Portland’s streets are killing fields.

In this city, you are twice as likely to die in traffic than to be murdered. Last week, a vehicle killed a Portlander for the 34th time in 2019. Police have recorded 15 homicides this year. Traffic is the second-most common cause of violent death in Portland. It was supposed to change.

In 2015, the Portland City Council approved a policy called “Vision Zero”—an ambitious traffic safety plan aimed at eliminating deaths in the streets by 2025. Since then, the city has spent more than $100 million on new crosswalks, flashing beacons and speed cameras.

The year the city started working on Vision Zero, 37 people died in traffic. This year, we’re on pace to eclipse that number by the end of summer. Despite the spending and what officials describe as an aggressive campaign, the numbers refuse to budge.

“It’s not just frustrating,” says City Commissioner Chloe Eudaly, who oversees transportation. “It’s deeply troubling. I’ve been asking myself, ‘What are we doing wrong, and what can we do faster?’”

Some of the deaths are simply an unhappy byproduct of a growing city, one where more people are jammed into the same space. Others can be traced to the difficulty of persuading people to stop driving—or at least to drive slowly and sober.

Yet critics of City Hall say the feebleness of Vision Zero is also a failure of political will. The causes of Portland’s crashes are known: They are speed, darkness, drugs and alcohol. Yet many advocates say the city has moved too slowly to reduce speed limits, hasn’t installed enough lights, and refuses to increase DUII patrols.

“The way that they’re operating, in the same manner that they’ve been operating, they’re going to get the same results,” says Anjeanette Brown, who lives on Southeast 159th Avenue and has been asking transportation officials for more streetlights.

City officials say slowing the rate of death is like turning a tractor-trailer on Burnside: It can’t be done quickly.

“It’s awful. Every death is awful,” says Dana Dickman, traffic safety section manager for the Portland Bureau of Transportation. “But it’s not unexpected, given the level of change we need to make. There’s massive cultural change that still needs to happen.”

Eudaly says City Hall must do more.

“We have so many more cars on the road,” she says. “We have a lot of frustration born out of heavy congestion. We have a lack of enforcement which makes people think they can take more risks on the road. We can’t engineer our way out of reckless behavior and human error. We need to do more, and we need to do it faster—and we desperately need help from other bureaus.”

The city’s need is measured in pain—hospital visits, shattered bones, and bereaved mothers. The most ghastly deaths often make headlines and lead the local news broadcasts for a few days. But the lived reality of traffic violence lingers with the people who have endured it. Their lives have been upended by cars. And they think the city should do more.

“The people making the laws at the state level or even the City Council members and the mayor—they’re not the ones actually seeing the results,” says Kristi Finney-Dunn, who has been advocating for slower traffic since her son was killed by a car on Southeast Division Street eight years ago. “They’re not actually feeling the feels from people.”

In the following pages, you’ll meet seven people who have felt the weight of a car crash. Their stories illustrate the urgency of fixing the streets now.

—Hannah Chinn and Aaron Mesh