The normal kill sites/Anchorage Annual Traffic Report

On pace for road-death record

With 11 pedestrians dead this year on the streets of Sacramento, the California city of half a million people is on the verge of declaring a state of emergency.

Meanwhile, 2,000 miles to the north in the city of Anchorage with a population about half the size, 13 have died, and the community is marching toward a new record for pedestrian deaths with hardly anyone in authority or power batting an eye.

Some Anchorage assembly members have suggested lowering speed limits in some places, but it seems a rather empty gesture given that there is little enforcement. Northern Lights Boulevard, posted at 35 to 40 mph through the heart of busy Anchorage Midtown, often witnesses traffic flowing at 10 to 20 mph faster than the speed limit.

And, of course, the idea of lowering speeds to safer levels has already brought accusations of an attempt to “penalize drivers.”  Isn’t it bad enough that they’re technically limited to less than highway speeds through the city?

Welcome to Alaska, where the old saying says “we don’t give a (insert your profanity of choice) how they do it Outside.” Outside, for those being unattuned to Alaska slang, being anywhere other than Alaska.

Alaska’s largest city has already reached the previous annual record of 13 deaths set in 2021, according to the municipality’s latest annual traffic report, and the average number of deaths in October, November and December has averaged 2.2 for the past decade.

There has never been a year in that time when at least one pedestrian didn’t die over the course of these three months, and there was a peak of four deaths in 2017 and 2018.

As has become the norm in the state, the dead victims are being blamed.

“On Saturday night, at 9:07 p.m….Crystal Anvil, 38, was struck by a car while crossing the westbound lanes, about 500 feet from a crosswalk, police said,” Alaska Public Media reported. 

Where exactly the Alaska Native woman was when struck is unclear from the Anchorage Police Department (APD) report, but the agency has a habit of making a point of pedestrians being outside of crosswalks even when they are in crosswalks.

The problem would appear to stem from an unfamiliarity with the Anchorage municipal code which defines a crosswalk as “the portion of a roadway at an intersection included within the connection of the lateral lines of the sidewalks on opposite sides of the street measured from the curbs, or, in the absence of curbs, from the edges of the traversable roadway and, in the absence of a sidewalk on one side of the roadway, the portion of a roadway included within the extension of the lateral lines of the sidewalk at right angles to the centerline.”

For those who can’t quite get their head around all that legalistic mumbo jumbo, the code goes on to make it clear that Anchorage has both “marked” and “unmarked” crosswalks where “the driver of a vehicle shall yield the right-of-way, slowing down or stopping if need be to so yield, to a pedestrian crossing the roadway.”

Anchorage drivers, however, are even less familiar with local law than APD officers, meaning that anyone foolish enough to expect a driver to slow down, let alone stop so as to yield at an unmarked crosswalk, is sure to end up dead. And there is no record of any driver ever being prosecuted for striking and killing a pedestrian in an unmarked crosswalk.

Anchorage media behavior in these cases is to take its lead from APD and, as Bob Dylan once put it, go “along for the ride.” The situation is such that when 27-year-old Tia Smart was struck and killed while walking along Brayton Drive, a state-designated bike route, in 2016, the Associated Press went so far as to report that police said that although the “drive has no sidewalk…pedestrians are not prohibited.”

As if there is somewhere in the U.S. where walking down a roadway designated as a state bike route is illegal. The Anchorage municipal bike plan in 2006 recommended a separated path be created along Brayton to provide safety for cyclists and other vulnerable road users, but instead an unaltered Brayton was incorporated into the U.S. Bicycle Route system in 2011 to keep vulnerable road users safe from traffic on the adjacent Seward Highway.

Whether the driver who killed Smart suffered any consequences for bad driving (it’s a rule that drivers aren’t supposed to run into things) is unknown and impossible to determine. APD generally refuses to identify drivers who kill pedestrians or other vulnerable road users because, a spokesperson has said, those drivers are involved in traffic incidents, not crimes.

The Alaska Department of Transportation now also says the “bike route” sign on Brayton is meaningless, too.

Not as if it mattered.

Killed in a crosswalk

When 85-year-old, retired dentist Carlton Higgins was run over and killed in a crosswalk in late August of last year, the Anchorage Police Department at first refused to say much of anything about his death while Anchorage residents piled on to APD’s Facebook page to suggest Higgins was, like other vulnerable road users, responsible for getting himself killed, something APD did nothing to refute.

Five months later, APD finally revealed to the Alaska Landmine that it had cited, though not charged, a driver in connection with Higgins’ death. Reporter Paxson Woelber admitted he was a little shocked when APD conceded to provide information on the deadly collision.

What Woelber discovered was that the penalty for killing a pedestrian in a crosswalk in Anchorage is a $100 fine and four points on one’s driver’s license for failing to yield. Driver Russel E. Webb paid a fine that was $120 less than that imposed on snowmachine operator Austin Gibbs after he killed two sled dogs in a collision with a dog team last winter. 

Still, Webb was at least ticketed. Most drives never suffer any consequences, especially if they hit a pedestrian or cyclist in one of the city’s many “unmarked” crosswalks.

Even if they are speeding, it doesn’t matter.

After 65-year-old cyclist Eldridge Griffith was run down and killed by Tj Justice on Northern Lights Boulevard in 2014, then Assistant District Attorney Daniel Shorey reported that Justice was likely driving 46 mph on a road with a posted speed limit of 35 mph, but “I do not believe that such speed is far enough removed from the speed other drivers maintain on that stretch of road to represent either reckless driving or excessive speeding.”

There were no indications Justice, who was also found to have THC in his blood from having smoked marijuana on the day in question, made any attempt to brake or go around Griffith. Shorey blamed that on a station wagon momentarily hiding Griffith from Justice’s view while the assistant DA ignored the fact Justice lied to police after the collision.

“Justice told police he smoked marijuana the night before going to bed at 10:00 p.m. and denied using marijuana after 10:00 p.m.,” Storey’s report said. “The drug testing revealed Justice had smoked marijuana that day.”

A handicapped driver, Justice was also on medication and so disabled that police couldn’t get him out of the car to perform a field sobriety test. But despite all this, Shorey concluded that “I cannot prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Justice’s failure to perceive the risk of collision was a gross deviation from the standard of care that a reasonable person would observe in the situation.”

Or at least a “reasonable person” by Anchorage standards, ignoring the fact that had Justice not been speeding Griffith would have had nearly twice the chance of surviving the collision.

“Results show that the average risk of severe injury for a pedestrian struck by a vehicle reaches 10 percent at an impact speed of 16 mph, 25 percent at 23 mph, 50 percent at 31 mph, 75 percent at 39 mph, and 90 percent at 46 mph,” according to the American Automobile Association (AAA) “The average risk of death for a pedestrian reaches 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.”

There are almost certainly speeders involved in some, several or many of the latest deadly collisions because on the roads in question, few drive the speed limit. This is a simple Alaska reality that can be fact checked by anyone.

Go drive the speed limit on Northern Lights Boulevard or Minnesota Drive and count the cars that go flying past.

A national norm

In fairness to Alaska drivers, the lack of consequences for running into a vulnerable road user is so generally universal in the U.S. that it is surprising some serial killer hasn’t figured out he could get his kicks out of offing people using cars and trucks.

By moving around the country, regularly changing names and always cooperating with law enforcement after a collision so that no one connected the dots, someone could probably do this for a long, long time because there are almost never consequences for killing someone with a motor vehicle.

When a California driver drove into a bike lane, ran down from behind National Football League coach Greg Knapp who was cycling there, and killed him in 2021, there were no charges. A local DA decided that “there is insufficient evidence to satisfy the requisite standard of criminal negligence on the part of the suspect driver” even though the driver admitted he was looking at a hands-free cellphone rather than the road when the collision occurred. 

The story was the same when a Arizona man mowed down a group of cyclists in Arizona in last year killing two and injuring 15. Police charged him with two counts of manslaughter and three counts of aggravated assault, but the local DA dropped the charges when driver Pedro Quintana-Lujan blamed the decision on steering wheel that locked,” although neither the Arizona Department of Public Safety or investigators with the National Transportation Safety Board  (NSTB) could find anything wrong with Quintana-Lujan’s truck. 

South Dakota residents did get outraged in 2022 when their state attorney general,  Jason Ravnsborg, ran down a man walking on the shoulder of a roadway in that state and left him to die only to get off with a $1,000 fine for three misdeamoners, including the use of his phone while driving, connected to the man’s death.

But when a South Dakota Public Media reporter did a deep dive into that story – something U.S. journalists rarely do when vulnerable road users are killed – she discovered that “the attorney general did not receive lighter charges or punishment than other South Dakota drivers involved in comparable fatal accidents. ”

In fact, it could be argued that Ravnsborg was treated more harshly.

From 2016 through 2020,  Arielle Zionts reported, “Ravnsborg was among at least 31 other drivers who were not legally intoxicated when they…hit and killed pedestrians during this time period.

“Twenty of these drivers – or about two-thirds of them – were not charged with any offense or crime related to their driving. The remaining 11 drivers were cited for traffic offenses or charged with low-level misdemeanors.

“None of the 31 drivers served jail or prison time, and none paid a fine close to the $1,000 imposed on the attorney general. None of them, including Ravnsborg, appear to have been arrested at the scene.”

Why? Because it’s generally not considered a crime to kill someone with your motor vehicle in the U.S., which has to make one wonder why governments waste so much time and money on the licensing of drivers. The data would indicate it doesn’t make them drive any better.

The only good news in Anchorage is that it could be worse.

City records indicate that of the more than 1,100 pedestrians who have been reported hit in the past 10 years – a rate of about 110 per year – 17 out of 18 survived although two in nine were seriously injured.

Cyclists faired a lot better. Forty-six out of 47 people reported hit while on a bike survived while only one in 12 was seriously injured.

There was no report on how many moose survived, although collisions with those big, hard to miss animals accounted for four percent of crashes in the city with pedestrians and cyclists trailing at three percent each.

The main things Anchorage motorists were reported running into were each other, 67 percent; buildings, light posts and other objects, 17 percent; or the ground when they rolled their car or truck, five percent.

Pets were reported struck less than one percent of the time, but many of those collisions go unreported because many drivers don’t bother to tell anyone they ran over a cat or dog.

A lot of collisions also go unreported in Anchorage, but plenty are reported, about a dozen per day on average with a distinct seasonality. In 2022, the last year for which full data is available, collisions fell to a low of about three per day in April before rising to about 17 per day in December, according to the data.

The number per day starts climbing steadily in September on its way to the December peak. This is thus the start of the months when it is wise to drive defensively, very defensively. But many don’t.

In crashes in which contributing factors could be identified, the muni report has aggressive/erratic operation number one followed by a variety of close cousins – improper driving, hit and run, disregarded traffic control, unsafe speed, swerved, red light violation and operating under the influence in that order.

Pedestrian error, despite all the pedestrians blamed for their deaths, comes in fifteenth at about 9 percent of the rate of aggressive driving, and cyclist error, despite all the complaints about cyclists taking dangerous risks on Anchorage roads, doesn’t happen often enough to be included in the data.