The garbage waits for the trucks that couldn’t navigate the snow-narrowed streets during Anchorage’s last major snowstorm/Doug O’Harra photo

What Alaskans really want

Of Benito Mussolini, the Italian dictator credited with the invention of the philosophy of fascism, it was once said in praise that he “made the trains run on time” in a nation choking on political chaos.

How much credit he deserves for the improved efficiency of Italian rail lines in the 1930s is still debated, but there can be no debate about the truism connecting the fate of politicians to transportation and other activities that have come to be considered “fundamental government services.”

Today’s trains of cars are on that list although the poster child in this country has become law enforcement.

Anchorage Mayor Dave Bronson is facing problems on both this front and the figurative trains front thanks, in the first case, to a Portlandesque problem of homelessness that has boosted petty crime to a level that has almost everyone in Alaska’s largest city complaining, and, in the second, to a record dump of November snow that brought parts of the city to a standstill.

Crime and transportation problems often signal the death knell for political careers. Mussolini, of course, died a famously inglorious death – he was executed by Italian partisans and hung in the public square – after he allowed a gang of Nazi thugs to take over the country he had once ruled.

Thankfully, in these unUnited States, the citizens are kinder to the politicians they view as failures, but pols still regularly pay the price for rising crime and failing transportation.

Progressive Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, who carried all 50 political precincts in that city on the way to a landslide victory in 2019, was unceremoniously shown the door out of the Windy City mayor’s office this spring with crime rising and the public transportation system a mess.

“Violent crime spiked on Lightfoot’s watch, (and) Chicago’s public transportation system remains saddled with service gaps and delays,” progressive CNN reported.

“The result was a municipal election in which Lightfoot finished third in the nine-person field, with the support of only about one-in-six Chicago voters. She is the first full-term incumbent Chicago mayor in 40 years to lose reelection.

“The outcome especially underscored the electorate’s focus on public safety. Violence in the city spiked in 2020 and 2021. And though shootings and murders have decreased since then, other crimes – including theft, car-jacking, robberies and burglaries – have increased since last year, according to the Chicago Police Department’s 2022 year-end report.”

The election came only months after CBS News Chicago reported the city’s “public transit has been on the ropes with a pandemic drop in ridership coupled with spikes of violent crime.”

Chicago, like New York and a few other American megapolises, is a city where trains still matter, but in most U.S. cities, personal motor vehicles – cars, trucks and SUVs so popular there is no need to explain the acronym – have taken over the job of moving people.

Motonormatitvy

And in those cities, motor vehicles more than just rule the roads; they rule peoples’ lives and the fates of politicians.

“Eleven months into a relatively placid first year, the indefinite closure of a vital piece of civic infrastructure presents a new, potentially thorny challenge for” Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, the Los Angeles Times reported just a couple weeks ago.

“Much of what happens next – repairs to a state-maintained freeway, possibly using federal dollars – will be out of her direct control. But that doesn’t mean she won’t be held responsible.

“Angelenos have a deep emotional connection to their roadways. And anyone who’s ever had a normally dependable commute upended by a lengthy detour in traffic purgatory can tell you about the frustration and seething anger that an extended disruption will probably bring.”

Ah yes, the seething anger that has become a regular companion of many an American motorist. Its roots can be traced back to California, which is reputed to have brought the country its first case of “road rage” fueled by an anger that sometimes grows to fill the unoccupied seats in the many driver-only vehicles on the roads of this country today.

You don’t have to dive deep into Anchorage social media at this moment to find such anger brewing.

As William Brewington put it simply on the Nextdoor forum, “the mayor should be voted out….He gave away our graders. And why has he cut the maintenance department budget? And have you seen the potholes lately?”

The predictable partisan bickering that characterizes the country’s politics of the moment followed.

“Bronson did NOT Create this Snow Plowing Mess, he inherited it,” Darlene O’Shea opinioned. “While everyone complains about (conservative) Mayor Bronson and the snow plowing of our roads. Let’s NOT forget what (liberal) Mayor Berkowitz’s (sic), who resigned in Disgrace said during one of our snow storms before he resigned.”

Berkowitz, along with Bronson, surely deserves some of the blame for the snowy mess Anchorage wrestled with for days and days, but so do most other Anchorage mayors going back for decades along with a goodly share of past and present Anchorage assembly members because Alaska’s largest city didn’t get into the mess it is in today by accident.

It got here by design.

Anchorage has changed a lot, and not in a good way, since the city hosted the 1994 conference of the World Winter Cities Association for Mayors. There was then considerable thought being given to designing liveable “winter cities.”

Somehow the thinking got lost as Anchorage grew, although as late as 2007 municipal planners were talking about how “a seven-foot separation is desired between back of curb and the pathway or sidewalk to provide for temporary snow storage” along residential collector streets.

Why? Because if you have enough room to temporarily push snow to the sides of streets, you can quickly open roads after a big snowstorm.

Unfortunately, Anchorage is now full of subdivision roads lacking any room for pushing aside snow. As a result, the only way to open those roads is to haul the snow away.

This requires loading the snow into dump trucks using snow blowers or pushing the snow into mounds where it can be picked up by front-end loaders and put into dump trucks.

Needless to say, these are labor intensive, time-consuming and costly tasks that are a whole lot slower than just plowing the roads open after a snowstorm.

Wider roads alone would be helpful in the temporary storage of snow to get the roads open, but in many older Anchorage subdivisions the roads have become narrower, rather than wider, as homeowners wanting more space indoors have converted the garages of their older homes to living space and minimized, or in some cases eliminated, any off-street parking.

As a result, the sides of the streets have become defacto parking lots, and there is far less space for temporary snow storage. Meanwhile, in some newer, high-density developments, the idea of zoning to require room for snow storage has been abandoned.

Many of these subdivisions don’t, to start with, have enough off-street parking for the multiple vehicles many Anchorage homeowners seem to “need.” Thus there are cars parked in the streets there, as well, and often, the snow from driveways and sidewalks (on those rare occasions when the latter are maintained) also goes into the street because there is nowhere else to put it.

Or, if there is somewhere the snow could be put, that space is often behind a high fence, given the new American privacy craze, making it difficult or impossible for the area to be used for on-lot snow storage.

Some more seething anger results from the handling of this neighborhood snow. There are regular social media complaints about neighbors plowing, snow-blowing or shoveling snow into the street only to create a blockage that results in stuck motor vehicles that make travel impossible even for those owners of four-wheel-drive vehicles who thought they’d be able to drive in Anchorage come hell or three feet of fluff.

Snowed in

But wait, there’s more.

If all of this was not enough, the Anchorage Assembly in November unanimously voted to eliminate all requirements for parking associated with new developments in the community.

“Surface parking lots have become a large portion of our city’s total land area as the city’s footprint continues to grow, leaving more of our land covered in asphalt without a benefit to our community,” Assemblyman Daniel Volland. “These changes will reduce barriers for housing development, preserve green spaces and support cyclists and pedestrians.”

Since the number of Anchorage residents without a car (not counting the community’s ever-growing homeless population) is tiny, this decision – which mandates developers provide for bike parking instead of car parking – could best be described as good intentions gone nuts.

“This ordinance will not take away our existing parking, but will help our community plan smarter, more affordable housing and commercial developments in the future,” Assemblyman Kevin Cross claimed, with Assemblyman Forrest Dunbar chiming in that “while a number of other cities have eliminated parking minimum requirements, including winter cities like Edmonton, Minneapolis and Toronto, Anchorage is unique in pairing bicycle parking requirements with parking minimums.”

Anchorage is unique, especially in that it isn’t Edmonton, Alberta, Canada or Minneapolis which raves about “a very compact downtown so no matter where you are, we have the options to get you there quickly and easily. An award-winning transit system with light rail and buses – taxis, Uber, Lyft – and bike rentals on the streets with dedicated bike lanes all over the city.”

Anchorage has no light rail, a lousy transit system with only a handful of buses, no year-round bike rentals, few dedicated bike lanes, and no real downtown in the big-city sense because modern Anchorage was largely designed around the motor vehicle.

But that’s not the city’s only difference from Minneapolis or Edmonton. Anchorage gets considerably more snow than those cities, which – it should be noted – aren’t always that great at snow removal either.

Consider how CNBC last year reported Katie Warwa, a designer for the construction firm Urbis Infill Homes, explaining Edmonton’s self-professed success with the idea of ditching requirements for off-street parking:

“Warwa said she often tells people that having more cars parked on the street can be safer for children and pedestrians. ‘The more cars are parked on either side, the narrower the street, the slower the traffic is,’ she said.”

CNBC did not mention how many of the snow-narrowed streets become impassable when a major snowstorm hit. But then Edmonton has a relatively dry, continental climate and gets only about 48 inches of light, fluffy snow per year.

A Pacific Ocean coastal community, Anchorage averages 74.5 inches per year. And this snow tends to be wetter and heavier, and it comes in bigger dumps. Anchorage averages more snow in the month of December, 16.6 inches, than Edmonton gets in December and January combined, 16.1 inches.

By the end of the average January, in the average year, Anchorage will have received more snow – 52.8 inches – than Edmonton sees in an entire year.

And yet, despite the fact Edmonton gets only about 70 percent as much snow as Anchorage gets in the average winter, the Canadian city has been struggling to cover the costs of removal because, according to the Edmonton Journal, “the number of roads to clear is still rising.”

Edmonton officials announced in July that they were changing their snow removal goals “to clear arterial roads, business districts and bus routes in five days instead of four,” the Journal reported. “It could take two days longer to clear residential roads, alleys and school zones (10 instead of eight days) and two days longer to clear city sidewalks, parking lots, wheelchair ramps, bridges and stairs (six instead of four days)” with the time to clear bus stops and benches, pathways, and other areas requiring work done by people with shovels would balloon from 13 days to 22.

And this is in a city which, according to the science and weather website Current Results, averages 1.7 snowfalls per year delivering up to 3.9 inches. The most common snowfall of significance is two inches, which happens seven times a year. 

Anchorage’s significant snowfall is three inches on 8.6 days per year on average, according to the website, with five inches coming on another 3.6 days per year for a total of more than a dozen days with good-sized dumps.

Anchorage does have one thing in common with Edmonton, however; the city is still adding pavement. And the more new roads built or lane-widths added to existing roads, the more snow there is that must be moved after a big storm.

Snowed in and safe

Unless, of course, one wants to leave much of the snow in place and buy into Warwa’s idea that a snowed-in city is a safer city.

There is some evidence she was onto something with this idea. A study released by the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Health just last month looked at road widths and safety and concluded that narrower residential roads – the ones Anchorage residents are now complaining aren’t plowed wide enough – are indeed safer.

After examining 1,117 street sections in seven cities, they reported that “street sections with 10-foot, 11-foot, and 12-foot lanes have
significantly higher numbers of non-intersection crashes than their counterparts with 9-foot lanes in the speed class of 30 to 35 mph.

“In other words, in the speed class of 30 to 35 mph, wider lanes not only are not safer, but exhibit significantly higher numbers of crashes than 9-foot lanes.”

Bill Lindeke, a professor at the University of Minnesota and a columnist for Street.Mn, was making these seems sorts of observations after a long, hard winter in Minneapolis way back in 2014.

“Narrower traffic lanes are fine,” he wrote at the time. “By the end of winter, almost all our city roads are between two-feet and five-feet narrower than they are in the summer….(and) as the winter narrows our roads, we drive slower.

“People still get where they’re going. The world does not end. Businesses still have people in them. Walking on streets feels a bit safer, at least for the speed and threat of car traffic.”

But then again, Minneapolis isn’t Anchorage.

Lindeke also observed that in Minneapolis the “potholes” in winter’s weather-beaten roads “are inverse speed bumps. They’re crazy this time of year, but after you hit a doozy, you drive slower.”

This might be true of Minneapolis drivers, but with so many Anchorage drivers complaining about major damage to cars and trucks due to rough, compacted snow on Anchorage road surfaces, you have to wonder if the slow-down concept is understood in the country’s northernmost major city.

“Last night while driving north on Jewel Lake, we saw our fourth truck/car, with a broken front axle,” Ed Cullinane added to the ongoing Nextdoor discussions about the city roads a few days ago. “There is still one parked on Strawberry just after getting off the Minnesota Bypass. Never before in 20 years have we seen so many broken front axles.”

There were a number of posters who subsequently chimed in to suggest that it might be a good idea for drivers to slow down to avoid doing such damage to their vehicle, but the post getting by far the most likes was a response from Cullinane:

“The point of my post, simply was why can’t the State or Municipal snow plows with graders/scrapers scrape away those ruts/holes in the ice? thereby making the public roadway less bumpy.”

Yes, why can’t they? Don’t they understand the motor vehicle is supposed to rule?