Portland Metropolis Councilor Tiffany Koyama Lane is about to take her dedication to visitors security to the following degree. In what she’s calling “Imaginative and prescient Zero Week,” the councilor will preside over a decision subsequent Wednesday (September seventeenth) that may reaffirm town’s formidable proclamation issued one decade in the past.
Impressed partially by her connection to Jeanie Diaz, a southeast Portland librarian who was killed by a reckless driver in 2023, Councilor Koyama Lane elevated Imaginative and prescient Zero throughout the metropolis’s most up-to-date finances cycle. Whereas her decision doesn’t obligate any funding for capital initiatives or applications, it might make vital administrative adjustments that might enhance political urgency across the challenge.
And Imaginative and prescient Zero wants all the assistance it could get. When the proclamation handed in 2015, advocates needed town to incorporate a agency date to succeed in zero deaths. That date? 2025. At this time we’ve nonetheless obtained approach too many individuals killed whereas utilizing Portland roads. And we’re nonetheless looking for solutions as evidenced by a newly shaped Metropolis Membership analysis undertaking that may research Imaginative and prescient Zero for the following 12 months.
If handed, the decision would do two fundamental issues. It transfer the lead Imaginative and prescient Zero staffer from the Portland Bureau of Transportation into the Deputy Metropolis Administrator’s workplace. As we’ve seen with a plan hatched by an workplace overseen by Mayor Keith Wilson — and pushed for by Metropolis Administrator Mike Jordan — that will have eliminated visitors diverters in northwest, there’s a transparent want for a stronger PBOT presence within the DCA’s workplace.
The decision would additionally set up a brand new Imaginative and prescient Zero Activity Pressure, “targeted on figuring out actions to fulfill the Metropolis’s targets in eliminating visitors deaths.” PBOT used to have a Imaginative and prescient Zero Activity Pressure however they disbanded it in 2021. Additionally not like the earlier process pressure, this new one won’t embrace reps from advocacy teams or particular person highway security activists. As a substitute, it is going to be comprised solely of metropolis employees and can join with exterior teams or subject-matter specialists solely “the place applicable.”
Councilor Koyama Lane launched a video on social media final week encouraging Portlanders to testify on the decision and to put on orange once they present up. She’s additionally selling three occasions for Imaginative and prescient Zero Week: on Wednesday there’s a trip to Metropolis Corridor and a parade deliberate earlier than the council assembly, on Thursday Portland will host the Age-Pleasant Oregon summit, and Friday is the annual PARK(ing) Day the place Koyama Lane says she is “taking to the streets” to transform a automobile parking spot on SE Stark and thirtieth right into a group house with highway safety-related actions.
I additionally hear Koyama Lane would love to fulfill extra bicycle riders and lovers of secure streets at her Constituent Espresso occasion this Saturday (9/13) from 9:00 to 10:30 am on the PDX Saints Love Day Shelter (247 SE 82nd Ave).
