The City of Portland is cautiously optimistic about fatal traffic crash trends as the transportation bureau reports a “dramatic drop in deaths” over the past two years. As of Monday (12/22), PBOT has recorded 39 traffic deaths, a 32% drop compared with a year ago and a 39% decline compared with the same period in 2023.
Today the Portland Bureau of Transportation said the trend is “encouraging” and that it might have something to do with a decline in excessive speeding — a behavior that spiked during the pandemic.
PBOT is also encouraged because their phalanx of automated enforcement cameras that had been offline since August are coming back. By tomorrow (12/23), 22 of the 39 (or so) cameras in the network are once again enforcing either speed and/or red signal violations. You might recall that back in August PBOT announced they would switch vendors and replace all of their existing cameras with new, more effective models. That switch is complete and now it’s just a matter of getting all the new cameras up and running…