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?
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/