A motorist blows through a red light on Northern Lights Boulevard in a classic example of bad driving in Alaska’s largest city/Craig Medred photo

The costs of machines dictating policy

Alaska State Troopers are yet again trumpeting their desire to make everyone safe by taking extra efforts to enforce the nation’s mandatory seatbelt law.

“…Troopers across the state will be conducting additional traffic patrols through June 4th as part of the Click It or Ticket campaign,” according to a media statement issued this week. “Nationwide it is estimated that 2,549 lives could have been saved in 2017 if everyone utilized a seatbelt.”

That’s a summary of the trees. A look at the forest reveals about four and half times as many people are killed by speeding every year, and a lot of them are innocent pedestrians or cyclists who just happen to come near a roadway.

“In 2020, speeding killed 11,258 people,” according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. “For more than two decades, speeding has been involved in approximately one-third of all motor vehicle fatalities.”

This is inevitable in a society that has come to be driven by the idea that everyone has a “right” to get from point A to point B as fast and as easily as possible.

In fairness to troopers, ir must, of course, be noted that the majority of these speeding-related deaths happen on urban rather than rural roads, and troopers mainly patrol the latter in the 49th state.

But the emphasis on Click-It-or-Ticket campaigns, driven as they are by federal monetary handouts, plays a big role in shifting focus away from what is really killing people on America’s roads and in the 49th state:

Bad drivers in urban areas.

Death zones

Of the average of 71 people per year killed on Alaska roads from 2015 to 2017, according to the “Alaska Highway Safety Plan Federal Fiscal Year 2022,” about two-thirds died in the state’s three major urban areas – the Municipality of Anchorage, the Matanuska Susitna Borough and the Fairbanks North Star Borough.

The number of dead might seem small, but the fatality rate is more revealing.

The Alaska death rate per million motor vehicle miles traveled (MVMT) was 1.44 for the years in question, about 32 percent higher than the national average of 1.17 per million MVMT for the same time period, a dubious achievement for a state with but 36,000 miles of road.

There are states with fewer miles of road, but they are all tiny states – New Hampshire, Vermont, Delaware, Rhode Island and Hawaii – with significantly lower motor vehicle fatality rates: 0.87 per million MVMT in 2020 for N.H., 1.03 for Vt., 0.98 for R.I., and 0.97 for Hawaii.

Alaska fatalities did creep downward during the pandemic with the “Alaska FY2021 Highway Safety Plan Annual Report,” which provides the most up-to-date data on deaths, registering 64 fatalities in 2020.

The decrease, however, came at the same time that the deaths of pedestrians and cyclists – so-called vulnerable road users given the lack of a steel cage to protect them –  more than doubled.

“The percentage of all fatalities involving pedestrians and bicyclists accounted for 23 percent of all motor vehicle-related fatalities in 2020,” the report says. It does not say how many of those deaths involved speeding.

But the percentage is likely high given that the vast majority of pedestrian and cyclist deaths take place in urban Alaska where posted speed limits are seldom obeyed

Bad judgment on the part of pedestrians cannot be ignored as a contributing factor. The Anchorage homeless, in particular,  have a history of randomly wandering into traffic, which unfortunately hasn’t altered the driving habits of those who regularly motor through areas frequented by the homeless.

Neither has it swayed the Municipality of Anchorage to slow traffic in those areas by posting slower speed limits given the well-documented fact that slower speeds save lives.

Speed kills

The average risk of death for a pedestrian is 10 percent at an impact speed of 23 mph, 25 percent at 32 mph, 50 percent at 42 mph, 75 percent at 50 mph, and 90 percent at 58 mph,” according to the American Automobile Association’s (AAA) Foundation for Traffic Safety.

The likelihood of survival is also greatly influenced by age.

“For example,” according to the AAA, “the average risk of severe injury or death for a 70‐year old pedestrian struck by a car traveling at 25 mph is similar to the risk for a 30‐year‐old pedestrian struck at 35 mph.”

The latest pedestrian to be seriously struck in Anchorage was hit on West Benson Boulevard just over a week ago, according to the Anchorage Police Department, which described the man as suffering from “life-threatening injuries.”

As of this date, he has not been identified nor has the driver of the pickup truck that hit him. This is the norm. The victims are usually identified eventually, but it is the policy of the APD not to identify drivers.

A police department spokeswoman explained in an email that this is because these incidents are mere “traffic” issues, and people involved in traffic issues are not identified.

Benson Boulevard is a known danger zone for pedestrians. The posted speed on the street is 35 mph, but motorists seldom drive that slow.

A 2014 “Non-motorized Reconnaissance” study of the area conducted by the Alaska Department of Transportation identified the road as a hotspot for collisions between motor vehicles and vulnerable road users.

The study also concluded that “speed limit restrictions may be needed to increase
perception reaction time and reduce the severity of collisions,” but then largely dismissed the recommendation with the notation that the “strategy may not be appropriate” because it would decrease the volume of traffic the road could handle.

The words “collateral damage” were not used to address pedestrians and cyclists, but could have been given that “motonormativity” dominates both traffic design and policing in Alaska’s largest city.

Take two

A day after the man on Benson suffered life-threatening injuries, 30-year-old cyclist Chelsea Jensen-Roehl was run down at the intersection of Debarr Road and Airport Heights Drive and left trapped beneath a car.

She was identified after her mother talked to an Anchorage television station about the efforts of the employees of a nearby gas station who used a jack to free her from beneath the car.

APD, per its policy, provided almost no information as to what happened. It issued a statement saying:

“Initial indications are that an adult female bicyclist was crossing Airport Heights, westbound at Debarr.  An SUV that was also westbound turned right to go north on Airport Heights and struck the bicyclist in the crosswalk. 

“No citations or charges have been filed.  The investigation is ongoing.”

This is where the reporting on such incidents in Anchorage usually ends. Jensen-Roehl also suffered life-threatening injuries but is expected to survive. How many pedestrians and cyclists are so injured in Alaska each year is not reported in the highway data.

Charges are almost never brought against the drivers involved, and even when they are, the drivers almost always get off.

Anchorage’s “Law and Order” authorities do not take seriously such injuries and deaths.

After Anchorage motorist Melissa Rabe ran a red light on C Street and killed  19-year-old Jonathon Johnson in 2008, a grand jury looking into Johnson’s death was told there was no crime involved.

According to court records, jurors were informed that such a death “is not a criminal case from the state’s perspective. This would be a civil liability case. You have a red light violation.”

Grand jurors were apparently somewhat taken aback by that statement.

“At the conclusion of the state’s presentation,” the documents say, “the foreperson asked the prosecutor: ‘If we determine that she wasn’t impaired by THC (the active ingredient in marijuana) but she ran the red light and hit him, what are our options in that regard?’

“To which the prosecutor responded: ‘Well, you have to find that she was criminally negligent then. And if you don’t find that she’s criminally negligent and its just civil negligence, you’ve heard from (APD) Investigator (Steve) Buchta that mere civil negligence results in nothing more than a red light citation, even though you caused the death of an individual by going through a red light.'”

Court records reflect that Rabe was eventually fined $260 for driving a vehicle that lacked an emissions testing sticker and another $150 for driving a vehicle with an expired registration.

There are reasons it is dangerous to be on or near a roadway in Alaska unless protected by a steel cage, and they are bigger than the simple lack of sidewalks and bike lanes in most of urban Alaska or speed limits set dangerously high to please motorists even in areas where motor vehicles regularly mix with vulnerable road users.

There is a serious problem with officials who accept human deaths as the cost of keeping traffic moving as fast as possible, which is a reality that has gone too long unreported.

Health costs

Were dead pedestrians and cyclists all there was to this, it would be one thing. But the pandemic of the old and unfit has now killed a reported 1.16 million Americans of whom nearly 1,500 were Alaskans.

After comparing the physically fit to the physically unfit due to lack of exercise, researchers concluded the latter group nearly doubled their chances of dying of Covid-19 and increased their chances of hospitalization by almost as much.

This should have come as no surprise given the many studies prior to the pandemic showing the links between deaths from heart disease, the nation’s number one killer, and a lack of exercise along with similar associations between the lack of exercise and diabetes, obesity and other illnesses leading to early death.

One would expect conservatives to be appalled at how much this is costing the American economy, which spends more on health care than any country in the world to produce worse health outcomes.

As a percentage of gross domestic product, the U.S. spends almost twice as much on health care as South Korea where the average citizen lives to the ripe, old age of 83.5.

U.S. life expectancy is now down to 76.1, having peaked 78.9 in 2014. It has fallen despite the fortunes being spent on drugs and medical treatments intended to prolong life.

Meanwhile, the average American’s lack of exercise goes largely undiscussed and the nation’s political leaders continue to encourage the design of cities to make driving easier and walking or cycling discouragingly more dangerous.

According to AAA, the average American now spends more than an hour per day behind the wheel of a motor vehicle, a nearly 30 percent increase from the amount of time AAA found them sitting behind the wheel in 2014.

And when they’re not sitting behind the wheel, they’re sitting behind a computer screen or in front of a TV. The average U.S. adult now spends 10.5 hours per day entertaining herself or himself in this way, according to the American Heart Association, which has linked all the time spent sitting to the steady rise in the number of strokes suffered by Americans.

“Nearly 9 in 10 strokes could be attributed to modifiable risk factors such as sedentary behaviors,” the organization reported. It recommends people get “at least 150 minutes, or 2.5 hours, of moderate-intensity physical activity per week.”

Fifty-three point one percent of Americans fail to clear that bar, according to the Centers for Disease Control. 

One would expect progressives to want to get these people up and moving on foot or  bicycles not only for their own good but to reduce the volume of climate-change-causing fossil fuels burned by motor vehicles. But progressives seem as addicted to driving as conservatives and would rather push a conversion to electric cars than do anything to encourage Americans to get moving under their own power.

Progressives are strangely all in on ordering people to wear masks, which have demonstrated little effectiveness in reducing Covid-19 infections although some fervently believe they make a difference, and get vaccinated, which has a real-world effectiveness near that of fitness, but when it comes to getting people to exercise they are as addicted to motorized transportation as conservatives.

It’s the American perfect storm: One of the few things left and right can agree on is promoting the means of transportation that does the most to shorten the lives of Americans and renders increasingly dangerous those forms of transporation that improve health.

All this in the name of convenience.