UPDATED IN 2020 WITH FINAL FIGURES

Sue Bartlett seemed to be involved in, and aware of, everything.

The 66-year-old software engineer was, in many ways, the quintessential Oregon transplant. She moved from the Midwest in the late 1980s and planted roots. She was a dedicated environmental advocate, an active volunteer with animal rights groups, a former board member at the community radio station KBOO, and a singer in the Portland Peace Choir. She skied, hiked and was an avid reader.

A trip to Greece in recent years introduced the Renaissance woman to a new passion: Motorized scooters. She was hooked, eventually buying two and making them her primary form of transportation. She joined the St. Johns Scooter Club, an all-comers band of sorts that goes on organized rides across town. Like everything else in her life, one brother said, Bartlett was conscientious about the new toys. She liked reducing her carbon footprint. She wore a helmet and reflective gear when she rode.

On Aug. 30, Bartlett became the 37th person to die on the city’s streets this year when police said the driver of an SUV turned left and crashed into Bartlett head-on. She later died in surgery. Months later, the crash remains under investigation, and the Multnomah County district attorney’s office declined to comment further.

Since her death, another dozen people have died in crashes across Portland. It’s the most deaths since 1996 and comes one year after Portland saw a significant decline, seemingly advancing its years-long campaign known as Vision Zero, which seeks to eliminate all fatalities and serious injuries by 2025.

The crash, which occurred roughly two miles away from Bartlett’s Cully home, shocked her family and friends.

“Sue had the reputation of being the safest person in the scooter club,” Paul Bartlett, a younger brother, said. She was “always concerned about being seen,” he said.

As of Dec. 31, 50 people have died in crashes on Portland streets this year, according to the Bureau of Transportation’s figures. Police include two suicides and a third death that occurred on private property in their tally. Neither agency includes perhaps the city’s most prominent traffic-related death, that of 23-year-old antifascist activist Sean Kealiher, who was hit and killed this fall. That case remains under investigation, and no arrests have been made. Investigators believe a driver who struck and killed a pedestrian Dec. 27 in North Portland likely “experienced a medical event,” which means it wouldn’t count in the transportation bureau’s tally.

In an interview, Bureau Director Chris Warner said 2019 “has been a terrible year,” which he described as “heartbreaking” for the city.

“Our hope is that it’s an anomaly,” he said, “But we are making a lot of investments.”

In 2020, Portland plans big safety projects on wide, dangerous streets in east Portland like Division and Stark, long designated as two of the deadliest streets within city limits. The bureau is flush with millions in revenue from development fees and the 10-cent gas tax, and officials hope projects to add center medians, reduce the number of dangerous left - turns, and add pedestrian crossing beacons and protected bike lanes will reduce the number of fatalities.

But Bartlett, and several other people who died this year, perished in what’s long been ordinary in Portland and nationwide. A “normal” intersection, this time Northeast 40th Avenue and Tillamook. An unremarkable day. A news release with scant details. An investigation. A life ended.

Warner, who also commutes on a motorized scooter, said he makes a point to ride past every crash site he can to think about what happened and what more, if anything, can be done .

He didn’t need directions to find where Bartlett was hit. Warner intentionally rides through that intersection en route to his Rose City Park neighborhood to avoid a more dangerous stretch of nearby Sandy Boulevard. “It’s just a daily reminder that our work never stops,” he said.

Two sisters died in a fatal crash on Greeley Avenue in North Portland this year.Andrew Theen/The Oregonian

RAPID REPONSE

Whenever there’s a traffic fatality, Dana Dickman and a team of a half-dozen folks at the transportation department are notified by investigators inside the police bureau’s Major Crash Team.

That police team responds to fatalities and some serious injury crashes. It’s been activated more than 50 times so far this year.

On April 25, following a string of 10 deaths in less than a month, Portland City Commissioner Chloe Eudaly directed her transportation bureau to do more.

She ordered that prominent electronic message boards be temporarily placed near every fatal crash to mark the site and capture the public’s attention, if possible. She created a new checklist to address road design flaws or engineering mistakes at a crash site soon as possible.

Dickman, the transportation bureau’s traffic safety section manager, said inside her office, the postmortem includes flagging any obvious flaws in road design that could have led to the crash or made a mistake more likely to turn deadly.

The office conducts an “initial engineering review” and looks back at five or 10 years of data to see if a trend emerges. They see if a big safety project is upcoming, and if they can do anything to speed it up.

Trends can be difficult to spot. “Even at high crash corridors,” Dickman said, using a term to describe streets like 82nd Avenue, Lombard, Foster and Division, where a preponderance of fatalities occurs, “there’s a lot of randomness as to why or where crashes are occurring.”

Sometimes the engineering review takes weeks or even months to complete. Sometimes the fatality doesn’t merit that much analysis in the first place, for instance if a lone drunken driver slams into a tree.

Jillian Detweiler, executive director of the nonprofit advocacy group The Street Trust, said the city can go further and be bolder.

“We want the city to be more aggressive in the kind of systemic change that Vision Zero is about,” she said. While Portland has reduced speed limits on neighborhood streets and on stretches of deadly roads like outer Division or Marine Drive, Detweiler would like to see more action.

Large swaths of the city need better lighting, she added, so everyone is more visible. She also wants pedestrians to get priority at more intersections. She wants to see some turn lanes – where drivers often make dangerous attempts to cross oncoming traffic – eliminated altogether.

In the case of Lori Woodard, a woman killed April 19 while crossing Northeast Broadway at Grand, the city did quickly identify one fix.

Crews installed a Leading Pedestrian Interval signal, which gives pedestrians a head start crossing the street at a traffic light before vehicles get a green light. The signal was installed within 10 days, Dickman said.

The bureau set a new policy of installing those signals “at new or upgraded traffic signals” on high crash corridors.

Since Woodard’s death, five more people died on high crash corridors while trying to cross the street. None of those deaths was related to vehicles turning at intersections with traffic signals, transportation spokesman John Brady said, so the leading pedestrian signal “didn’t come into consideration.” Portland has added 16 such signals since Woodard’s death, bringing the total number of signals citywide to 42.

One of those five pedestrians, Louanna Battams, died crossing Southeast Foster Road near 74th Avenue.

She was killed just a few hours after Portland transportation officials held a news conference mere steps away to celebrate finishing $9 million in safety projects on a 40-block stretch of Foster.

Portland City Commissioner Chloey Eudaly on June 13, 2019 at the news event celebrating the Foster Road safety project wrapping up. A pedestrian died nearby later that night.Andrew Theen/Staff

WHERE PORTLAND FALLS

Vision Zero, which started in Sweden in 1997, is built off a three-legged approach to changing the culture around transportation: Educate people about the dangers of speeding and impaired driving, enforce traffic laws and engineer streets in a different way to limit fatalities, and emphasize safety over free-flowing traffic.

In June 2015, Portland City Council pledged to eliminate all traffic fatalities and serious injuries by 2025. In December 2016, the council approved a two-year action plan that set a series of steps and priorities for getting there.

Since then, at least 131 people have died in Portland traffic crashes.

Some 765 people were also seriously injured in traffic crashes in 2017 alone, well above the city’s 10-year average. Portland doesn’t have preliminary figures for the number of people seriously injured in 2018 or 2019. Dylan Rivera, a city transportation spokesman, said Portland relies on receiving that crash data from the state and it doesn’t expect data from last year until February.

Seattle, which reported 25 traffic fatalities in 2019 so far, works with its police department and Washington’s transportation agency to compile preliminary figures for the number of residents seriously injured in traffic crashes.

According to those estimates, 160 people have been seriously injured in Seattle in 2019. Seattle’s death toll doesn’t include freeway fatalities, city spokesman Ethan Bergeson confirmed in an email, nor deaths on State Route 520, which runs from the city to Redmond, so the city’s death toll is likely higher.

Dickman notes that Seattle, at roughly 84 square miles, is significantly smaller in land mass than Portland.

Seattle also doesn’t have an east Portland, she notes, an area with wide streets that function like urban highways. In 2018, two-thirds of the people killed in Portland traffic crashes died east of 82nd Avenue.

Dickman said absent obvious road engineering flaws, the causes of deadly crashes remain stubbornly persistent. “We continue to see impairment,” she said, with causes like drunken driving or driving under the influence of drugs accounting for 54% of crashes. “We continue to see speed. We continue to see signal disregard. Things that we know are contributing to fatal crashes. We haven’t fixed them.”

The city spent $300,000 in marijuana tax revenue last year on an advertising campaign seeking to raise public awareness about the risks of speeding.

Warner, the transportation director, said he’ll continue to push out the message urging people to pay attention and slow down. “A lot of it is out of our control,” he said.

It’s not just a Portland problem, and the fatality issue is more pronounced in many cities of comparable size.

Nationally, the number of motorists killed in traffic crashes is on a slow decline, but pedestrian deaths nationally rose 3.4% last year. The number of bicyclists killed is also rising.

Transportation advocates point toward the increasing rise of SUV ownership in recent decades as a contributing factor. A Detroit Free Press/USA Today investigation this year found that SUVs are the constant factor in what amounts to a skyrocketing pedestrian death toll since 2009.

Bartlett believes the driver who struck his sister with an SUV is symptomatic of a broader issue. “They can kill if you just make the slightest mistake,” he said of the larger-profile vehicles.

More Americans have died in the 19 years since the turn of the century than in World Wars I and II combined, according to National Highway Traffic Safety Administration figures cited by The Washington Post this summer.

Advocates say the system is designed to favor automobiles and the human drivers who operate them.

Detweiler said Vision Zero, and the public attention given to it, is shining an important light on a long-standing problem to which people often didn’t pay attention. “There was a time when we weren’t tracking it,” Detweiler, a long - time TriMet official who also worked for the Portland urban renewal agency and Mayor Charlie Hales before helming the nonprofit, said of traffic fatalities. “When we were so complacent about the violence associated with driving that we weren’t even taking account of the death toll. Like many things, pulling back the curtain on what’s really happening is painful.”

While Portland’s death toll is the highest in more than two decades, the likelihood of dying on streets here is significantly lower than in many cities of similar size.

According to figures reported to the federal government in 2017, the fatality rate per 100,000 people in Portland was 7.26. That amounts to half the rates of similarly sized cities like Memphis or Oklahoma City. But Portland has twice the fatality rate of Boston and Las Vegas.

Portland has a higher pedestrian and total traffic fatality rate than Denver and Seattle, according to the most recent data available.

A crash on Southeast Division Street, where no one died but there were serious injuries in late 2019.

SPEED TRAPS

When it comes to Vision Zero’s three e’s -- education, enforcement and engineering -- the enforcement portion is often pointed to as lacking.

“Speeding is pretty socially acceptable,” Dickman said, “and there’s not a recognition of the risk that you’re putting other people in.”

The police bureau today has 18 motorcycle officers and one officer in a standard sedan assigned to the traffic division. In 2010, the city had 40 officers assigned to that division.

According to city transportation records, some 26 people died that year, the second-lowest total since 1997.

The short-handed police force is still out there writing tickets. Cops issued 21,499 citations for traffic related offenses from January through October this year. The top violation, 30% of stops, was for speeding.

With fewer cops, Portland is trying to turn to fixed radar and red-light cameras to pick up the slack.

Portland obtained state authority to install speed cameras on 10 dangerous corridors. It currently has cameras on 122nd Avenue, Division, Beaverton-Hillsdale Highway and Marine Drive.

But it hasn’t yet expanded to the remaining roads. “We need a new contract for a camera operator,” Rivera said in an email, adding that the city posted a contract solicitation last week. He added that the police bureau, which is required by state law to issue traffic citations, doesn’t have the staffing to handle additional cameras.

A police spokesman said officers must process and mail citations to violators caught on camera within 10 days. As of December, it had issued more than 43,300 tickets through its fixed speed camera and red-light citation program and more than 23,000 from pictures snapped by its mobile speed van.

Eudaly has said she was interested in trying to change state law to allow non-officers to process the tickets or find ways to contract the work to other law enforcement agencies.

Portland believes the speed cameras work. On Division, fatalities stopped for a year - and - a - half after cameras went in, Dickman said.

Elena Davkina, 48, died on Division this August.

The driver of the other car involved, Zodiac Clark, was charged with driving under the influence, reckless driving and manslaughter. He is scheduled to appear in court next month.

In an interview in October, Eudaly said she wanted to expand the speed radar camera network and that she was frustrated with how long it takes to get cameras installed, hire a contractor and process the tickets.

“While I’m not a fan of punishment, I’m even less of a fan of people dying on our streets.

These cameras are the least biased, safest and possibly most effective tools we have in changing the behavior,” she said.

An electronic message near the Oregon Convention Center showing the most recent traffic fatality in what has been the deadliest year since 1997.

ALWAYS AWARE

Just as the city didn’t celebrate 2018 when it saw traffic fatalities dip, it isn’t wavering on Vision Zero.

Dickman said it’s a huge task to shift the public culture. “We are in it for the long game, but every single crash is deeply troubling,” she said.

Humans are flawed. People make mistakes. City officials hope they can reduce the risk of fatalities by changing how roads look and feel. Maybe that mistake will result in a serious injury rather than a death.

Paul Bartlett said when he thinks back on his sister’s death, he doesn’t linger on the driver. To him it’s more systemic.

“When people are in vehicles, they have to be aware that there are vulnerable people out there,” he said.

Like everything else in her life, he said, his sister was present and visible at the end. She was always aware. “There was absolutely nothing she could do,” he said.

Dave Cansler contributed to this report

-- Andrew Theen; atheen@oregonian.com; 503-294-4026; @andrewtheen