On Monday night someone was hit and killed by the driver of a car while walking in Swan Island. Portland Police say it happened around 10:20 and the driver remained on the scene.
According to video from local news outlets, the vehicle was a four-door Subaru Forester. It showed severe damage to the center front hood and windshield. The car was facing east on North Channel Street just west of N Port Center Way, in a right-turn only lane that led to a driveway into a fast-food outlet.
This section of N Channel/N Going is 105-feet wide and has eight general traffic lanes with no shoulder. The posted speed limit is 40 mph. Swan Island is an industrial hub and N Channel/N Going is a high volume freight truck corridor. There is no residential zoning in the area and no local businesses would have been open at the time of the collision.
This is the eighth fatal traffic crash so far this year, and fifth that killed someone on foot. This is the lowest year-to-date death total since 2018. At this same date last year Portland had 19 fatal crashes.
Last night a group of safe street advocates rode bikes to the location of the crash. They laid flowers and hung a memorial sign created by the local chapter of Families for Safe Streets.
If anyone has further details about what happened, please let me know. You should also contact the PPB at crimetips@police.portlandoregon.gov, attention Traffic Investigations Unit, and reference case number 25-103320.
Thanks for reading.
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Every death is a tragedy, but I am relieved to hear that the trend is reversing.
Having lived over that way, making N Going less of a glorified off-ramp to I5 would be nice, but I see it making little difference. People need alternatives to driving, but the bus doesn’t stop at every door. What reasonable thing, if any, could be done to make Swan Island less hostile, especially if human scaling is why industrial parks exist?
Not sure what you meant by “human scaling,” but I ride my bike on Swan Island regularly and it is TERRIBLE. I take the right lane and it is SCARY. I would take the sidewalk but the sidewalks aren’t continuous: they disappear and you are stranded, with huge curbs to climb over. The Waud Bluff trail has helped a lot but it dumps you at the far end so you still have to ride the length of the island to get anywhere.
The Original Sin was to design Swan Island for cars and trucks ONLY. Humans outside of cars are entirely dependent on the whim of drivers. It’s really sad and pretty much impossible to rectify.
Somewhere in there Swan Island was an airport and naval port. Don’t ships still dock there? Bike and ped-friendly seaports are rare but not unheard of.
I commute to the “Island” as well. It’s basically terrifying taking the lane on N Basin. The sidewalks are not at all adequate for riding. I have taken the railroad bed from the S end of Basin down to the Leverman over pass. It was good but only if I’m on my gravel bike. The track farthest west gets 0 to no use. I’d love to see some sort of paved pathway there on the west side of the tracks all the way to Ward Bluff.
I’m hopeful that some changes can be made for those traveling outside of a vehicle but the mindset down there will be a tough nut to crack plus there is no money for anything.
I have to wonder if this is yet another tragic death of a homeless person in Portland….
https://www.opb.org/article/2024/12/20/multnomah-county-portland-homelessness-deaths-increase/
Slight correction. There is an open 7-11 nearby. Not sure if that was a factor.
Correct, it is just to the upper left of the satellite view picture. Truckers often park and take breaks in the lot next to Face Plant. I’ve seen people make the dash across Channel to get to the 7-11 plenty of times. Taking the shortest route using marked crosswalks would add over a 1/4 mile additional walk.
An even more egregious killing occurred on the Amazon Parkway in Eugene this week. Just for context, this road is a through-road, sort of a semi-highway that runs right through the middle of Eugene for a mile or two. Kind of a limited crossings, quicker way to get from SE Eugene to Downtown. It passes by Amazon Park, a haven for walkers and runners on its bark mulch trails. A driver going too fast on the curvy road, lost it, jumped the curb, travelled at least 50′ across a field onto the bark mulch trail and killed instantaneously an elderly walker. I ran that trail hundreds of times in the 80s and 90s and the last thing that a walker would even think about is something like this ending their life.