A sign posted last summer near the intersection of Abbott and Elmore roads/Craig Medred photo
The pedestrians are not the killers
The mayor of Alaska’s largest wants to stiffen the so-called crime of “jaywalking” in the name of saving lives, and nobody seems to have asked the most pertinent question:
Exactly how will this save the lives of those most often killed in Anchorage motor vehicle collisions, given that most of those who die in such collisions are riding inside motor vehicles they themselves crash or are hit by other motor vehicles?
Anchorage has, obviously, seen a bleak 2024 in which a record 15 people have died, nearly twice the average, but significant annual variations in deaths are the norm. The 15 this year is not wildly out of line with the past.
Municipal records show 13 pedestrians struck and killed in 2021 and 11 struck and killed in 2003, both years when jaywalking was technically illegal but not in the way drivers think. The laws as written in Alaska have always allowed people to cross roads with minimum restrictions because even in Alaska there are many places where roads restrict movement.
Where laws have been written to prevent what motorists long ago labeled jaywalking in an effort to keep pedestrians off the pavements motorists believed should be theirs, and theirs alone, those laws have only limited the crossing points.
The law in Anchorage at the moment – the one the mavens of misinformation claim has legalized jaywalking – didn’t actually do that. What it did was liberalize the law to recognize the city’s relative lack of stoplights, overpasses and marked crosswalks.
What the Anchorage Municipal Code now says is this: “No pedestrian shall cross a street or thoroughfare at or within 150 feet of access to a pedestrian tunnel or overhead walkway unless a marked crosswalk is also provided.”
What that means as a practical matter is this: If you are in downtown Anchorage, where most city blocks are 300 feet by 300 feet, you can’t legally “jaywalk” because there is a marked crossing of some sort within 150 feet in one direction or the other.
Alaska’s other major urban areas have no such provision. Juneau, Fairbanks and the Matanuska-Susitna Borough, which comprises most of what is considered the Anchorage Metropolitan Area, have either accepted the state law on road crossings or written it into their local codes.
The term “near” is open to broad interpretation. When the Anchorage assembly rewrote the Anchorage code last year, it defined the term as 150 feet. MustReadAlaska, the news website now leading the charge to “reverse its walk-anywhere approach and reinstate an ordinance pertaining to jaywalking, which has become a nightmare for drivers and deadly for those who wander into the roadways,” has offered no opinion on how near should be defined.
Near is an obviously vague term and “which are so close to constitute a hazard” an obviously vague phrase. Pedestrians reading this should be aware the latter offers them or their survivors no protection against speeding drivers nor does it protect them from those who might decide to swerve into them instead of away from them.
The legal system in Alaska has little regard for pedestrians. Drivers who strike and kill pedestrians in crosswalks, which are legally intended to protect pedestrians, face less punishment – $100 fine and three points on their license – than drivers caught blocking five or more vehicles on the highway ($100 and four points), following too closely ($100 and four points), failing to yield at an intersection or roundabout ($150 and four points), or driving 20 mph over the speed limit on a deserted Seward Highway ($300 and six points).
Juneau – the state’s most “progressive” city – also goes out of its way to offer an extra level of protection to motorists. The Juneau code stipulates that “no pedestrian may leave a curb or other place of safety and walk or run into the path of a vehicle which is so close as to constitute an immediate hazard.”
Such an amendment to the Anchorage code would appear one way to provide some comfort to the seemingly many drivers in Alaska’s largest city fearful that a suicidal homeless person will jump in front of their car or truck.
Straw men/women
These nameless, faceless homeless have become the strawmen of Anchorage’s road-safety debate even though no one has cataloged how many of the 15 pedestrians dead this year were actually homeless or given much consideration to whether stiffer standards imposed on pedestrians crossing the street would be recognized by the homeless let alone obeyed.
A fair number of the homeless migrate into Alaska’s largest city after having grown up in rural areas where they can walk on or across roads at any time and have no idea of what the word “jaywalking” is even meant to mean.
Then, too, there is a significant minority of scofflaws among the Anchorage homeless whose thievery runs rampant. There is little reason to believe they would pay any more attention to a stiffer street-crossing law than they do to the existing laws against thievery which impose a considerably bigger bite.
The reality here is that the homeless appear to have been dragged into this discussion primarily as a distraction from the real Anchorage problem which was, strangely enough, illustrated by a driver in New York City last week.
Her bad driving was captured on video: https://nypost.com/2024/12/17/us-news/brutal-video-shows-suv-driver-crushing-nyc-worker-against-garbage-truck-leaving-him-with-severe-injuries/
The New York Post described the video as a “brutal” display of someone driving a Toyota Highland sport-utility vehicle into a New York City sanitation worker loading a garbage truck and crushing him against the back of it. The video shows no attempt at all by the driver to slow down.
What can also be said is that the collision does not appear to have been caused by the driver suffering a debilitating medical problem, given the Post’s report that she “got out of the car and came to the badly injured worker’s aid.”
Of course, police aren’t naming her. Motor vehicles are the only dangerous weapon the misuse of which is implicitly condoned by law enforcement almost nationwide.
After U.S. ski team member Hannah Halverson was crushed by an Anchorage driver five years ago, the Anchorage Police Department handled the incident in much the same way the New York Police Department is now handling the Highlander collision.
The young and fit have significantly better odds of survival when struck by motor vehicles.
All of which is why focusing on how many pedestrians are killed on Anchorage streets, and especially homeless pedestrians, is another distraction.
Why? Because the dead are a small part of the problem.
Carnage
For every pedestrian killed on Anchorage streets, 15 to 20 or more are struck and injured, often seriously. The injuries caused cyclists are even greater, but luckily fewer of them die.
Age and general physiological health no doubt play a part here as they did in the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic of the unhealthy and unfit. Because of this, the homeless are likely to be over-represented among the pedestrian dead in Anchorage given their greater odds of death from anything.
Halvorsen, it should be noted, was lucky to eventually recover fully from her injuries. How many others suffer injuries from which they never fully recover is unknown, but a study published last year reported that about a third of the nearly 34,000 pedestrians taken to hospitals after being struck by motor vehicles in 2019 – or about 11,000 people – were admitted in critical condition.
Focusing on just those pedestrians who die when hit by motor vehicles ignores this troubling statistic.
That said, the possibility the homelessness contribute to the death toll can hardly be ignored.
The number has been steadily on the rise since the start of the new millennium, and the latest report from the Anchorage Coalition to End Homelessness puts the number at 2,728 or about three times what it was in 2009.
This would indicate that if the entire pedestrian problem was linked to the homeless, the death toll should be over 30 by now, and it’s well short of that. But then not all the dead are homeless. Just ask the family of retired dentist Carlton Higgins.
What underlies the thinking of so many who want to pin blame on the homeless for these deaths is itself a sad commentary on what has happened to Americans suffering from an addiction to motor vehicles that has only grown over the years.
There is now a belief among many that the most vulnerable among us – the homeless, the mentally handicapped and children – should be responsible for staying out of the way of motor vehicles so drivers can avoid the inconvenience of focusing on their driving.
Could there be more extreme, entitled, all-about-me thinking? Probably not. But this has become a norm in a country where few children walk or bike to school anymore because their parents consider it too dangerous.
America has become a nation wherein neighborhoods once safe for children to play are now littered with signs noting 20 or 25 mph speed limits and pleading “Drive Like Your Children Live Here” while motorists speed through them with the attitude of “F… You; My Kids Don’t Live Here.”
And, of course, you can expect a driver with that attitude would never, ever go a single mile per hour faster than the posted speed limit in any neighborhood.
Why collisions happen
Unfortunately, in Anchorage, a lot of people regularly exceed speed limits and almost everywhere. As a result of that, there are a lot of motor-vehicle crashes.
No one knows exactly how many in any given year because a fair number go unreported. But the municipal traffic report for 2022 (the latest available) shows that there were 3,528 crashes reported that year or an average of more than a dozen per day.
About 104 of these were recorded as causing “major injuries,” though it was not reported how many people were maimed for life.
The report’s “crash analysis” section reported the chief factors contributing to crashes were “aggressive/erratic operation,” “improper driving,” “hit & run,” and “disregarded traffic control” in that order.
“Pedestrian error” was down at number 14 on the list of 17 possible contributing factors, which put it just behind “stop sign violation” and just ahead of “physical state.” The chart in the report indicated pedestrian error was involved in about 2 percent of collisions.
The first four forms of bad driving – starting with aggressive and ending with ignoring traffic signals – would appear to be involved in about 89 percent of collisions. The report showed 67 percent of the crashes involved one car t-boning another, 17 percent involved collisions with objects, and rollovers or other “equipment failures” accounted for another 5 percent.
Drivers in 2002 also hit more moose – 4 percent of collisions – than pedestrians or cyclists – 3 percent for each. Maybe the Anchorage Assembly needs to pass an ordinance banning moose from crossing the roads.
There are no reports on how many moose died in these crashes. If they were lucky, they got off as easy as cyclists. The report lists only two of the 93 reported to have been hit by cars – or just over 2 percent – died.
Pedestrians were not so lucky. Six of the 109 hit by cars – 5.5 percent – died.
Then again, they were luckier than pedestrians hit in 2021. Fewer were hit that year – 94 – but far more were killed – 13 – leading to a kill rate of 14 percent.
Most of the deaths in both years happened along the same roads and at or near the same intersections as has been the case in Anchorage for decades.
“In general, intersections in Anchorage had much higher combined crash scores
than non-Anchorage intersections,” the Alaska Department of Transportation reported in 2019 after completing an exhaustive, 199-page report on Pedestrian and Bicycle Collisions with Motor Vehicles in Anchorage: 1998 – 2002. “The top 15 high-injury intersections are located along identified high-risk corridors, frequently where two busy roads meet or where there may be limited or no marked crossing infrastructure.”
Little has changed since then despite the report defining the danger areas and warning that the problem is far bigger than “jaywalkers.”The study reported that more than half (54 percent) of collisions happened at intersections where the infrastructure was specifically designed to prevent motorists from running into vulnerable road users.
“Approximately 35 percent of all pedestrian and bicycle-related accidents occurred at locations with a traffic signal,” the report said. “Another 18.7 percent occurred at STOP-controlled intersections.”
The study reported that motor vehicles at the time were hitting vulnerable road users about 220 times per year. Since 2019, the number of collisions has luckily slipped downward. There were about 200 in 2022, according to the latest traffic report.
If this was a reflection of drivers driving better, it would be a good thing. But the decrease appears attributable to the fact that in Anchorage, as well in much of the rest of the country, people are walking less and driving more, often out of fears about road safety.
This drive-everywhere mentality has helped fuel the country’s epidemics of obesity and metabolic syndrome, and most especially the troubling problem of childhood obesity which usually sentences children to poor health for the rest of their lives.
The most recent National Household Travel Survey reports that the 8.7 percent of trips Americans made out of their homes in 2002 dropped significantly to 6.8 percent in 2022. Meanwhile, the percentage of children walking or cycling to and from schools has fallen precipitously.
The travel study pegged that number at 11 percent of school-age children in 2022, down from 41 percent found walking or cycling to school in 1969.
And, of course, there are now the 900,000 or so older Americans no longer with us because their immune systems weren’t strong enough to fend off the SARS-CoV-2 virus because, in many if not most cases, they had abandoned physical activity as too much “work.”
But apparently, the country’s big problem is jaywalkers or cyclists getting in front of motorists and sometimes causing collisions that leave motorists feeling awful, though how many of them really feel awful is debatable.
The last one this reporter interviewed insisted that the well-lit cyclist he ran into and killed had only himself to blame for his death even though the cyclist had the right-of-way. That motorist was and is, in fact, still angry that authorities didn’t check the blood alcohol of the cyclist then pedaling to work early in the morning because any sober cyclist would have known better than to pedal across the path of the man’s truck.
There might, indeed, be motorists who feel bad about killing vulnerable road users, but killing someone with a motor vehicle in this country is something incredibly easy to rationalize as “not my fault.”
And “not my fault” is an excuse readily accepted by the legal system even if the dead pedestrian was in a crosswalk at which the motorist was required by law to yield, which renders marked crosswalks petty much meaningless.
Categories: Commentary, News
I posted on “Neighbor” about the provision covering unmarked pedestrian crossings. The blow back was amazing – numerous responses uniformly stating that the entire burden was on the pedestrian, there was absolutely no driver duty to avoid contact by slowing down.
Treating an injury or death as an aspect of a driving violation rather than as an assault or manslaughter makes no sense. I’ll have to remember this if I ever get homicidal.