By Ed Jones
Linnton has long been known as an unsafe neighborhood for pedestrians. Crossing St Helens Road. or Bridge Ave. is challenging even for the able and alert, and downright dangerous for anyone with limited mobility or attention. Despite many efforts by the Linnton Neighborhood Association (LNA) to improve street crossing safety, and various highway projects in our area, little has been done to improve the situation in the more than 20 years that have passed since the last improvements were made.
Part of the problem is that our major streets are not city streets. Even though Linnton is part of the city, St Helens Road, Bridge Ave., and the St Johns Bridge itself, all belong to the state. So rather than having PDOT (Portland Department of Transportation) in charge we have ODOT (Oregon Department of Transportation) instead. History has proven ODOT to be far less responsive to pedestrian issues. Their focus has been on keeping the vehicles moving.
At the January LNA meeting, two ODOT representatives, Matthew Freitag and Ellen Sweeney, came and discussed how ODOT decides where pedestrian safety improvements are needed and how limited budgets influence which of many needed improvements get funded each year. The process is based on the Active Transportation Needs Inventory.
Information about the ATNI process is at https://tinyurl.com/36r2yk4x. There is an ATNI map associated with the process which can be found at https://tinyurl.com/2p87kssf.
It is a complex process; evaluations are done in tenth-mile segments using the NCHRP (National Cooperative Highway Research Program) ActiveTrans Prioritization Tool. There is a long list of evaluation criteria, which includes transit and crash data.
When the scoring is done, according to ODOT, none of the pedestrian risks that concern the Linnton neighborhood rate high enough to justify funding. How accurate the scoring is, and how fair the criteria are, is difficult to tell.
Anyone interested in diving into the details of ANTI should contact Ed Jones at Edward97231@gmail.com.