A motorist blows through a red light on Anchorage’s Northern Lights Boulevard/Craig Medred photo

Who is responsible for pedestrian death record?

With Anchorage having set a new record for killing pedestrians on its streets, and more than a few motorists happy to blame it on the homeless getting in the way of their cars and trucks, the time has come for Triple-A, as in the American Automobile Association, to weigh in.

AAA is a more than 100-year-old organization formed in 1902 to lobby for more and better roads and highways suitable for automobiles. A nonprofit, national automobile association, it has since become involved in all kinds of activities from providing roadside assistance to protecting motorists’ rights. 

And in 1947,  it formed the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety to study how and why people die on American roadways. The Foundation has been issuing regular traffic safety reports ever since. The latest came out on Dec. 5, and said this:

“In 2023, nearly 41,000 people were killed in U.S. traffic crashes, a sobering reminder of the ongoing public health crisis on our roads. Despite a slight decrease from the previous year, the threat posed by risky driving behaviors remains alarmingly high.”

“Public health crisis” and “the threat posed by risky driving behaviors remains alarmingly high” are phrases that ought to warrant everyone’s attention, especially with the report going on to say that while the vast majority of American motorists talk about safety, way too many ignore it in practice.

The report concluded that of the drivers on the road today, only 34.9 percent, or a little more than a third, actually qualify as “safe drivers.” The other two-thirds?

They were reported to be aggressive, distracted or dangerously speeding, all of which lead to either more or worse collisions.

If these national numbers are reflective of the behaviors of drivers in Anchorage – and there is no reason to believe they aren’t – the odds are that two out of every three pedestrians killed in the state’s largest city were hit by someone engaged in what AAA classified as “risky driving behaviors.”

Safe drivers

This is not to say there are no safe drivers in Anchorage. The evidence would indicate there are a good number of them.

If you read the social media website NextDoor, you will regularly find safe drivers posting their views on the bad driving of others along with photos of the license plates on the vehicles driven by bad drivers. Folks there also regularly post their complaints or concerns about dodging pedestrians, cyclists and loose dogs.

Pedestrians are also sometimes chastised for inconveniencing drivers by legally claiming the right-of-way at an intersection or sometimes, in the case of cyclists, the road.

But the thing is that the people posting these comments – even the ones complaining about pedestrians and cyclists inconveniencing them by legally taking the right of way – didn’t run into them, or into the motor vehicles driven by bad drivers, or into the moose they sometimes criticize other drivers of ignoring.

Why?

Because safe drivers rarely run into things. They pay attention to both the road and the world along the edges of the road and act accordingly. This is how they avoid hitting other motor vehicles, moose, loose dogs, cyclists and even deranged homeless people wandering around in the middle of the road seemingly asking to be run over.

When they see moose or loose dogs along the sides of the road, they slow down and prepare to stop because there is no telling what those animals are going to do.  When safe drivers see people staggering along beside the roadway or approaching it, as if to cross, they do likewise.

Aggressive drivers, on the other hand, don’t care. Their sense of entitlement is strong, and their most important concern is getting to wherever they have to be as fast as possible.

Distracted drivers, meanwhile, are simply not paying attention to the road, which is why they regularly run into many things, starting with the rear ends of other motor vehicles. A National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA) study found that 87 percent of rear-end collisions involved distracted drivers.

“Over 60 specific, (distracting) activities were defined across 11 activity categories,” the agency reported, and it noted that the use of “wireless devices” – cell phones and smartphones that allow for texting and browsing the internet – accounted for about a third of those rear-end collisions. 

As for the speeding drivers involved in collisions, the problem is that they are going too fast to stop in time to avoid a collision, an issue often only compounded by their inattentiveness, their failure to look far enough ahead on the road, or the bad habit of following other speeding cars too closely.

A video of a 2023 pileup blamed on a self-driving Tesla nicely shows what happens in the latter case. The Tesla in the video slows and then stops in the far lefthand lane on the San Fransisco Bay Bridge. The first driver behind it at the wheel of a sport-utility vehicle (SUV) can’t quite stop in time and taps the Tesla. The driver in the SUV behind him does manage to stop in time, but that vehicle is then rear-ended and a smash-and-bash pile-up begins as a half dozen less than fully attentive drivers crash into the cars ahead of them.

Former U.S. Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao in 2018 went on the record with the claim that this sort of thing is indicative of the fact that “94 percent of (road) accidents occur because of human error.”

Her statement has been challenged by some road safety experts who believe the number is lower and that the claim of human error masks a variety of design errors, especially transportation systems poorly designed to protect pedestrians and cyclists. 

Safer roads

But the essence of their argument is mainly that better design can reduce some of the dangers of human error rather than that human error isn’t a huge factor in road collisions and deaths. And there is no doubt they are right about this.

Cyclists riding safely behind the barriers of protected bike lanes don’t get killed by motorists. And pedestrian fatalities fall dramatically when people on foot are provided push-to-walk stop lights at busy intersections as in Reykjavik, Iceland.

Over the past decade, Iceland – a country with a population about the size of Anchorage – has witnessed an average of 1.1 pedestrian deaths per year, according to data compiled by the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe. Such low death rates are not unusual in the Scandinavian countries.

Onshore to the east in northern Europe, Denmark, a country of nearly 6 million, has averaged fewer than 27 pedestrian deaths per year, according to the UNECE data. That makes for a pedestrian death rate of approximately 0.45 per 100,000 or about one-twelveth this year’s Anchorage death rate of more than five per 100,000.

Norway, a country with a population about 11 times greater than Anchorage, averages approximately 14 pedestrian deaths per year, according to the UNECE.  That’s one less than the Anchorage record of 15 this year with the year not quite over.

Part of the reason for the comparatively low body count is that Norwegian drivers appear to be, in general, more responsible than Anchorage drivers, but a part of it is also that Norway has a base speed limit of 50 kilometers per hour (31 mph) in “built-up areas or town centers” and speed limits of 30 kph (19 mph) in most residential areas.

The country has also made it illegal to have a phone in your hand while driving. The U.S. State Department warns travelers who like play with their phones when driving that in Norway they “risk a fine of 1,300 kroner (approximately $215).

“Automatic cameras placed by the police along roadways help enforce speed limits,” State adds, and then in bold letters notes that “fines – and sometimes even jail time – are imposed for violations.”

Anchorage has no speed cameras, almost no enforcement of speed limits, and if a driver ignores the law created to protect pedestrians in crosswalks and kills one there, the fine is $100.

A driver in Norway faces stiffer punishment for holding a phone in his or her hand. Not to mention that in that country someone could go to jail for dangerous speeding, which seems somewhat less significant than killing a pedestrian.

But then the lives of pedestrians and cyclists in Alaska are of little value unlike those in Norway.

In Alaska, the fine for killing a pedestrian is less than that for killing a sled dog. After a young Healy man on a snowmachine struck and killed two sled dogs on the Denali Highway last year he was fined $320 or $160 per dog.

After truck driver Russell E. Webb ran over and killed retired dentist Carlton Higgins in an Anchorage crosswalk last year, he was fined $100.  The Anchorage Police Department explained to The Alaska Landmine that the deadly collision was considered minor because other than killing Higgins, Webb was not impaired, was licensed and insured, and was following all rules of the road other than the one he broke in order to kill Higgins.

For these reasons, APD explained to Landmine reporter Paxson Woebler, “this was an unfortunate event, but not criminally negligent.”

This is the attitude of the APD and Alaska prosecutors to the deaths of most pedestrians in Anchorage. When unlicensed driver Martin Richards, a man who court records show has repeatedly had his driving privileges taken away because of his bad driving, struck and killed  65-year-old Rdezebije Imeri this year,  APD again charged him with a misdemeanor for driving with a revoked license. 

If Richards is convicted on that charge, he could be ordered to spend a year in jail at most, but a term of such length would be highly unusual. He does now fact a mandatory 10-days in jail if one once again convicted of driving without a license,  but he is unlikely to serve more time than that.

The 10-day minimum “reflects the state’s stringent approach to repeat offenders, emphasizing the importance of adhering to licensing laws,” according to the Legal Clarity website. Unfortunately, it is clear from Richards’ court file that the “stringent approach” hasn’t stopped him from repeatedly driving without a license, an act which isn’t all that surprising in a country where many in this country have come to believe driving is a “right” not a privilege.

Motonormativity

This belief in driving as a right is at the heart of what British safety researchers have termed “motonormativity,” the addiction to driving that leads people to abandon their normal standards of judgment and morality. 

And it is this that leads them to willingly ignore speed limits, license requirements, laws against texting and driving, red lights, driving while dozing off, and driving while under the influence of alcohol or drugs.

A surprising 7 percent of drivers polled by AAA admitted they had driven drunk in the previous 30 days, and AAA reported that “only 70 percent of drivers felt driving within an hour of using cannabis to be very or extremely dangerous, and 6 percent reported having done it in the previous 30 days.”

The latest report did not say how many drivers were unlicensed, but AAA has in the past reported that nearly 13 percent of fatal crashes involve unlicensed drivers.

Boston City Councilor Kendra Lara was among that 13 percent, but fortunately didn’t kill anyone after she lost control of a car doing a reported 52 mph in a 25 mph zone in that city before crashing into a house last year. She later claimed she had no choice but to drive illegally because of the city’s poor public transportation system.

A black woman, Lara told NBC, that “other people” had options unavailable to her and argued that “this is not just an issue of Kendra Lara. It is an issue that driving with a suspended license…(is) an issue that disproportionally impacts black and brown communities…and so I had to make a decision because there were no other options available to me. I am not the  only person to whom that happened.”

AAA is likely to now find itself in trouble with the Lara’s of America for stating that its “new survey highlights that most risk-taking drivers also speed.  By prioritizing speed enforcement, police can curb a wide range of risky driving behaviors and maximize their lifesaving impact.”

This sort of enforcement of traffic laws has in recent years been described as racist. An invited speaker at Harvard University in 2021 actually called for ending police enforcement of traffic laws because people of color have in the past been overpoliced.

“Separating traffic law enforcement and criminal law enforcement would undo the history of abuse that arose from the merger of these two functions,” historian Sarah Seo argued there, the Harvard Gazette reported. 

Seo suggested that the police could possibly be replaced with automated traffic enforcement employing cameras to catch speeders, red light runners and those driving unregistered vehicles. She must have been unaware that when people collect multiple tickets for these offenses and fail to pay them, the courts send the police to collect, which again raises the problem of policing and race.

Then, too, there is the political problem of getting drivers to accept automated traffic enforcement. The idea has run into heavy opposition from motorists in many areas, including Anchorage.

Fairness

Now, to be fair, it could be that the AAA’s national numbers on dangerous drivers don’t accurately reflect the behavior of drivers in Anchorage. It could be that the majority of pedestrian deaths do involve homeless people throwing themselves into the paths of cars or trucks.

There is no readily available data to sort out exactly what is happening here.

It is impossible to find details on most of these collisions because APD regularly refuses to provide information on pedestrian fatalities or serious collisions, such as the one that in 2019 left 21-year-old Hannah Halvorsen, a member of the U.S. Ski Team, with a skull fracture, a bruised and bleeding brain, a broken tibia, and ligaments torn off the bone in her left knee.

It was eventually revealed an 80-year-old driver was cited for hitting a pedestrian in a crosswalk in the wake of that collision, but APD has refused to release the woman’s name, which makes it impossible to find out if she was even competent to drive, which is a concern with older drivers.

“Studies have found that failure to yield the right-of-way is the most common error by seniors involved in crashes,” according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. “Seniors are cited for this error more often than younger drivers.

“In a nationally representative study of serious U.S. crashes, the most frequent error made by crash-involved drivers ages 70 and older was inadequate surveillance, which included looking but not seeing and failing to look.”

Did the courts require the woman who hit Halvorsen to be retested as a driver after the collision in order to ensure the roads are safe for the rest of us? Who knows.

Alaska doesn’t seem all that concerned about this problem even though some states have started to tighten up their licensing requirement for older drivers. Indiana now requires those ages 81 to 86 to renew their license in person every two years, and Iowa requires that of all drivers 78 or older.

Alaska does require all those 69 or older to renew their licenses in person every year and take a vision test at that time, but there are no other requirements imposed on senior drivers. And once the license is renewed, no matter the driver’s age, she or he does not need to renew it again for five years.

Whether older drivers are a greater or lesser danger than young drivers on Anchorage’s road is, unfortunately, impossible to know because along with not reporting the names of drivers who kill pedestrians, APD keeps secret their ages. It could be the 80-year-old woman who maimed Halvresen was the only elderly driver to seriously injure or kill a pedestrian.

Or it could be most of pedestrians are being killed by older drivers and Alaska needs to tighten its licensing standards as other states have done. Still, or if you drive much in Anchorage, or walk or cycle around the city which give you an even better opportunity to observe the behavior of drivers, you don’t get the feeling older folks are the problem.

The pool of aggressive, distracted and speeding drivers in Anchorage appears to skew toward middle age and younger. Nationally, AAA’s survey put 11 percent of all drivers in the aggressive category, 19 percent in the distracted category and 32.6 percent in the speeding category.

The 32.6 percent speeding would, in particularly, seem below the average for Anchorage.

In Midtown, where many pedestrians have been hit, five miles per hour over the speed limit is usually what could be considered the “normal” speed, and it’s not uncommon to find drivers ripping down 35 mph streets like Northern Lights or Benson boulevards at 50 mph.

This is a speed, according to AAA, that will kill three out of four people hit by a motor vehicle. A pedestrian hit at the speed has a three-times greater risk of death than one hit at 32 mph, according to the organization.

Part of the problem in Anchorage is clearly that the speed limits are set too high in areas where many people are known to be on foot near roadways. Lowering speed limits in those areas would save lives, or they would save lives if drivers obeyed the new lower limits.

If the way they behave now is any illustration, lowering speed limits to 25 mph to 30 mph might result in their falling into the range of 30 to 40 mph if the municipality devoted some effort to traffic law enforcement to underline the idea that speed limits are meant to be followed.

The general Anchorage view at this time would seem to be that speed limits are advisory. When a motorist so handicapped that APD couldn’t get him out of his car to perform a field sobriety test killed 65-year-old cyclist Eldridge Griffith on Northern Lights in 2014, investigators concluded he was doing 46 mph on a road with a poster speed limit of 35 mph.

But former Assistant District Attorney Daniel Shorey decided that the driver was driving like everyone else and wrote that he did “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.”

A blood test showed driver, Tj Justice, had also recently smoked marijuana – something he lied to police about after the collision – but Shorey ignored that as well and determined 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.”

Thus Justice faced no consequences because the bar for what constitutes a “reasonable” driver in Anchorage is set so low that if you are a handicapped driver with already compromised driving skills traveling more than 10 mph over the speed limit in a busy business district while on drugs and having smoked marijuana, you are a “reasonable” driver even if as in this case witnesses report you made no effort to stop or go around another human you saw in the roadway or should have seen in the roadway.

A lot of other Anchorage drivers seem good with this standard, too, and if someone dies as a result, well, give the dead a Darwin Award and move on. They should have understood driving is a right not a privilege in this country and that it’s their responsibility to watch out for the drivers who own the roads and not the other way around.