Brayton Drive, one of Anchorage’s designated “cylce routes”/Craig Medred photo

To speed us on our way, we kill people

In a month when the deaths of vulnerable road users are normally in decline in Alaska’s largest city, a motor vehicle has struck and killed a record, 14th pedestrian.

The body count is now more than 50 percent above the decadal average for pedestrian deaths, and there is still a month and a half to go to the end of the year.

That the latest death came on Brayton Drive in South Anchorage came as no surprise given that the Seward Highway access road has been the scene of two other pedestrian deaths in recent years along with a variety of collisions involving vulnerable road users.

Marc Grober, an Anchorage road safety advocate, suggested the road – designated as an Anchorage “Bike Route” – should instead be flagged as dangerous to warn pedestrians and cyclists of the proven risks there.

The Anchorage Police Department is saying little about the latest fatality. The agency reported only that 33-year-old Matthew Douglas was struck by a northbound sport-utility vehicle and died on Friday. APD spokesman Shelly Wozniak said the agency would not identify the driver because “we do not release the driver’s name publicly if no charges are filed.”

Neither would she clarify APD’s statement that Douglas was a “pedestrian in the roadway.” A roadway is defined as “a road together with the land at its edge,” the land at its edge is commonly called the “shoulder.”

“APD’s use of the term ‘roadway’ begs the question of whether there was any non-roadway space where the incident took place, and if not, why the term was used,” Anchorage road safety advocate Marc Grober said. “Such usage appears loaded based on the statistical likelihood that the driver was exceeding the speed limit, which was more than likely the cause of the collision.

Grober added that his concerns about Brayton were not “limited to APD’s rhetoric. The Alaska Department of Transportation, ​​​​​Anchorage Metropolitan Area Transportation Solutions and the Municipality of Anchorage have known that Brayton is unsafe at least since a child was run over on the road on his bike. Brayton is signed both for pedestrians and as a bike path though no segregated infrastructure or protected cycle path or sidewalk – required by the Federal Highway Safety Administration – is in place.”

The lack of infrastructure, however, didn’t stop APD from blaming the victim of a deadly collision on Brayton in 2018.

After 38-year-old Kasey Turner was killed in 2018, an APD spokeswoman told the Anchorage Daily News that Turner “was partially in the roadway and not on a sidewalk, and he was wearing dark clothing.

“Pedestrians should always utilize sidewalks or keep as far away from the main road as possible.”

The newspaper made no mention of the fact that Brayton lacks sidewalks, and it did not question what “partially in the roadway” meant. Given the large berm of snow shown in a photograph that accompanied the story, partially in the roadway could have been as far to the right as a person could walk along the road.

Not uncommon

Local government’s willingness to ignore the safety of vulnerable road users and law enforcement’s obfuscation of the details of collisions that kill vulnerable road users is not unique to Anchorage.

These behaviors are common in a country where road deaths have long been considered to be the result of “accidents” even though, technically, any incident in which “one person causes the death of another” is legally defined as a “homicide.”

Barring the involvement of drunk or drugged drivers, however, motor vehicle fatalities are almost never investigated as if they were homicides, and they are even more rarely prosecuted as such. In many places, local authorities have now taken to avoiding the term accident, which suggests an unavoidable incident, and referencing motor vehicle “crashes” or  “collisions.”

But they continue to treat crashes and collisions as if they were indeed accidents.

The driver who killed cyclist Matt Glover near Fairbanks in 2022 told police there that he didn’t see Grober because he’d “bent down to look (in his mirror) and about four seconds later I heard a big thump.”  Fairbanks Police then ignored his confession that he had taken his eyes off the road for a dangerously long time.

According to the American Automobile Association (AAA), studies have found that “taking your eyes off the road for only two seconds doubles the chance that you will be involved in a crash.”

Four seconds is just six-tenths of a second less than the average time the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has estimated it takes for a driver to check their phone and read a text.

This dangerous eyes-off-the-road-time is why 49 states now have laws making “distracted driving” illegal.

To test the danger of these 4.6 seconds, Lexus in 2021 put drivers in a car in which the windshield could be blacked out and turned them loose on a test track. The results were not pretty.

“Lexus chose not to tell its participants that it would be blinding them for a period of time, so the panic of suddenly not being able to see might be clouding the results here, but the fact remains that at 55 mph, 4.6 seconds is enough time to cover the length of a football field,” CarScoops later reported. “You don’t need to be at the Super Bowl to know a lot can happen in that amount of space.”

The video speaks for itself. It can be seen by clicking here.

No accountability

Still, drivers who take their eyes off the road are rarely held accountable for running into and killing others unless driving drunk or drugged, and in the rare cases where charges are filed they are usually minor.

After a pickup truck slammed into 85-year-old Carlton Higgins in a crosswalk in Anchorage last year, the Anchorage Police Department reported his death, the cooperation of the driver at the scene, and the lack of charges or citations as the Anchorage Daily News recorded.

It took the Alaska Landmine, an alternative news website, to six months later reveal that APD had eventually decided to take action against Russell Webb, the driver who killed Higgins. Webb was ticketed for failure to yield to a pedestrian in a crosswalk. The ticket cost him $100 and four points on his driving record.

“The exceptionally light penalty given to the driver who killed Higgins is standard practice in Anchorage, where the criminal justice system and law enforcement routinely decline to hold drivers responsible for striking and injuring or killing pedestrians and other vulnerable road users,” reporter Paxson Woelber added.

Webb went back to driving after the deadly collision.  To lose a driver’s license even temporarily in Alaska, a driver must accumulate “12 points in 12 months or 18 points in 24 months,” according to the Alaska Division of Motor Vehicles, which goes out of its way to try to help drivers prevent this from happening.

“Traffic law violators are sent a warning letter upon reaching the halfway mark towards a point suspension. Violators are advised to take steps to correct their poor-driving behavior,” the agency says.

“Credits may be earned for violation-free driving and/or completion of a defensive driver course (DDC). A DDC may be taken once every 12 months for a point reduction.”

Again, this response to deadly collisions is not unique to Alaska. There is a long-running, national trend toward treating driving as a necessity rather than a privilege and in turn minimizing or ignoring the harms it can cause.

South Dakota residents were outraged when that state’s attorney general ran down and killed a pedestrian walking along the shoulder of a highway there in 2020 only to get off with a $1,000 fine after pleading guilty to misdemeanors of making an illegal lane change and driving while using his phone.

But when South Dakota Public Media did a deep dive into how other drivers were treated after similar deadly collisions – something most U.S. media has proven reluctant to do – it found that “among at least 31 other drivers who were not legally intoxicated when they accidentally hit and killed pedestrian….20 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.”

The lack of consequences for bad driving, even when it turns deadly, hasn’t helped make drivers more conscientious. The Governors Highway Safety Association took note of this in February when it cited the need for “more equitable enforcement focused on dangerous driving behaviors” as part of a call for a “national safety strategy” to bring down road deaths. 

An instructor’s view

Jose Corpas, a 25-year veteran driving instructor and licensing examiner in New York, found himself so troubled by what is happening that he earlier this week wrote a commentary for Streetsblog NYC in which he warned of the public’s increasingly “entitled attitude toward the danger-prone privilege of driving.”

“During in-car lessons and mandatory pre-licensing course lectures, I stress the importance of not having tunnel vision,” he wrote. “I stress that the roads are meant to be shared with other motorists, pedestrians, cyclists, horses, carriages and even farm vehicles.

“But when I get to the part where I explain that up to 94 percent of car crashes are a result of human error or ‘choice,’ I begin to lose hope.

“Not too long ago, the drivers I observed were more courteous. They knew that you had to take turns with other vehicles when merging, unlike today, where many drivers are intent on not letting anyone in front of them. Back then, drivers would stop and let you park. Today, they are too eager to pass through even the smallest of spaces rather than wait the few seconds it takes for someone to back into a parking space. Driving was more of a social activity in the past, with the use of hand signals to advise the other cars of their intentions and also to give a friendly wave of the hand to say thanks when you let them pass. That intimacy is gone.

“During lessons, I stress that the streets are not a racetrack, that it is not the fastest who goes first, but the one who has the right-of-way. Almost every time I point that out, another driver  on the road breaks a rule. The student says something along the lines of, ‘You see; they did it; why can’t I?'”

Corpas is not alone in making these observations. After surveying drivers last year, Nationwide Mutal Insurance Company warned of “dangerous driving behavior drastically higher than last year” with 59 percent of Gen Z drivers reporting they were more impatient than ever on the road. 

Nearly 40 percent of them also admitted they were “looking at their phone” regularly while driving, despite those state laws against distracted driving, and 38 percent said they were video chatting while driving.

AAA warned in August that video chatting is a troubling new trend because “holding a phone to film yourself while driving is extremely dangerous – it combines visual, manual and cognitive distraction.”

Better and increased enforcement – if you pay close attention to the behavior of drivers around you in Anchorage you will find an alarming number of them on their phones much of the time – would help to make the country’s roads safer, but enforcement of distracted driving laws and accountability for deadly driving aren’t the only potential solutions for reducing traffic deaths.

Speed kills

Brayton Drive is a highway-access road with a posted speed limit of 45 mph. A pedestrian hit by a car driving at that speed has about a 90 percent chance of severe injury and a chance of survival of slightly less than 50 percent, according to a 2011 study conducted by AAA.

Newer research suggests the risks of severe injury and death only increase when SUVs are involved as was the case in the latest fatality.

“…Pickups, SUVs and vans with a hood height greater than 40 inches are about 45 percent more likely to cause fatalities in pedestrian crashes than cars and other vehicles with a hood height of 30 inches or less and a sloping profile,” the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety reported last year after a study of nearly 18,000 pedestrian strikes.

This is, in part, death by design.

“Over the past 30 years, the average U.S. passenger vehicle has gotten about four inches wider, 10 inches longer, eight inches taller and 1,000 pounds heavier,” the Institute reported. And “vehicles with hoods more than 40 inches off the ground at the leading edge and a grille sloped at an angle of 65 degrees or less were 45 percent more likely to cause pedestrian fatalities than those with a similar slope and hood heights of 30 inches or less.”

The Institute’s Senior Research Transportation Engineer Wen Hu claimed that “there’s no functional benefit to these massive, blocky fronts,” but in Alaska, for better or worse, there is one benefit. Those high, block front ends tend to knock moose over instead of rolling them onto the hood and into the windshield which can lead to serious injuries or death for motor vehicle passengers.

This is part of the reason why big vehicles with massive front ends are popular in the 49th state, and in the state’s largest city where drivers run into about 100 moose per year on average.

Since 2013, three people have died in the municipality as a result of collisions with moose, according to the city records. Moose are bigger and easier to spot than pedestrians, but drivers hit a lot of them anyway.

A study of motor vehicle-moose collisions published in Environmental Research Letters last found that most of the collisions take place in the winter when the days are short in Alaska and snows force moose down out of the mountains and often onto roadways where the big animals find walking easier.

The study also found an inverse relationship between collisions and snowy weather that brings slippery roads, leading the researchers to conclude that this “negative relationship could be caused partly by reduced traffic volumes during snowstorms and possibly more cautious (ie. slower) drivers.”

They went on to suggest that “reduced nighttime speed limits from December (through) February could reduce collision risk, especially if coupled with driver education and lighting improvements of roadways or vehicles. As with most regulations, the key challenge
would lie in compliance: recent research shows that seasonal speed limits are often ignored by drivers.”

In Anchorage, all speed limits are often ignored by drivers.

Though Brayton has a posted speed limit of 45 mph, it is not unusual to see drivers there going almost as fast or as fast as drivers on the adjacent Seward Highway with a posted speed limit of 65 mph and traffic often proceeding at 70 mph or more.

A pedestrian hit by a car doing 65 mph, let alone a blunt-nosed SUV or pickup truck traveling at that speed, has almost no chance of surviving the collision, according to AAA.

Why such speeds are allowed on Brayton is hard to comprehend. Because the road is posted as a “bike route” but lacks bike lanes, it would be accurately described as a “shared roadway.”

The Federal Highway Administration says that “shared roadways are suitable in urban areas on streets with low speeds – 25 mph or less – or low traffic volumes – 3,000 average daily traffic or less – depending on speed and land use.”

The National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO) makes a similar recommendation as to road safety, but the Municipality of Anchorage has pointedly decided not to align itself with NATCO safety guidelines for cyclists or pedestrians.

And the Alaska Department of Transportation, which is technically the authority managing Brayton, has said the “Bike Route” sign there is meaningless. Shana Mann discovered this after her 13-year-old son was hit by a driver and seriously injured on the road two years ago. 

Mann couldn’t even get APD to investigate that Brayton collision, and the state DOT, for its part, said the “Bike Route” sign is only there to direct cyclists off the Seward Highway. It is not meant to mean, according to the agency, that the “Bike Route” provides any of the limited protection for vulnerable road users that bike routes are supposed to provide.

Welcome to Alaska, where providing the maximum convenience for motorists tops life itself.