Opinion: Why SW Portland Has So Few Crosswalks
- Hillsdale News
- 5 days ago
- 2 min read
[December 17, 2025]
Submitted by Don Baack, PE Civil (retired), Founder of SWTrails PDX
In 2019, a couple dozen SW residents participated in a months-long process to identify a large number of low-cost street improvements. Improving bicycle and pedestrian safety was the objective.
Despite that early involvement in the process, this group of stakeholders was not involved in selecting the crosswalks later identified by PBOT for safety improvements.
One of the crosswalks rated as important by PBOT was the marked crossing at Capitol Hwy/Vermont/SW 25th. This crossing serves many families seeking to attend religious services on Vermont, use the facilities of the Jewish Community Center, and as a nice walk to Robert Gray Middle School for students living south of Vermont, especially at Stephens Creek Crossing, a 122-home public housing complex.
About 2010, I was told planning for this safer crossing was underway. Nothing happened. As it turns out, that crossing has been on the short list of PBOT projects in SW Portland for years. The holdup: PBOT has a requirement that at least 20 people cross the street at the proposed crosswalk location each hour. To see if that’s the case, PBOT staffers come out and spend 15 minutes counting the people crossing and multiply the count by four to get the hourly total.
After I recently made inquiries about the count, a helpful PBOT staff person offered to do the count when SWTrails scheduled a walk across Capitol Hwy at this location.
On hearing of the plan, a traffic engineer immediately issued a stop-count order saying the count had to be at a random time, not a scheduled walk.
In my opinion, based on 35 years of walking around SW Portland, we have few locations that will meet the 20-pedestrian-crossings-per-hour threshold. In effect, the rule says there will not be any more crosswalks in SW Portland.
The traffic engineer explained that the rule comes from an agreement of other traffic engineers who said 20 crossers per hour was a reasonable standard and put the rule in the traffic engineering “bible.” I will bet not one of the rule makers has any experience with trails like our 50-mile urban trail network—it is the only one in the world to my knowledge.
We need marked crosswalks to alert drivers that pedestrians are likely to cross the street at that location. In my experience, drivers don’t realize they’re approaching a trail crossing unless it is a zebra-striped crossing. Having a yellow pedestrian sign seems to do little to change drivers’ behavior. The zebra stripes seem to make a positive connection with drivers.
On the day of the hike noted above, I watched as 22 walkers lined up ready to cross Capitol Hwy, an unmarked crosswalk. The 22 waited for several minutes until there was no traffic to safely cross the street. Not one car slowed or stopped as they waited.
PBOT seems to be inverting their priority pyramid which has pedestrians at the top and motor vehicles at the bottom. In my experience they constantly favor motor vehicles over pedestrians. No wonder Vision Zero is not working!
Our challenge is to change the culture of PBOT to cease inverting the pyramid.
Thoughts? Comments? Let us know.
