Siobhán Brett is the opinion editor of the Maine Trust for Local News.
The magazine Travel + Leisure last month, with a seeming straight face, referred to Portland as “a walker’s paradise.”
Covering a 2026 list of “Best Wellness Towns” (oy) the report referred to our city’s “quaint feel” and its cobblestone streets. Two stretches of cobblestone street, by my count, one of which is marred by a steady stream of two-way traffic.
Oh, never mind that. We’re told the city’s Walk Score, a branding honor for which we can thank walkscore.com, an online contrivance owned by Redfin, is 100/100. Haha. Hahahahahahahaha!
Vehicles sail around Portland bends without looking. Crossings and road markings lack uniformity and, as a result, reliability. Rules are broken or bent by people who are either suiting themselves or having to innovatively cheat death. Visitors, when they’re here, roll around like blind mice. Locals seem to believe that open phone use is permissible off the highway. A yellow light is a green light. A red light is a yellow light, and after that it’s a suggestion.
The volume of cars driving, the volume of cars parked, the volume of drivers who don’t know where they are or where they’re going — these are stubborn conditions not easily worked out. It’s the manner in which Portland responds to them — or fails to — that gives us the diabolical pedestrian experience we have today.
The cleanest and most routinely disturbing example of Portland’s disregard for road safety can be faithfully seen at the all-way stop. Approach these circles of hell at your own risk. The points throughout the city where four stop signs converge couldn’t expose people to greater danger if they were designed to.
For ease of illustration, let’s single out the junction at Washington Avenue and Congress Street. Here, as at all of its counterparts, driver inattention breeds driver disarray. One driver slows to a stop. Which of the three cars he’s now looking at was there before him, and in which order? More often than not, he drives as though he could not know for sure.
A rogue pedestrian, dependably upending the sequence as it ought to have unfolded, might buy this driver some time. Throw in three more walkers, one on each crosswalk. Better again, staggered sets of walkers.
Add to this already fraught scene the driver who relishes in the four-way stop as a waving or honking exercise, an involved social interaction to be made and remade originally every time. Add in the pedestrian who indignantly waves waiting drivers on, preferring to cross without an audience or otherwise striving to wield some power of their own. This breach of contract is as corrosive as anything else.
What about a long-suffering cyclist or two? What about the motorist who insists on sidling into available space alongside an already-waiting car, creating a fifth or sixth start line when four have already overwhelmed the critical faculties of all in the vicinity? The chance of a collision under these circumstances is alarmingly high.
Wander down to Franklin Avenue and Marginal Way, where the police department could make my dreams come true by stationing officers on the medians (where, due to the light sequencing, pedestrians are also forced to linger) and issuing tickets to the scores of people serenely using their phones at and around the lights.
Carry on to Pine Street and State Street, where fresh investment in that pedestrian crossing — an undertaking that should destroy our faith in city planning — has resulted in a sick new carnival game.
Where there was a flashing light, there is now a traffic light, just yards after the intersection’s lights. The indignant pedestrian will never use this light. The pedestrian who does, in crossing with the light, now seems to grant the driver permission to drive on — through a red light! — once they have crossed.
At a Bicycle Coalition of Maine workshop a couple of years ago, I learned about “the Idaho stop.” Passed into law in that state in 1982 with a view to improving cyclists’ safety, the rule allows people on bikes to treat red lights like stop signs and stop signs like yield signs. Critics of this concession say we need more uniformity in our rules, less ambiguity. If everything didn’t feel so far gone on the roads, I’d say the same.
Negotiating America’s most walkable city, I think often about the Idaho stop; about the sustained tension between cars, trucks and everybody else; about the immense, creative caution pedestrians are forced to take for self-preservation. Being on foot in Portland can feel like an extreme sport. I’d hate to have to try to score it.