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In early 2024, a car hit and killed 71-year-old Tom Amato at the intersection of Southeast Woodstock Boulevard and 97th Avenue in the Lents neighborhood.
His death came nearly six years after the city first promised to make the intersection safer, deeming it a particularly dangerous place for motorists and pedestrians. The Portland Bureau of Transportation pledged $4 million in 2018 to improve stretches of Southeast Foster Road and Woodstock Boulevard, including by painting a crosswalk, installing a traffic median and stoplight, and improving sidewalks at the intersection of 97th and Woodstock.
The city initially promised the improvements would be completed by 2020. In 2020, the city promised them by 2022. After Amato died, the city said the project was at 60% design completion—none of the improvements had been made.
And just last week, in response to another inquiry from WW, the bureau said the project is now at 95% design completion. Construction should begin in 2026, bureau spokeswoman Hannah Schafer said.
When a car hit and killed Amato in early 2024, the Transportation Bureau chalked up the delays in safety improvements to staffing struggles, retirements during the pandemic, inflation hiking construction costs, and the bureau’s “budget uncertainty,” among other reasons. Also, it said, “competing policy and federal requirements for paving projects of this type have delayed our design effort.”
At the time, the city said it hoped the improvements would be made in 2025.
Schafer now says the city has had to scale the project back due to financial constraints.
“As costs have increased for transportation projects, we had to value-engineer and reduce the project scope to stay within the funds allocated to the work,” Schafer said. “To do that, we significantly reduced the scope of the asphalt paving.”
And the crosswalk—white stripes painted on the asphalt—won’t be the first safety measure installed, Schafer says.
“We did discuss trying to install a crosswalk prior to building the refuge island, but because the crosswalk is within the area of [Oregon Department of Transportation] right of way at the I-205 intersection, it requires additional necessary changes to signage, sight lines, and other striping that need to happen concurrently.”
