Safer Seattle Confounds Portland Experts

I guess it's funny week on Seattle Traffic, because here comes another story that amused me. It turns out that Seattle drivers get in fewer auto accidents than our southernly neighbor Portland—and apparently that little fact keeps some Portlanders awake at night.

Sometimes a statistic jumps out and says: Analyze this.

Here's one: Portland drivers are 13 percent more likely to crash their cars than drivers in Seattle.
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According to Progressive, more than 26,000 car crashes will occur in the Portland metropolitan area this year. That's about 70 a day. And Portland drivers are actually safer than most — 3 percent less likely to be involved in an accident than the national average driver, according to the same report.

Idaho drivers are even better — 18 percent less accident-prone than the national average, based on accidents per capita. And Nevada drivers are 13 percent less accident-prone.

But the one statistic that doesn't make sense, or at least begs for explanation, is the comparison between Portland and Seattle drivers.

A couple of quick possibilities: The smart people here are all riding bikes and taking mass transit, leaving the rest of the drivers in their cars at the mercy of, well, one another. And Seattle's infamous traffic patterns could be a factor. But on the other hand, if you're in gridlock, you're not likely to hit anybody.

That's rich. All the smart people are riding bikes... I mean, I ride a bike, so that's certainly a flattering suggestion, but really, how ridiculous can you get? I grew up in Vancouver (just across the river from Portland) and I can tell you anecdotally that Portland drivers just plain stink. Whenever I was driving around town and I saw someone pull a crazy/idiotic driving stunt, I checked the license plate. I'd say at least 80% of the time those plates would be from Oregon. I constantly found myself wondering just how lax the driver's license requirements are in Oregon. I mean, Seattle residents aren't exactly paragons of safe and responsible driving, but they're definitely noticably better than Portland drivers.

[Dick] Walker [manager of Metro's transportation research and modeling services], a guy who knows his way around a spreadsheet, cautioned not to put too much faith in the Progressive statistics. They may only tell half of a story, he said.

For instance, he posed, maybe people here don't crash more often. "Maybe we report our accidents more frequently than they do in Seattle," he said. "We just may make more claims. It doesn't mean more accidents, necessarily."

There's a phrase that describes this article pretty well... hang on, it'll come to me... oh yes: grasping at straws.

(Peter Korn, Portland Tribune, 05.09.2006)