The more severe damage done in Portland is to the affordability of housing, due to a combination of no-growth policies, light rail and the severe zoning restrictions that are designed to make it more "sustainable."
As far as fatal accidents go, LA's Blue Line still has the record, and many of those victims were pedestrians. On a passenger-mile basis, though, it isn't that bad. I think Denver holds the record on fatalities/passenger mile, but SLC can't be far behind.
Houston is just getting started, and the Chronically Wrongicle won't be publishing humorous reports of drivers' horoscopes and hair color once the fatalites begin stacking up.
From Randal O'Toole, at Reason Public Policy Institute:
Rail lines, especially light rail and commuter rail, are also dangerous. Between 1992 and 2001, Los Angeles' commuter-rail trains have killed five times as many people per passenger mile carried as either buses or urban interstate freeways, while light rail has killed nearly nine times as many people per passenger mile as buses or urban interstates.
(The linked report, Great Rail Disasters, is packed with tables and charts that prove just what an unmitigated disaster LRT has been in most of America's cities where it's been built. The railfans will hate it, of course, because the truth sometimes hurts.)
"Tables and charts" are
just data. They don't prove cheese!
Just as easily
one could say (I would)
that these numbers prove how dumb
modern citizens
have become, and light
rail is like a spotlight that
illuminates our
impulsive, thoughtless
range-of-the-moment rock-heads
as they pay the price.