issue, that what we’re trying to do is think about all the risks in the system. And that’s going to take coming together of long-range planning of police, of fire, of transportation, of mental health professionals to really come together to think about those outcomes. Those things aren’t going to happen immediately. But I think that that’s a shift in the leadership really seeing that need to come together and not just continue to say, “PBOT, you fix it.” We all need to rally around and fix it.
Miller: Dana, Sarah and Zachary, thanks very much.
Lauritzen: Thank you. Walk on.
Dickman: Thank you.
Iannarone: Thanks for having us.
Miller: Zachary Lauritzen is the executive director of Oregon Walks. Sarah Iannarone is the executive director of The Street Trust. Dana Dickman is the Vision Zero policy manager at the city of Portland.
“Think Out Loud®” broadcasts live at noon every day and rebroadcasts at 8 p.m.
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.
