As Kostelec points out, according to ODOT’s own data for the most recent five-year period, none of the crashes in the project area have been fatal, or even serious. Nearly all of the crashes are non-injury fender benders.

Kostelec digs deeper: Despite ODOT’s claims that peak hour traffic is slowed by these fender-benders, ODOT’s data shows that most crashes actually happen during non-peak hours.

“. . . when you look at when crashes are occurring, for the most part, they’re occurring mid-day, not at the time of day that the traffic models and things are trying to address.”

Because most of the crashes happen when the freeway is not jammed, widening the freeway is unlikely to do anything to reduce the number of crashes. If anything, as Kostelec argues, faster traffic is likely to increase the severity of the crashes that do occur.

The key takeaway here is that we ought to care about lives lost and injuries sustained, not the number of crashes. As a result, the I-5 Rose Quarter project isn’t about safety, it’s really about motorist convenience. Kostelec:

“What are we trying to do here? We’re trying to prevent a bunch of no-injury crashes. Now nobody wants to be in a fender bender. I have a minor ding. But that’s what I call a motorist’s inconvenience crash . . . and we’re proposing to put $500 million into this . . . good for you Oregon DOT. You’ve done a hell of a job with safety . . .

(Note: $450 million to $500 million was the range of ODOT estimates of project costs when Kostelec gave his talk in March 2019. To almost no one’s surprise that has gone up, and ODOT now estimates the project could cost between $700 and $800 million. Buildable freeway covers, which some community leaders say are essential to the project, could cost another $200 to $400 million.)

Designing our roads—and indeed, re-engineering our entire urban environment—for the speed and convenience of drivers are what has produced our current lethal transportation system. It’s shocking and perverse that highway engineers at the Oregon Department of Transportation can use the mantle of “safety” to peddle a an $800 million project that addresses no real safety need, at the same time it routinely pleads poverty when asked to fix the many multi-lane arterial streets in the Portland area that routinely kill and maim our citizens.

Top image via the Oregon Department of Transportation.