Five cops with ticket books might help


I see that Portland is breaking records for traffic fatalities. The bureaucratic solutions will be to block off more streets and take away more lanes from motorized vehicles. None of which will make a difference in the death toll.

The speed bumps on the side streets have been good. But I don't think that's where the people are dying.

One cause of the carnage is no secret. It's the atmosphere of lawlessness that currently exists in the city. There is no enforcement of traffic laws by the police; that's not an exaggeration, there is none. Zero. That includes by state troopers on the Portland freeways. They simply don't exist. 

And we haven't had a functional DMV in a year and a half, and so the concepts of licenses and registration are meaningless.

But hey, cars are bad, that's the only mantra Portland City Hall knows. So if you drive, expect more persecution. People with a job, a family, and a real life are encouraged to stick a feather you-know-where and fly to wherever they're going.

Comments

  1. Neighborhood association spike strips deployed at 10-15+mph over?

    IDK on cellphone use and the more reckless endangerment distractions, unpredictable patterns on outer-ring unlimited access wide roads with people being insane and feral & lawless over the last 2 years?

    I can't predict the choke-points & free flow times like I used to be able to when all the lemming run would start toward downtown for all the paper pushers/mouse-ticklers (are you a maker, fixer or a mouse tickler?) / BS job havers downtown.

    Total miles traveled is way down nation wide (25%), but wrecks are up ~30+%, so it's not just wild west lawless portland, but it's really scary out there...
    .
    ..I only go out certain times really cautiously, tho even I doubt my abilities as a driver and stare at whole chunks of the city while driving slowly if a bit distractedly myself that I barely recognize with the luxury bunker monstrosity lofts, tent cities and desctruction of the urban tree canopy and greenspace being rampant!

    I'm more fearful, but my reflexes/coordination also isn't what it was when I was 16-25, either.

    Vision is still pretty good, but new cars and bro-dozer SUVs especially have crazy bright blue horrible HID lights that are really high up and shine right in your eyes....
    I don't remember it being so bad when cars had standard incandescent sealed beam incandescent & halogen lamps with lots of late 70s-80s gas crisis era econo-boxed growing up here...

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  2. I guess to sum it up, short of neighborhood association strips and colorado-style snow-plow compatible triple-dips to really dope-slap the bro-dozer mobile tank & humvee/SUV driver armies of 1 asshole speeding without writing tickets and harrassing innocent people, don't expect much of use anytime soon from the city, especially with inclement weather and holi-daze consumption (alcohol or shopping) & out-of-towner tourists & visitors!

    Be safe & attentive out there.

    But cars always were risky, I remember reading Gertrude Stein's description of how after cars became commonplace and few knew what to be afraid of or the limitations of the machine or crowds of car traffic that it was a new thing that people would run out on an impulse and be maimed or killed in a 'car involved incident' (officer involved shooting?) that how that became normalized and much more common after being largely unheard of before within her lifetime in (I think she was talking about living in Paris at that time??)

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