DMV Crash Reporting Thresholds to Rise

The Oregon Transportation Commission meets on Friday the 15th, and there are several bits on the agenda about House Bill 2017 and settling details on the State 2021-2024 funding cycle. We'll probably come back to some of them as they filter down to the MPO level. If you are interested in more detail, here's the full agenda and links to the meeting materials and presentations.

One item in the consent calendar stands out.

The OTC will formally approve a change in Oregon Administrative Rules on crashes that must be reported to the DMV:

Raising the threshold of damages for reporting

I think this is a direct consequence of Senate Bill 35.

Things to note:

• ODOT and the DMV here continue to use the language of "accident" rather than "crash." This is a symptom of minimizing the extent to which many or most of these are preventable, and not in fact random "acts of God."
• Only high-end bikes have a value of $2500 or more. For ordinary bikes, the value of "a totaled bike" is equivalent to a "fender-bender." A kind of routine bike catastrophe is not reportable and therefore unimportant. This underreporting skews data that ODOT collects, and which cities and MPOs use formally in Safety Plans, in addition to making insurance claims more difficult. 
• So this is a detail in the way that ODOT enacts a systemic bias against people who bike, and is an ingredient in the perpetuation of the more general autoist system.

Also, the Salem Public Art Commission meets today (full packet here), and the Cherriots Board meets tomorrow (full packet here). They mostly had routine or on-going things on the agenda, and it didn't seem like there was anything interesting to say about them. But if these are your particular interests, do check out their agenda.