Safety Summit II


Hold the date:

Dear Summit invitee

You are receiving this email due to your leadership in improving transportation safety in the Portland region. Please plan to save the date for the second Annual Transportation Safety Summit, and help us carry out a review of recent trends, accomplishments, and future projects. Join attendees for the Summit including –

•Transportation City Commissioner Sam Adams
•Portland Police Traffic Division’s Lt Mark Kruger
•Multnomah County Circuit Court Presiding Judge The Honorable Steve Todd
•Trauma Nurses Talk Tough’s Coordinator Joanne Fairchild
•Alliance for Community Traffic Safety Oregon’s Ruth Harshfield
•African-American Health Coalition’s Program Supervisor Keith Dempsey
•Attorney At Law Mark J. Ginsberg

2nd Annual Transportation Safety Summit
Tuesday, June 26th 2007
1:00 to 4:00 p.m.
The Portland Building, 1120 SW Fifth Avenue, 2nd Floor Auditorium

What is the Transportation Safety Summit?

Transportation is a major public safety, health, and livability concern among Portland residents. Commissioner Sam Adams will join dozens of transportation officials, pedestrian and bicycle advocates, community leaders, enforcement officers, school officials, injury prevention experts, neighborhood coalitions, business associations and other elected officials for a facilitated discussion about the state of Portland’s transportation safety.

The Traffic Safety Summit is a fantastic opportunity for participants to learn more about Portland’s efforts to improve traffic safety, and to generate ideas and provide input into traffic safety issues and solutions. The Summit will raise awareness of Portland’s transportation safety issues; generate interest and energy in existing efforts to improve traffic safety; and develop insight into potential solutions that can help improve traffic safety conditions for all modes of transportation.

Portland has seen some encouraging trends in the past ten years regarding a reduction in pedestrian, bicyclist, and motorist crash fatalities and injury rates, as the charts below show. Your attendance at the summit will help us to ensure these encouraging trends continue, and crash rates continue to fall.

Please plan on saving this date – Tuesday June 26th from 1:00 to 4:00 p.m. – in order to attend this event at the Portland Building downtown. More information on the Summit, including how to officially register your place, will follow.

Many thanks,
Kirsty Hall, Summit Organizer


4 responses to “Safety Summit II”

  1. The key safety issue for Portland is reducing the speed of traffic. Neighborhood speeds should be 15 mph but I believe setting that as the speed limit requires changes to state law. Once the speed limits are reduced the streets can be reengineered to get actual speeds down to the limit. But the traffic engineers will not engineer a street for 15 mph that has a 25 mph limit.

  2. JK –

    Where would you locate a “free-flowing freeway” to alleviate traffic on say NE Fremont adjacent to the Rose City Park and Beaumont neighborhoods? Or the purely residential neighborhood street of SE 51st near Hawthorne?

    What would those free-flowing freeways do to the quality of the neighborhood?

    What would the Mt. Hood Freeway have done for the safety and health of people living on neighborhood streets along SE Division St.?

    I’m not opposed to freeways per-se, I think they offer a number of economic and travel benefits… but there are trade-offs and a big trade-off is that freeways are devastating to the quality of immediately-adjacent neighborhoods.

    Freeways make great sense in connecting cities and regions, but far less sense for providing for local travel.

    – Bob R.

    [Corrected text above to clarify Rose City Park / Beaumont neighborhoods and not the park itself]

  3. “The real safety measure would be to get traffic off of neighborhood streets by attracting it to free-flowing freeways.”

    Perhaps, but only if the cars materialized and vaporized on the on- and off-ramps, respectively. Failing that, every car on a freeway still has to go on “neighborhood streets” (in the loosely-defined sense we’re using here) to get to/from the freeways.

    The freeways are largely substitutions for arterials, not neighborhood streets, and the cars using them still have to access them the same way (in fact, in the case of freeways, people often drive more on residential streets as they go out of their way to access the (theoretically) high-speed thoroughfare–much more residential street use than accessing the nearest arterial or through street).

  4. Freeways are a great way to reduce traffic on some streets. One place that immediately comes to mind is SW Boones Ferry Rd along I-5, where traffic on I-5 diverts many drivers (myself included some nights) to Boones Ferry.

    It’s a 35 mph road with a lot of driveways, it’s not a good freeway supplement. The problem is, it’s the only alternate route, and it saves time more than taking I-5, which should be faster.

    It’s not always the solution, but an extra lane on I-5 southbound could be added with minimal effects on local properties between SR 217 and I-205. It would allow traffic from 217 to 205 to move much smoother, and allow vehicles moving on I-5 to be able to keep going south without getting too clogged up.

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