If you have walked anywhere in Portland you know how difficult and dangerous it can be to cross when cars are parked close to the intersection.
What’s wrong with this image?
You can’t see the pedestrians attempting to cross the street.
What?
If you have walked anywhere in Portland you know how difficult and dangerous it can be to cross when cars are parked close to the intersection. Portland’s problem is that most crashes in the city happen at intersections. Safety at intersections is even worse here because the city allows vehicles to park right up to the crosswalk without any setback. This creates a situation for people on foot, bike or car to not be able to see each other and creates dangerous, but preventable, situations.
Why?
While Oregon Law requires a 20ft setback at crosswalks, marked or unmarked, Portland has control over parking regulations on city roads and allows cars to park up to the edge of crosswalks. This is an unsafe and outdated practice that needs to be changed.
What’s the solution?
Daylighting – What’s daylighting? Simply, it’s improving visibility at an intersection usually by creating no-parking setbacks near an intersection. Oregon law specifies parking setbacks of 20ft. Required sight distances can also depend on design speed.
How can we make this happen?
Oregon Walks is launching our “#ClearTheCorners” initiative. Building off our successful #WorkZoneWTF campaign that brought a citywide policy change around sidewalk closures we are going to build awareness and educate how dangerous visibility at intersections can be and advocate for change. While PedPDX calls for vision clearance at uncontrolled intersections we are calling on an expansion of vision clearance at all intersections.
What can you do?
There are a few ways you can help.
In a dense city such as ours, it should be a 20-foot from intersections law. We cannot use the excuse of needing more parking spaces that will result in unsafe walking (and driving) situations. This is a chronic situation and somehow it should be instituted.
Intersection “daylighting” is standard practice in the vast majority of US cities….in those cities it doesn’t even need a name, because it’s simply applying the law. It is a true shame and embarrassment for Portland that city officials have actively resisted applying the ACTUAL LAW for decades. This creates horribly dangerous situations at thousands of interactions, many of which are too narrow to allow two cars to pass because there are parked cars right ip to the stop sign.
Fixing 350 more intersections is nice,
but it’s just a tiny drop in the bucket. We need daylighting on ALL Portland intersections within one year!