Today Portlanders will vote on whether to renew a 10 cents per gallon gas tax to fund the Portland Bureau of Transportation’s “Fixing Our Streets” program. The gas tax was introduced in 2016, renewed in 2020 and has generated approximately $74.5 million in the past four years to repave streets, fix potholes and install infrastructure to improve pedestrian and cyclist safety. We analyzed 24 projects funded by the gas tax to evaluate their impact on improving public safety by reducing vehicle crashes and whether they addressed inequities in Portland’s transportation system by focusing on marginalized or underrepresented communities as defined within the Portland Bureau of Transportation’s Equity Matrix.

We found that of the 24 projects we analyzed, only 8 had a meaningful impact on reducing vehicle crashes and 13 were in neighborhoods that should be prioritized for racial and economic equity. Learn how we evaluated each project’s impact on public safety and its surrounding neighborhood.

The 24 projects we analyzed are the only completed projects with clear connections to bicycle or pedestrian safety that were funded by the 2020 renewal of the gas tax. An additional 22 safety-related projects are listed as “slated” or “in design” with no information regarding whether these projects are being prioritized or when they will be completed.

18 of the projects we analyzed are Neighborhood Greenway retrofits that do not have a precise start or end date, only a completion year, which unfortunately limits the precision of our assessment of safety. In this case we used July 1st, the mid-point in the calendar year, as the project completion date or December 31st if the project construction year spanned two years e.g. 2022-2023.

Project

Safety

Equity

1

Southwest in Motion Bike Lanes

2

Southwest Idaho Drive

3

Southwest 60th Greenway

4

Southwest 52nd Greenway

5

Southeast Umatilla Greenway

6

Southeast Bush Greenway

7

Southeast Ankeny Greenway

8

Southeast 87th Greenway

9

Southeast 4M Greenway

10

Southeast 162nd Avenue

11

Northwest Pettygrove Avenue

12

Northeast Tillamook Greenway

13

Northeast Hancock Greenway

14

Northeast Hancock Connection

15

Northeast Everett Greenway

16

Northeast Davis Greenway

17

Northeast 72nd Greenway

18

Northeast 38th Greenway

19

Northeast 148th Avenue

20

North Wabash Avenue

21

North Michigan Greenway

22

North Kilpatrick Greenway

23

North Denver Avenue

24

North Bryant Greenway

Public Safety

To determine a project’s impact on public safety, we compared the number of crashes within an equal amount of time before and after the project was completed. This range is the time between when the project was completed and the date of the most recently available crash data, which is April 2024.

If the number of crashes after the project was completed decreased by at least 25%, we determined that the project improved public safety, however if there were fewer than 2 crashes in the months before and after the project was completed, we believe that it not possible to assess the project’s impact on improving safety due to either low traffic volume or an inherently safe environment.

Racial and Economic Equity

To determine if the project is in an equity priority neighborhood, we compared the neighborhood’s median income and racial composition to the rest of the city. The median income in Portland is $83,432. If the neighborhood’s median income is equal to or less than 80% of the Portland median income ($66,745), we believe it should be prioritized for economic equity.

The racial composition of Portland is 67.4% White, 12.3% Latin American, 7.5% Asian, 5.8% Mixed Race, 5.3% Black, 0.6% Native American, 0.6% Pacific Islander and 0.4% Other. This translates to 32.6% of Portland residents being People of Color. If the racial composition of a neighborhood is at least 120% of the citywide percentage of People of Color (39.12%), we believe it should be prioritized for racial equity.

Any projects that are within the neighborhood school zoning boundaries for a Title I Elementary School were also identified as being in an equity priority neighborhood. Title I is a federally funded program that helps students in poverty meet state academic content and performance standards.

The project analyzer below shows where each project is in Portland, highlighted by a solid blue rectangle on the map. The surrounding, transparent areas are the U.S Census Bureau tracts that the project boundaries intersect. We used these census tracts to calculate the neighborhood’s socioeconomic characteristics and determine if the project is in an equity priority neighborhood.

Despite the fact that only about a third of projects funded by the gas tax over the past four years improved public safety and only half are in equity priority neighborhoods, 33% and 54% respectively, we believe Portlander’s should still vote to renew the gas tax on May 21st as it is critically important to fund transportation projects that support sustainable modes of transportation such as walking, biking, scooting and taking public transit.

However, the Portland Bureau of Transportation should take a hard look at where it is spending its limited resources and funding, especially on “Fixing our Streets” projects that are funded by the gas tax to ensure every project is improving public safety and is an equity priority neighborhood.

As the negative effects of climate change continue to accelerate, it is imperative that we fund and support transportation projects that move people out of cars and onto sustainable modes of transportation. However, this requires the public’s trust and confidence that our transportation agencies will make good use of the funding we provide them. The most effective way our transportation agencies can earn that trust is to regularly share the impact of their work on public safety and equity just as we have done in this analysis.

The crash data used in the analysis is from the Portland police department’s dispatched calls for service dataset which includes 911 reports of traffic crashes from January 2012 through, at the time of this writing, April 2024. The neighborhood characteristics for each project were calculated using data from the U.S. Census (ACS) 5-Year Estimates 2009-2023.

We would like to Roger Geller, Bicycle Coordinator at the Portland Bureau of Transportation for providing us with this spreadsheet of completed bicycle safety improvement projects which helped inform our analysis and special thanks to Charlie Blackmar, Kylie and Walt Della, Alyssa Essman, Deanna Oothoudt and Ben Waterhouse for helping us photograph the work the Portland Bureau of Transportation did at each location.