A typical Anchorage interesection with “unmarked” crosswalks where pedestrians are supposed to have the right-of-way/Google

Examining Anchorage’s Deadly Streets

After a day spent perusing social media views on the record number of pedestrians being run down and killed by motor vehicles in Alaska’s largest city this year, a few conclusions can be drawn.

The first is that there is a huge amount of ignorance surrounding Anchorage traffic laws and considerable misinformation as to where deaths happen on the city’s roadways. Then comes the frightening attitudes some driver self-confess plus the realization of the role the city’s significant homeless population may play in making the roads safer for vulnerable road users.

As counter-intuitive as the latter might seem, it is fair to say that if you are an educated, working individual who walks or bikes in Anchorage, you owe the city’s homeless population a big thank you.

Why do I say this? Because social media is overloaded with tales of cyclists riding against traffic down the middle of traffic lanes and pedestrians wandering into the street seemingly oblivious to anything around them whether due to the chemicals in their system or not.

And everyone in Anchorage knows who most of these people are, the homeless.

As one woman put it on the Nextdoor website, “Please keep in mind that these are street-living persons being hit. They are not responsible persons who are also destitute. I encounter these persons when driving at night and am scared to death that I may hit one….”

That some unknown number of Anchorage drivers are “scared to death” of hitting on of these people on the roads is a good thing. It helps to keep drivers alert and attentive and driving, as was once often advocated, defensively.

I’m not going to go to greater lengths as to how we all know the homeless are a part of the issue here other than to quote U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart on another subject hard to define with words: “Perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it.”

And we’re all going to have to go with that because the Annual Traffic Reports compiled by the Municipality of Anchorage provide no data on the educational levels or economic status of those killed and maimed on the city’s road

Still, there is a lot of other useful information in those reports which one would have hoped the city’s legacy media would have reported long ago to add some facts to the discussion. But, obviously, the days when the media filled that role are over.

Angry drivers

Into the void left by this lack of information come mightily upset motorists rushing to defend their turf – that being the pavement – by blaming the victims of collisions for their own deaths.

As one woman observed at Nextdoor, “if the driver is driving the limit or lower, the onus falls on the walker to get out of the way.”

Or as another put it, apparently unaware of why the country has driving schools and requires motorists to pass a test to get a driver’s license, “not everyone has defensive driving abilities.”

Anyone who lacks these abilities should probably park the motor vehicle or at least keep their speed under 20 mph so they don’t kill themselves or someone else. But some think all’s good as long as they’re traveling the “speed limit.”

When the issue of motor-vehicle speed and fatalities came up on Nextdoor, one woman responded this way, “If you’re going the speed limit and the person is jaywalking, you are not going too fast!”

Or, as someone posting as Steve Shepherd put it, “Comes down to a life choice: cross the road with no crosswalks, you risk your life, get run over, c’est la vie.”

Shepherd’s comment underlines the issues of both misinformation and ignorance. The misinformation is focused on where exactly people are dying on the roads of Anchorage and who those people are with the ignorance focused on what constitutes a “crosswalk” in the municipality.

Let’s first deal with the issue of fatalities. The municipality’s Annual Traffic Reports can provide a lot of information here. And the report on the five-year rolling average for Anchorage collisions as of 2022, the latest fully detailed year, is a good place to start.

That report says that for those five years there was an annual average of:

• 3,439.6 motor vehicle collisions
• 113.4 or 3.4 percent of which involved pedestrians
• 92 or 2.7 percent which involved bicyclists
• And 1 or 0.02 percent of which involved other vulnerable road users, such as people in wheelchairs

These 3,439.6 collisions resulted in an average of:

• 13.80 deaths of motorists and 65.40 serious injuries
• 8.4 deaths of pedestrians and 23 serious injuries
• 1.20 deaths of cyclists and 7.6 serious injuries
• No deaths of other vulnerable road users, but 0.20 serious injuries

Of these collisions, 2,333 or almost 69 percent happened at intersections and:

• 85.8 or 3.7 percent involved pedestrians
• 74.8 or 3.2 percent involved bicycles
• 0.6 involved other vulnerable road users or what the report calls “other non-motorized

These collisions resulted in:

• Six deaths of motorists and 53.40 serious injuries
• Four deaths of pedestrians and 16.8 major injuries
• One death of a cyclist and 6.40 serious injuries

So the first thing you see here is that motorists comprise the largest number of people dying on Anchorage streets, something that is regularly overlooked. Meanwhile, the deaths of pedestrians at crosswalks, ie. intersections, account for slightly less than half of pedestrian deaths but about 73 percent of major injuries.

Or, in other words, intersections are more dangerous than deadly for pedestrians, which is to be expected in that most of the collisions there happen at lower speeds. And the reality is that the lower the speed of a motor vehicle, the better the odds of survival for a vulnerable road user.

This is why a National Transportation Safety Board study of road deaths found that while “more bicycle crashes involving motor vehicles occur at intersections, crash severity is higher when a crash occurs at a midblock location. The travel speeds of motor vehicles at midblock locations tend to be higher compared to intersections where there may be traffic lights, stop signs, or turning vehicles. 

The data for Anchorage would indicate that in Alaska’s largest city, this midblock danger applies to pedestrians as well.

Crosswalks

Now, as to those crosswalks that dead pedestrians are regularly blamed for ignoring – as if it is somehow OK to run people down and kill them if they are not in a crosswalk – they exist at every intersection in Anchorage whether it is marked with white lines on the pavement or not.

The Municode defines a crosswalk as “the portion of a roadway 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.”

These are elsewhere in the code referred to as “marked” and “unmarked” crosswalks, as in 9.20.040, which stipulates that “every pedestrian crossing a roadway at any point other than within a marked crosswalk or within an unmarked crosswalk at an intersection shall yield the right-of-way to all vehicles,” and 9.20.020, which stipulates that “when traffic control signals are not in place or not in operation, 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 within any marked or unmarked crosswalk.”

There is a practical reason crosswalks are defined in this way. It would cost the municipality a significant amount of money to paint white lines on the road at every intersection in every Anchorage neighborhood to make it safe for people to walk around near their homes.

By law, however, these unmarked crosswalks don’t exist only in neighborhoods but at all intersections on all Anchorage roads although even the Anchorage Police Department seems to somehow overlook this at times. Motorists are, by law, required to yield to pedestrians in these unmarked crosswalks, but there is no record of a motorist ever being prosecuted for killing a pedestrian or cyclist by failing to do so.

Anchorage authorities have over the years shown a strong bias towards motorists when vulnerable road users are killed. Though APD and Alaska prosecutors have these days dropped the use of the word “accident” in describing pedestrians and cyclists hit by motorists, they still treat these collisions as accidents.

After a motorist ran a red light in Anchorage in 2008, killing 19-year-old cyclist Jonathon Johnson at the intersection of 40th Avenue and C Street in midtown Anchorage, a state prosecutor told the grand jury considering the case that the crash wouldn’t constitute a crime unless jurors found driver Melissa Rabe was driving under the influence of drugs.

“At the conclusion of the state’s presentation,” court documents said of the grand jury’s reaction, “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 it’s just civil negligence, you’ve heard from (APD) Investigator (Steve) Buchta that mere civil negligence results in nothing more than a red light citation….”

The grand jury, for its part, then decided to recognize the THC in Rabe’s system as an impairment and indicted Rabe for manslaughter. But her attorney later told a court that the police officers who testified before the grand jury as to the effects of marijuana on drivers weren’t qualified, and thus the only “admissible evidence on the issue of recklessness established that Ms. Rabe failed to stop for a traffic signal. Committing a traffic violation does not, in and of itself, establish recklessness, as the state conceded at grand jury.”

A judge subsequently ruled the THC evidence could not be used against Rabe, and prosecutors dropped the case. Six years later, when a motorist ran down 65-year-old cyclist Eldridge Griffith, prosecutors decided the driver’s traveling at 10 mph faster than the speed limit didn’t constitute recklessness nor did the THC in that driver’s blood.

“Alaska (unlike other states like Washington, Montana and Nevada) lacks a … DUI statute for THC levels in a driver’s blood,” then Assistant District Attorney Daniel Shorey wrote a six-page memorandum to the Anchorage Police Department detailing why prosecutors decided not to bring charges. “In other words, the mere presence of THC will not automatically lead to a conviction for DUI. Instead, the evidence as a whole, including blood tests, erratic driving, and roadside sobriety test results, must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the person was impaired.”

APD had failed to conduct a roadside sobriety test on the driver because he claimed he was too handicapped to get out of the car. Alaska has no law setting an impairment level for THC.

Ten other states now have zero tolerance for THC or a metabolite in a driver’s blood, according to the Governors Highway Safety Association. Four more have zero tolerance for THC but no restriction on metabolites. Another four have sent a limit for THIC above which a driver is judged impaired.

And Colorado set a standard of five nanograms (ng) or more per milliliter of THC in whole blood but allows authorities to arrest or cite people “for impaired driving if law enforcement observes and documents driver impairment to any degree, even with a blood level below 5 ng….”

Colorado wrote the law after it legalized marijuana and saw traffic fatalities begin to rise. A 2023  study by the University of Illinois Chicago School of Public Health found this to be the case in most states.

After looking at data from 2009 to 2019, researchers reported that crash fatalities rose 14 percent in California, 16 percent in Colorado, 20 percent in Alaska and 22 percent in Oregon. The 2023 Anchorage Annal Traffic Report records does not break out separate categories for alcohol or drug involved collisions, but overall reports a relatively low number of collisions related to drugs and alcohol as a whole – 305 or about 8.6 percent of the 3,528 for 2022.

The report lists about four times as many collisions connected to “aggressive/erratic operation.” Many Anchorage cyclists having been often close-passed in violation of a municipal ordinance APD has never enforced are well familiar with the problem of aggressive drivers in Alaska’s largest city.

The muni report provides no detail on those aggressive drivers, but does note that 16 percent of Anchorage collisions – or about 584 – were the result of sideswipes in 2022, a year in which one cyclist was killed and six were seriously injured.

Overall, however, the data would indicate that cycling in Alaska’s largest city is considerably safer than it looks while walking is more dangerous although the data is clearly biased by the large number of homeless who die.

Exactly how much the sacrifice of those people helps protect better-off pedestrians and cyclists by “scaring” drivers into paying attention is impossible to say, but it is well known that hypervigilant drivers – those driving defensively – are much less likely to run into anything – people, animals, structures or other motor vehicles – than drivers alseep at the switch so to speak.

In a peer-reviewed paper published in the journal of the International Association of Traffic and Safety Services two decades ago, Australian researchers warned that inattention is a badly overlooked contributor to motor vehicles crashes and collisions.

Drivers they studied “did not perceive driver inattention as a major contributor of serious crashes,” they wrote. “This perception is not consistent with crash statistics from the Australian State of Queensland which showed that it contributed more to not only the number of fatal crashes than fatigue but also several times more to the number of serious injury crashes than speed, alcohol or fatigue. Part of this incorrect perception may be due to the lack of publicity and awareness on driver inattention as a major contributor to serious crashes.”

Nothing has changed in the years since.

Inattention now runs rampant in Anchorage. It is not uncommon to see drivers doing 45 or 50 mph through Midtown in vehicles tight against the curb despite an obviously impaired pedestrian weaving down the sidewalk directly next to them. Drivers don’t even bother to get as far left in their lane as possible just in case that person topples over and lands on the edge of the roadway.

In fact, anyone who spends much time watching drivers in Anchorage is likely come to the conclusion that its only by sheer luck, or the grace of God, that they don’t kill far more vulnerable roads users than they are now killing.

It isn’t by accident that Anchorage is on its way to a new record for pedestrian road fatalities. Anchorage drivers have been working hard for years to earn it.