Skip to main content
Trying to walk across Northeast Fremont Street (particularly between 42nd and 57th avenues, packed with shops and restaurants) can be downright frightening. In addition to the regular traffic of delivery trucks and buses, drivers either blatantly ignore posted speed limits or are distracted by their smartphones or hopes of scoring a streetside parking spot near Pip’s or Grand Central Bakery. It’s a reality that’s even more terrifying at night or during our frequent rainy spells.
With the Portland Bureau of Transportation deeming this a low-priority area for safety improvements, the Beaumont-Wilshire Neighborhood Association took matters into its own hands. At various marked crosswalks on Fremont, the group has attached small containers, each with a pair of bright orange flags for pedestrians to carry to alert drivers to their presence as they attempt to get from one side of the street to the other.
PBOT spokeswoman Hannah Schafer says the bureau doesn’t include pedestrian flags in its toolkit of traffic-calming measures (like speed bumps) because studies have shown flags don’t make drivers any more likely to stop for walkers. That said, she empathizes with neighborhoods calling for more safety features.
“We have more need than we have resources across the city, and that’s the bottom line,” Schafer says. “So we have to do a prioritization that’s understandably frustrating for some people, because what they experience is also valid.”
The Fremont project, which BWNA president Al Ellis says was inspired in part by similar flag projects in cities like Kirkland, Wash., was entirely an in-house affair. The Beaumont Business Association paid for supplies, and other local businesses helped with materials and design work. It’s proven so successful with local residents that it will soon be expanded to the intersection of Northeast 33rd Avenue and Alameda Street. According to one resident quoted in the neighborhood association’s newsletter, simply having the flags visible is having a positive effect as drivers “think something is happening and…move through the intersection more cautiously.”
See the rest of Willamette Week’s Best of Portland 2025 here!
