They’re stumped in Stumptown.
Portland bills itself as a haven for cyclists, yet the Oregon city has struggled to reduce the rising death toll on its roadways, and now activists are clamoring for changes to its Vision Zero strategy.
The Portland Police Bureau recorded 65 deaths on its streets in 2024, including 23 pedestrians and four cyclists. That high number follows an even worse 2023, when police reported 75 traffic deaths, a three-decade high for the Rose City.
The trend will startle those who see Portland as one of America’s most bike and pedestrian-friendly places, a reputation built on its nearly 400 miles of bike lanes and 100 miles of neighborhood greenways. The city has one of the highest percentages of bike commuters per capita as a result and its vibrant bike culture has been parodied in the FX show “Portlandia” in 2012.
So why is Portland falling so short of its Vision Zero goal of eliminating deaths and injuries on its roads by 2025?
A decade ago, the city’s traffic fatality rate was one of the lowest among the 50 largest cities in the country, but the number of fatalities have crept upward nearly every year since 2018. Its five-year traffic fatality rate is just below 11 deaths per 100,000 people.
By comparison, Seattle, a city with 100,000 more people than Portland, had only 35 traffic fatalities in 2023 — fewer than half of Portland. And New York, a city with 8.3 million people, had 260 traffic deaths in 2023. In other words, a city with 13 times the population of Portland had only 3.5 times its roadway fatalities.
Portland isn’t the only place struggling with road violence. The number of pedestrians killed by drivers has steadily climbed for more than a decade across the country, thanks, in part, to rising vehicle size and weight and distracted drivers.
But city officials and Portland activists say a culture of lawlessness on the roads developed during the pandemic and has continued when drivers found there were few consequences for speeding and driving recklessly.
In the aftermath of the George Floyd demonstrations and the Covid pandemic, the City Council reduced the police budget by $15 million, and officials claimed that police brass redirected resources away from traffic enforcement and disbanded several units.
“Given the resources that we have, and the limited time officers have to do this type of enforcement, I'm directing our sworn personnel to focus on safety violations and enforcement and high-crash corridors,” Police Chief Chuck Lovell said in 2021.
But Portland had only one full-time traffic officer in the city at the time, compared with the 19 motorcycles and one officer with a vehicle before the cuts. Traffic citations dropped 80 percent from February to June 2021 compared with the same five-month period the prior year.
"It's hard to ignore the fact that we have a huge number — record-setting number — of fatalities and we have very, very low numbers of police officers patrolling our streets," Sgt. Ty Engstrom, the lone traffic officer, told KGW8 in November 2021.
Two years after the initial “defund the police” push, police leaders eventually reassigned 22 officers to patrol areas where frequent crashes occurred.
Activists claimed the police played politics by linking the defund debate with traffic deaths in order to get more money.
“They held public safety hostage for their budget negotiations,” said Jonathan Maus, transportation advocate and founder of BikePortland. “The most authoritative figure in the police bureau was telling people to go ahead and do whatever they want on the road and people died because of that.”
Another reason was Portland’s lack of follow-through for multiple street safety projects and speed cameras.
A city audit of Portland’s Vision Zero plan found that the city’s transportation department only partially completed projects like street lighting, enhanced pedestrian crossings, and traffic signals in areas like East Portland, one of the city’s most diverse communities that has seen a disproportionate number of crashes.
The audit also found the agency only installed eight speed cameras by 2021 and couldn’t add new cameras more quickly due to lengthy contract negotiations with a vendor and pandemic-related disruptions. (Portland had 20 cameras operational by 2023 and the city expected to double that figure to 40 by early 2025. By comparison, New York City has 2,000 camera systems, or 4,900 percent more.)
And once a project was completed, whether it was repurposing a travel lane for parking or setting up left-turn calming bumps, Portland officials did not always evaluate its effectiveness to determine whether it was working properly, the audit said.
Portland transportation officials explained that a $6-billion maintenance backlog has left them to make difficult choices when completing safety projects. The city has been able to invest $55 million in a number of crosswalks and bus rapid transit along a seven-mile corridor of 82nd Avenue in East Portland, one of the most dangerous strips in the city, after the state transferred the highway to the city in 2022. But budget cuts forced the department to suspend residential street sweeping, including bike lanes where wet leaves can pile up.
“We don’t like to install safety improvements when there are potholes and our streets are falling into deeper disrepair,” said Portland Bureau of Transportation spokeswoman Hannah Schafer. “What you will often see is an attempt to put in bumps and posts and they will be the pilot version. We don’t have the budget to do longer-term solutions such as actual concrete material, but the goal is to come back and harden those improvements.”
A new mayoral administration and several new Council members who campaigned for safer streets could help expedite transportation plans, too.
But advocates worry city leaders won’t stand up to drivers in East Portland and other outskirt neighborhoods who oppose street safety measures in community meetings.
“The city needs to answer for the fact that these numbers aren’t going down," Maus said.
"If you ask people what they want, they say, ‘We don’t want people to slow down.’" It’s on the city to figure out how to communicate and make the designs stronger to meet the moment.”
