Treacherous walking in this town typically brings to mind desolate, speed-fueled boulevards on the city’s east end. Dangerous biking facilities have lately brought heat to SE Powell. But today, everyone’s mad about the Burnside Bridge.
A proposal to hold a “memorial walk, ride, and protest” is going around active transportation circles following a crash this weekend where a driver ran up on the bridge’s sidewalk—apparently after a “medical episode”—striking two pedestrians and killing one of them. George Ben Carlson, 36, died shortly after the crash. A 59-year-old Beaverton resident named Douglas Walker was the driver.
The tragedy is bringing out old grievances that Multnomah County hasn’t done more to separate pedestrians and cyclists from motorists on the Burnside. It’s the only one of the (walkable or bikeable) downtown bridges that doesn’t separate cyclists and cars by at least a curb, though clearly that’s not always enough.
The protest being considered today at 5 pm has shades of a “slow down” held last month after a cyclist was struck by a truck at SE Powell and 26th and lost a leg. Portland activist Dan Kaufman organize both events, but says it remains to be seen whether this evening’s protest will draw enough people to effectively slowdown traffic on the Burnside (it doesn’t help that it’s scheduled at the same time as an organized demonstration against dangerous conditions on SW Barbur). The group BikeLoudPDX has signed on to the Burnside demonstration.
“Speeds are too fast,” says Kaufman. “And how do you hit two people in broad daylight and just get to go home?”
The demonstration marks a continued bout of stepped-up activism over Portland’s biking and walking infrastructure. And it comes as Portland City Council prepares to formally enshrine Vision Zero, the notion that preventing traffic deaths must be the primary concern for transportation planning.
The Portland Bureau of Transportation, as part of a recent $150,000 study, already pledged to “move toward zero traffic-related fatalities and serious injuries in the next 10 years.” On Wednesday, city council will consider whether to formally adopt that ethos (which it will) and spend another $150,000 in state grant money to study how to make that work. This city loves $150,000 studies.
PBOT’s fond of pointing out Portland’s actually fairly safe, traffic-wise, for a bigger city. But according to CDC numbers the bureau uses (from 2009 data), we’re doing worse than dense cities like Chicago, Washington, and New York in terms of traffic deaths per capita. Portland sees an average of 37 traffic-related deaths a year—12 of those pedestrians, two of them cyclists.
Portland’s plan for Vision Zero isn’t without its critics, but it’s widely seen by walk/bike advocates as heartening progress. According to PBOT the forthcoming study will “be developed with a broad coalition of partners and include education, enforcement, and engineering strategies.”
Seems odd that no one pays much attention to the alarming number of people drowning on local rivers in the summer, as those deaths eclipse yearly pedestrian/bike deaths in the span of a month.
BTW, that’s not to say more attention shouldn’t be paid to bike/ped safety. It should. It’s just odd that there seems to be a threshold for the number of drownings that we’re willing to endure that doesn’t seem to apply to bike/peds.
Drownings are generally not homicides.
When someone has a heart attack at the wheel of a car, that’s not homicide either. Just saying maybe we should wait until all the facts come out before jumping to conclusions.
So a guy has a medical emergency, car jumps the curb and hits someone– and that’s a homicide? Sounds an awful lot like an accident to me.
Rolling my eyes so very hard at you SJW types…
I don’t know. The rapid move to politicize this man’s death seems a little… tasteless to me. But if this is true, then I’m not sure what to feel anymore. https://twitter.com/RachaelKGW/status/6104…
Certainly, I’d be happy to see cops regularly camped out all along Powell and the bridges ticketing distracted drivers.
Why does “medical emergency” mean heart attack? Because we live in a car-centric culture and we empathize with the driver and how it must have been something that extreme, I think. His family says he choked on some soda. Not the same as a heart attack; drinking a soda while going over a bridge is something he chose to do.
I can’t believe that you can hit two people like that and just get to drive yourself home.
The reports I have heard are that he got distracted by the soda he was consuming not that he had a heart attack.
Either way: it’s an accident, and accidents tend to happen. Just because one involved party happened to fit your agenda doesn’t mean the man should be automatically be lynched in the town square.
If you’d just admit that the “real” crime, to you, is driving itself– then I’d feel like you bleating little ninnies would be at least be a little closer to honesty. Until then, I’ll keep chuckling at your indignant outrage, where every single moment of our collective existence serves to confirm your biases. It’s adorable.
If the protesters could get away with a lynching…..