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Who can blame people for wanting to satisfy up with buddies, exhibit their cool vehicles,
create content material for social media, and blow off some steam?
Avenue racing, drifting and “takeovers” are revving up for summer time. Final Sunday night time a whole bunch of individuals and vehicles took over sections of streets all through town to point out off their drifting and avenue racing expertise.
In line with the Portland Police Bureau, teams took over seven totally different places between 8:00 pm Sunday night time and 1:00 am Monday morning. They should have recognized it was coming as a result of they carried out an enforcement mission that resulted in seven arrests, seven towed automobiles and the restoration of a gun.
The biggest takeover was on NE thirteenth and Multnomah the place PPB says over 200 individuals took half.
We’ve seen this film earlier than.
Final summer time the difficulty grew to become so distinguished Portland Metropolis Council thought of a crackdown. And some months earlier than that I shared issues about how an aggressive police response may trigger extra hurt than good. Thankfully that doesn’t seem to have occurred but and (to this point) police have been in a position to handle the difficulty with none escalations or tragic penalties.
Whereas police play whack-a-mole and barely make a dent in the issue (whereas creating much more pleasure and drama for the road racers, one thing that doubtless makes it extra enticing to a few of them), the takeovers persist. If Sunday night time’s motion is any indication, their recognition may even be on the rise.
And who can blame these people for wanting to satisfy up with buddies, exhibit their vehicles, create content material for social media accounts, and blow off some steam? In some ways they’re much like the large group bike rides that occur each day as a part of Pedalpalooza. It’s all a part of the same human want for cultural expression, adrenalin, social bonding, and so forth.
However these avenue takeovers are very totally different in essential methods. They’ve led to deadly crashes many instances, they pump poisonous emissions into our air and waterways, they usually put harmless individuals in danger. We have to do extra to stop them. Even when we predict these occasions are confined to keen individuals, we should contemplate spillover results. Individuals don’t flip off this sort of reckless driving once they depart a big gathering. I’ve seen burnouts and reckless dashing occur many instances and everyone knows harmful driving habits is rampant in Portland immediately.
Possibly one reply is to deploy easy visitors calming instruments.
The Portland Bureau of Transportation has already put in a lot of these little, rubber, yellow-and-black striped curbs everywhere in the metropolis. It’s a part of a “left-turn calming” effort to enhance security and forestall accidents and deaths to different highway customers. One fastidiously positioned, mountable curb may successfully stop somebody from doing burnouts and drifting round an intersection. I’m certain engineers and planners may discover different intelligent methods to do that if a curb isn’t possible.
Stopping actions via infrastructure design is previous hat for presidency companies. Together with non-public property house owners, they’ve develop into artistic and environment friendly at putting in hostile infrastructure on sidewalks as a way to stop individuals from erecting tents and sleeping within the public right-of-way. They’ve additionally determined there are locations the place skateboarding shouldn’t be allowed they usually’ve put in tiny bumps on curbs and benches to stop “grinding” and different methods.
We must always apply the same strategy to intersections.
Well positioned bits of laborious infrastructure may safely and successfully stop a variety of these harmful actions whereas concurrently enhancing visitors security general. It may be a chance for PBOT and the Portland Police Bureau to collaborate on a mission that doesn’t deal with enforcement, but permits each companies to handle an issue collectively.
We’d like extra of that from our metropolis.
Jonathan Maus is BikePortland’s editor, writer and founder. Contact him at @jonathan_maus on Twitter, through e mail at maus.jonathan@gmail.com, or telephone/textual content at 503-706-8804. Additionally, when you learn and recognize this web site, please develop into a supporter.
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