How potentially dangerous are the Downtown Mall vehicle crossings?

In 2018, the City paid $100K for a threat assessment of the Downtown Mall, with a focus on the vehicle crossings, but the results still remain confidential.

4th Street crossing on the Downtown Mall.

After the 4th Street crossing on the Downtown Mall became a partial memorial to a deadly vehicular homicide during a white supremacist rally in August 2017, the city allocated $100,000 for a Threat & Risk Assessment for the Downtown Mall. It would determine, in part, how potentially dangerous the crossings at 2nd and 4th Street were, and if infrastructure changes needed to be made to protect pedestrians. The threat assessment was phase one of what was being called the “Downtown Mall Pedestrian Safety Project,” a three-phase plan to “identify risks, engineer solutions, and make physical modifications to Downtown Mall access points.”

Of course, you don’t need to be a security expert to know that the access points on the downtown mall have always been vulnerable - check out this video of a driver turning onto the mall from the 2nd Street crossing last year. But the new project represented a shift in city thinking about the crossings, which had hist…