New freeway proposal/Alaska DOT
Death by design on U.S. roads
With a record number of pedestrians dead in Anchorage last year, the state Department of Transportation has proposed a new, high-speed roadway through the heart of the state’s largest city.
One can only ask: What the hell are traffic engineers thinking?
As proposed, the most controversial alternative for a connection between the Glenn and Seward highways is unlikely to kill many, if any, itself. If built as suggested, the roadway would be elevated above a section of one of the city’s premier greenbelts, which it will greatly alter if not destroy, but this separation should eliminate the direct deaths of many pedestrians unless, of course, a drive like this comes along:
Mainly, though, what any new, high-speed connection between the Glenn and Seward highways will do is further the idea that Anchorage, like so many other American cities, is a place that motorists should be able to speed through.
Sadly designs that encourage this sort of thinking are killing people all over the country, and Anchorage’s Midtown is today a shining example of why.
In the sort of congested area where more sensible cities post speed limits of 30 mph, Anchorage has speed limits of 35 and 40 mph, and because those speed limits are almost never enforced, traffic regularly travels at 40 to 45 mph and speeds of 50 mph or more are not uncommon.
Such speeds have proven deadly for many pedestrians and a few cyclists with drivers rushing to accuse them all of responsibility for their own deaths for “jaywalking” or not paying attention to drivers and entering a crosswalk too quickly on a green light.
Never mind that many, if not most, of these people are killed because drivers are going so fast they can’t stop when anyone or anything enters the road. Some of them don’t even try to stop, but there are no consequences as was the case when Ti Justice ran down and killed 65-year-old cyclist Eldridge Griffith in December 2014.
Speeding is illegal but…
Shorey ignored the THC, a sign of recent marijuana use, in Justice’s system because there was no evidence to indicate he was driving erratically. The assistant DA never addressed the question of whether Shorey should have been driving at all.
This was a big question given that the lack of evidence to indicate Shorey had, or had not, been driving erratically after smoking dope was attributable to the failure of Anchorage police to perform a roadside sobriety test after the collision.
The reason for this? Police said Justice’s handicaps were severe they couldn’t get him out of his car.
But his speeding alone, never mind his failure to make any attempt to stop, greatly increased the odds that Griffiths, a retired counselor who spent his life working with troubled youth, would die.
An interactive chart that accompanied their work indicates that Griffiths’s chances of dying in the Anchorage collision more than tripled – going from 19 percent to 67 percent – because of the speed at which Justice was driving.
Still Anchorage, like many other American cities, remains a place where drivers are encouraged – both actively and by oversight – to speed through town. This in large part helps explain why the roads in Anchorage and in America are so much more dangerous than those in most of the rest of the Western world.
Germany is a wonderful place to drive. Because significant sections of the autobahn have no speed limits, it is often as fast or faster to get between German cities by motor vehicle as by airplane, but don’t be daddling in the far left passing lane.
(From personal experience, this writer can testify that you can be doing 120 mph or more on the autobahn only to have a Porsche or Mercedes suddenly flashing its headlights in your rearview mirror to say “get the hell out of the way” because the far left lane is for passing, period.)
Germany allows these speeds on what could be considered rural sections of the controlled-access autobahn because those roads are not the big killing ground for motor vehicles. Around the world, the big killing grounds are urban.
In the U.S., the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety in 2022 pointedly noted the carnage on urban roads in the U.S.
In recent years, however, it has turned more attention to road safety because of the large number of Americans who die in collisions on American roadways or are maimed for life on American roadways, something National Transportation Safety Board chairman Jennifer Homendy noted on Friday.
NTSB warning
Near the end of a 30-minute press briefing on a midair plane collision over Washington, D.C. that left 67 dead, she had this to say:
“We’re talking 43,000 people are dying on our nation’s roads annually, Millions more injured.”
Steeped in the same motonormativity that leads traffic engineers to want to punch high-speed roads through the middle of cities like Anchorage, nobody in the clueless American media bothered to ask Homendy “why is that?”
She certainly would have had an answer as did AAA.
“Between 2010 and 2019, fatalities in urban areas surged 34 percent, while those in rural areas fell 10 percent. Urban fatalities surpassed those in rural areas in 2016; by 2019, 19,595 people were killed in urban locations compared to 16,340 in the countryside.”
The NTSB examined the issue of increasing road deaths in its “Special Investigation Report: Pedestrian Safety” in 2018 and again in its “Safety Research Report – Bicyclist Safety on US Roadways: Crash Risks and Countermeasures” in 2019. In both reports, it concluded the fastest, easiest and cheapest way to save lives is to slow traffic in urban areas.
Those slower speeds help save the lives of not only pedestrians and cyclists, but also passengers in motor vehicles who – in Anchorage as elsewhere – compromise the bulk of the dead dying on urban roads even if most drivers never give a thought to the idea they could be next.
“Only 219 people died on Finnish roads in 2021, or four per 100,000 residents – just one-third the U.S. rate,” Bloomberg’s David Zipper reported. “And Finland’s roadways are growing steadily safer. Fatalities plunged 50 percent between 2001 and 2019, when Helsinki made international news for going an entire year without a single pedestrian or cyclist fatality.”
Finland’s motor vehicle death rate is now about a quarter of that of the U.S. as are the death rates in most other European countries. People in the United Kingdom might fret a lot about the 2.81 per 100,000 death rate there, but that pales next to America’s 11.1 per 100,000.
World Health Rankings put the U.S. in a whole different group than most of the European nations. The U.S. was bundled with countries like Syria, the Philippines, Uzbekistan, Pakistan and India, a country which The Economist magazine in 2022 described as “home to just 10 percent of the world’s registered vehicles, (but) account(ing) for 22 percent of traffic deaths.”
Anchorage isn’t doing all that much better, and compared to the great northern cities of the world, its record is horrible.
When Helsinki went a year without the death of a pedestrian death, it boasted a population more than twice that of Anchorage where pedestrians and cyclists died last year at an average rate of more than one per month, and where the five-year average number of deaths of motor vehicle drivers and their passengers is about 44 percent higher than the average for deaths of so-called “vulnerable road users,” according to the municipality’s latest annual traffic report.
But instead of trying to slow Anchorage traffic down to save lives, Alaska highway engineers seem to be always trying to speed it up to kill more people. Go figure, but consider on whose hands the data says the blood is to be found.
Categories: Commentary, News
If they want to build bridges, maybe it is time to revisit Knik Arm and Turnagain Arm bridges and do something real about long travel times in Southcentral. Cheers –
That’s why they designed Tudor Road. So you can go around rather than through. Ca you please shorten your response? Way to much.
The reason why, the state Department of Transportation has proposed a new, high-speed roadway through the heart of the state’s largest city? Is federal dollars! DOT can not exist without federal dollars. Short version how it works. Federal Highway and Transportation, put out a list every year of what projects states can apply for to get federal matching funds. Some projects have a higher federal match than others. As an example. If the state wants to improve a lighted 4 way intersection. With new lights, improved crossings, newer signage, and so on. The FHT may offer $2 for every $1 the state contributes. Or the state could $5 to every $1 the state contribute to a “Round About” intersection. So in short the reason for this possible new design in Anchorage or anywhere else is not about protecting pedestrians or even motorist, but is about how much money DOT makes on every project.
I have had become a much more alert/aware driver since reading your blogs. And yes, there are plenty of motorist, cyclist, and pedestrians who should drive, bike and walk more defensibly and beware of their surroundings and others.
Maybe do a blog on, how does State DOT really exist?
2 pedestrians killed in one night, only a day after this post. I certainly agree that if drivers slowed-down there would be less pedestrian fatalities.
What I question is how this blog, and local media in general, downplays the pedestrian-victims’ actions.
Every single Anchorage driver I have talked to has at least one story of a human blindly wandering into the street, into the path of their car; no looking, not even a tilt of the head.
Some of us see it frequently. And a few of us have even seen inebriated pedestrians actually taunting drivers, albeit rare.
How are the zombie-like wanderings into the roadway void of criticism? Thank you.
None of these “zombies” are in charge of a dangerous weapon, which is, theoretidally at least, supposed to under the control of the operator. I’ve seen all sorts of strange behavior by people on foot or bikes in Anchorage while driving. I haven’t hit any of those people, but then I haven’t hit any moose either although I have witnessed people in front of me slam into moose they never attempted to avoid or brake for because they clearly weren’t paying attention to the road in front of them.
I expect I will also one day witness a collision like this involving an Anchorage pedestrian.
That said, I am sure there is some poor driver out there, probably more than one, who has killed someone who suddenly appeared in the road without warning so close in front the driver couldn’t stop. But most of these “blindly wandering into the street” folks of which you talk are hit by drivers not looking at the road.
Shit, on more than one occasion, I’ve had drivers go flying past me while I was slowing because I could see what looked to be a street person acting as if they might wander into the road. Really all you are mainly doing here is making excuses for bad driving, which doesn’t begin to work for significant number of people we’ve aslo had hit in crosswalks – both marked and unmarked – in Anchorage.
Among those people a U.S. Ski Team member who almost died and spent a long time in hospital in recovery.
As a cyclist, I have been hit multiple times in Anchorage: Once by a redlight running truck, once by a left turning woman who appeared to look right into my eyes before I started into a crosswalk pushing the bike only to turn smack into me and put me on her hood (she then apologized by saying she didn’t see me there), once by right turning car that passed me and a second later turned hard right in front of me (the driver, when asked what the hell he was thinking, said he couldn’t stop after passing me because “someone might hit me from behind” which basically translated to “I’d rather hit a cyclist and risk maiming them than take a chance of having my precious car rear-ended), once by a trailer being towed by someone making a right turn on red (I was stopped with one foot on the curb while waiting for the light to change), and once by an angry women who intentionally took me out because she was apparently pissed that I gave her a dirty look that made her brake when I passed in front of her in the bike lane while she was trying to get into traffic. A block later, I was in the middle of a car-wide, middle turn-lane doing 25 mph and signaling to turn left when she pulled into that lane and hit my front wheel. I can only guess that she was trying to scare me and misjudged how fast the bike was going. Luckily, I stayed in that middle turning lane after the crash instead of bouncing into the busy traffic lane next to it. The driver, of course, claimed she’d never entered into the middle turning lane and suggested I was, apparently suicidally, riding in a fast lane of traffic.
To say that a lot of Anchorage drivers behave badly would be an understatement. Fortunately, most of my collisions happened when I was younger and healed fast. I’ve grown ever more conservative by the year. I now ride as if every motorist on the road is trying to kill me, because it seems that they are. I have become extremely careful about what bike lanes I use (some of them are downright dangerous) and when I use them.
And I won’t enter a controlled intersection in Anchorage – whether on foot, on the bike, in the car or in the truck – unless it is clear the cross traffic is going to stop for the red light. This has more than once saved the car or truck from being hit because an amazing number of Anchorage drivers seem to care litle what color the light at an intersection. Some to think that if they’re only a few seconds after the red, it’s still good to go.
If you haven’t noticed, there are a lot of morning and evening motor commuters driving around with their faces in their phones, and if you happen to follow them in your motor vehicle, you might notice them straying into Anchorage bike lanes all the time which, when coupled with studded tires, explains why the white paint wears off Anchorage bike lanes faster than in another city in the country.
Muldoon to Tudor. I use it all the time.