Car Kills Electric Scooter Rider in Saturday Morning Hit-and-Run

It’s the 26th traffic fatality so far this year.

scooters piled on the sidewalk
Lime scooters Lime scooters in downtown Portland. (Wesley Lapointe) (Wesley Lapointe)

Early Saturday morning, a driver hit and killed a woman riding a Lime electric scooter on Northeast Sandy Boulevard at 149th Avenue.

The crash occurred just past 12:30 am, and the woman riding the motorized scooter was pronounced dead at the scene, according to the Portland Police Bureau. The bureau says the driver who hit the scooter rider fled the scene and is still at large.

It appears to be the first time a person has died on a rental e-scooter since tech startups were allowed to deploy fleets of scooters on Portland streets in 2018. Police spokesman Sgt. Kevin Allen tells WW the bureau is “unaware of any other fatalities involving the rental motorized scooter program in Portland.”

While rental scooters have proven largely safe—and fretting about their use in Portland feels like a relic of another era—traffic deaths in this city are on pace to eclipse a 24-year record.

The bureau said the crash “marks the grim milestone of doubling the number of traffic-related fatalities as this time last year.”

It’s this year’s 26th fatal crash. At this same time last year, 13 fatal crashes had occurred.

Related: The 54 traffic deaths on Portland streets last year are the highest since 1996.

Just two days prior, on May 6, 25-year old David Dentler was killed when the driver of the car he was riding in crashed into a power pole on Northeast Killingsworth Street at Sandy Boulevard. The two crashes occurred two and a half miles apart.


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