PORTLAND, Ore. — This year's Christmas holiday was a deadly one on Portland roadways. Three people lost their lives in separate crashes on Christmas Day, bringing the city's total traffic fatality count for the year to 71, a grim milestone that makes 2023 the deadliest traffic year in decades.
"We are very unfortunately at 65 deaths in 2023, that is the highest we have had in any single calendar year in the last three decades," said Portland Bureau of Transportation (PBOT) spokesperson Hannah Schafer said Tuesday afternoon.
The reason PBOT's number (65) is lower than the number reported by KGW and the Portland Police Bureau (71) is because PBOT and ODOT follow guidelines set by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which excludes crash data for people who die more than 30 days after a crash, by suicide or homicide, from a prior medical event, in a parking lot or by a non-motor vehicle (crashes involving trains, MAX, Portland Streetcar, for example).
Another person died in a crash on Christmas Eve, and a pedestrian was killed in a hit-and-run incident Tuesday evening, raising the count to 72 for the year and bringing the city to a total of five traffic deaths in three days. Two of the five incidents occurred along 122nd Avenue in east Portland, which is considered to be one of the most dangerous corridors in the city.
PBOT rolled out "Vision Zero" in 2017, a program aimed at limiting traffic deaths in Portland. But the number of fatalities has only grown since then, up from 35 in 2018 to more than 60 in each of the past three years.
The bureau has identified many dangerous intersections in the city, but officials have said funding is often an issue when it comes to drastically changing roads, and there are additional factors that have made driving on Portland roads more dangerous.
"We continue to see speeding and impairment as the two main reasons for fatalities on our streets," Schafer said.
Speed was a factor in all three of the Christmas Day fatal accidents, according to the Portland Police Bureau.
"We are very focused and will continue to stay focused on making the investments we know we need to make on changing the design of our streets to make them more conducive to people, but it is a full scale community effort and requires everyone to take a role," Schafer said.
PDOT did recently receive a $20 million grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation to make improvements along 122nd Avenue, and those efforts are expected to begin in the near future.