Thirty-Eight People Were Killed on Porto's Streets in Five Years, and the City's Own Mobility Plan Links Some of Them to Illegal Parking
Porto's Sustainable Urban Mobility Plan goes to a vote on Tuesday on whether to open it to public consultation. Its diagnosis chapter records 38 deaths, 71 serious injuries and 5,435 light ones between 2019 and 2023, and maps where each kind of accident happens.
Thirty-eight people were killed in road accidents inside the city of Porto between 2019 and 2023. Seventy-one more were seriously injured and 5,435 suffered light injuries. Those totals sit in the diagnosis chapter of Porto's Plano de Mobilidade Urbana Sustentável (Sustainable Urban Mobility Plan), the PMUS, which the city council votes on Tuesday to send out for public consultation.
The plan, presented at the Rivoli in July, is mostly discussed for what it proposes: burying three stretches of the Via de Cintura Interna at Foco, Faria Guimarães and Antas, reprofiling the Estrada da Circunvalação, and a bike-share system with 56 stations. The diagnosis underneath those proposals is the more revealing document.
Three kinds of accident, three different maps
The five-year toll splits into three categories. Collisions between vehicles killed 14 people, seriously injured 34 and lightly injured 3,467. Run-off-road accidents killed 11, seriously injured 13 and lightly injured 791. Pedestrians struck by vehicles accounted for 13 deaths, 24 serious injuries and 1,177 light ones.
Each category has its own geography. Collisions cluster on the Estrada da Circunvalação, the Avenida AEP and the Via de Cintura Interna, which the plan attributes to traffic volume. Run-offs concentrate on the winding sections of the VCI and the Francos and A3 junctions. Pedestrians are hit somewhere else again: the historic centre, the Boavista, the seafront along the Avenidas do Brasil and de Montevideu, the Asprela university cluster, and radial arteries such as the Avenida de Fernão de Magalhães.
The fatalities fall on a short list of roads. Eight deaths occurred on the VCI, part of the national network rather than the municipal one. Five were on the Circunvalação, three of those around Asprela. Four were on Fernão de Magalhães and three on the Boavista. Only three records in the whole period involved more than one death, two fatalities each.
The crossings the city cannot count
The plan admits a data gap. Porto has no dataset recording where its pedestrian crossings are, so the diagnosis used traffic-signal locations as a proxy, on the reasoning that a signalised junction almost always has crossings. On that basis about 16 percent of pedestrian collisions happened at a signalised intersection, notably on Fernão de Magalhães, the Rua da Constituição and the Praça de Mouzinho de Albuquerque, better known as the Boavista roundabout. Where a pedestrian is hit at a crossing with a green man, the plan blames excessive speed or signal cycles that give people too little time to get across.
The link to illegal parking, stated carefully
The diagnosis then does something unusual: it overlays the pedestrian collision map onto the map of recurrent illegal parking, and finds the two coincide at places that include fatal ones. It counts 377 pedestrian collisions at those locations, producing three deaths, eight serious injuries and 383 light ones.
The document does not claim causation. Its wording is that it is not possible to say these were a direct consequence of illegal parking, but that the casualties "could have been avoided, or largely reduced, had illegal parking been punished more severely". That is the same enforcement question the council usually approaches from the revenue side, where fines have been climbing toward 300 a day as plate-reading vans multiply. Tuesday's meeting also decides a towing contract of nearly five million euros.
What this means for you
- The dangerous roads are the fast ones. The VCI, the Circunvalação and Fernão de Magalhães carry most of the deaths, and the Asprela stretch of the Circunvalação is the worst pedestrian environment named.
- A green man is not a guarantee. One in six pedestrian collisions happened at a signalised junction, and short crossing phases are one of the two causes the plan identifies.
- Consultation is your window. If Tuesday's vote passes, the diagnosis becomes contestable in writing.
The council's stated hierarchy puts the pedestrian first and the car last, and it has been extending its Rede 30 speed-limited zone north of the Boavista alongside more than 100,000 free transport cards and a delayed metrobus. The national frame is the Visão Zero 2030 strategy, which commits Portugal to halving deaths and serious injuries. Porto's own numbers are now on the table to be argued with.
Feature image: the Avenida da Boavista in Porto, its carriageway in the foreground and cars parked along the kerb. Photograph by Mister No, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0.
