Anchorage not alone in pedestrian death increase/Governors Highway Safety Association
Me, me, me killers
Part 2 of a three-part series
With tens of thousands of people dying on American roads every year, the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety in 2023 polled drivers for their opinions on why the nation’s roads are so unsafe.
AAA is the oldest organization of motorists in the U.S. Born in 1902 as the American Automobile Association, it has spent the past 123 years lobbying for the interests of drivers.
But its safety foundation, according to an AAA history, has its roots in “a landmark effort to reverse the soaring pedestrian fatality rate during the 1930s.” The country’s pedestrian fatality rate is again soaring with the number of deaths up 48 percent since 2014, according to the Governors Highway Safety Association.
- Safe Drivers, 34.9 percent
- Speeding Drivers, 32.6 percent
- Distracted Drivers, 19 percent
- Distracted & Aggressive, 11 percent
- Most Dangerous, 2.5 percent
The majority of drivers there – 65.1 percent if you do the math – can be fairly described as the “all-about-me” drivers. Their self-interests top the laws designed to make roads safe while the dangers they pose to other road users steadily grow from top to bottom in the AAA list.
Were that not troubling enough, the report showed a 6.3-point increase in unsafe drivers from a similar report the year before, which would help explain the rising numbers of road deaths.
Alaska’s largest city this year set a record for pedestrian deaths. I must confess to once believing the aggressive and inattentive driving one can see on the streets of Anchorage every day illustrates a bigger problem in this city than elsewhere.
But after spending a fair amount of time driving around Western Canada the Pacific Northwest and some of the West, it has become clear that the inattentive, aggressive and plain, old bad driving in Anchorage is little more than a reflection of what has become the North American norm.
I got good a taste of this after deciding to take the dog for a walk while visiting the solidly blue city of Olympia in the bluest state in the nation – Washington.
Interested in how highway noise affects parks, given Anchorage traffic engineers discussing plans to put a high-speed road link over the Chester Creek bike trail and the city’s Sitka Park, Hugh and I ventured into Olympia’s Watershed Park, a place of big, rain-forest trees and relative quiet on the end farthest from the I-5 Expressway.
Suffice it to say the end of the park near I-5, into which we hiked, is not very park-like. But that’s an aside in a story that should stay focused on what happened in our effort to avoid that end of the park.
Emerging from the park on Eastside St. SE, I looked at a trail map and saw another trailhead along the street a quarter mile or so to the south, away from the freeway, where Hugh and I could re-enter the Watershed trail system to loop back to where our hike started.
Where we emerged from the park, there was a sidewalk and along it a sign designating a 25 mph speed limit through the surrounding neighborhood. The sidewalk didn’t go far, but it did end in a bike lane, which was good.
What was bad was that the bike lane narrowed as the road went south toward where Watershed Park forest on one side met the forest in the Harry Fain’s Legion Park on the other. And as the road headed from a neighborhood into a forest, motor vehicle speeds quickly began to increase though there was no indication the speed limit had changed.
Hugh and I were just approaching this area when I was almost clipped by a young woman in a Subaru with a tire more than a foot on the wrong side of the white stripe demarking the bike lane. When she went speeding by at 35 to 45 mph, I did turn my head in time to notice why she was so far out of the lane.
She had her face in a phone. In that moment, I was thankful I’d put Hugh on the inside of the bike lane even though I almost tripped over him in jumping to the right when I heard the sound of a car coming fast and close behind.
I doubt the driver ever saw us. The last I saw of her was the Harris/Walz 2024 bumper sticker on her car.
I am confident she had no desire to intentionally run us down, and I am equally confident that in her self-involved world, speeding while reading something on a personal-communication device trumped paying attention to her driving.
An all-people problem
If you read Streetsblog USA, a website dedicated to urban design and traffic issues, you will be led to believe this sort of bad driving is a lefty-righty issue tied to America’s raging culture war.
It’s not. It’s a 65.1 percent of drivers problem involving a society full of people in a hurry to go anywhere or, for that matter, nowhere – often while multi-tasking – because their desires are more important than road safety.
It is a deadly problem that transcends all the differences – politics, gender, economic status, race, religion, you name it – about which Americans now argue.
And it is a particularly deadly problem for the country’s so-called “vulnerable road users” (VRUs) – pedestrians, cyclists, children at play, and the handicapped in wheelchairs.
They are dying in increasing numbers despite the serious decline in walking and cycling that has helped to place Americans among the fattest, most out-of-shape and shortest-lived people in the Western world.
Americans were estimated to be walking 10,000 to 15,000 steps per day, the equivalent of five to seven miles, on average during the 1960s. A 2017 study that tracked smartphones to calculate how much people are on the move around the globe reported the average U.S. step count down to an average of 4,774 steps per day.
Many of these steps were lost when people stopped walking to work, the store, the school or otherwise using their feet as transportation. This decline in walking should have led to a decline in pedestrian deaths as a percentage of all traffic deaths.
Instead, the opposite has happened. Pedestrian deaths – which comprised 17 percent of road deaths in 1975, according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety – did slip to a low of 11 percent at the start of the new millennium but have since climbed back up.
They comprised 18 percent by 2022, according to the Institute.
If you read the social media website Nextdoor in Anchorage, you will find plenty of apologists for the bad driving that results in the deaths of these people. Nextdoor is the community’s number-one website for victim blaming.
It regularly posts complaints from people angry about pedestrians or cyclists getting in their way or worse, forcing them to hit the brakes to avoid a collision. No one, to my knowledge, has ever posted a comment noting how he or she avoided hitting a homeless person stumbling across an Anchorage street, and pointed out that “if everyone in Anchorage paid as much attention to their driving as I did, we wouldn’t have killed a record number pedestrians.”
Instead, there are regular rants by drivers upset they had to brake to avoid someone, usually a homeless walker. Anchorage, if you believe these posts, is full of people just waiting to jump out into the street to commit suicide by motor vehicle.
Surely this must have happened somewhere, too. People commit suicide in all sorts of ways. But most pedestrians get killed or seriously injured because drivers are speeding, not paying attention or ignoring the rules of the road.
A marked crosswalk, a pedestrian crossing sign and a reminder of the legal requirement to yield, all to try to get motorists to follow simple and long-established rules for driving/Craig Medred photo
Rules of the road
I have spent some time testing motorists’ knowledge as to the rules of the road by entering intersections in various American neighborhoods when there are cars approaching. In much of the country, as in Anchorage and Alaska, all intersections are designated as the locations of “crosswalks, whether marked with paint on the road or not. Motor vehicles are required by law to yield to pedestrians at all of these locations.
A bare majority of drivers, in my experience, will so yield on a neighborhood street if they believe a pedestrian is going to assert their right to continue walking into an unmarked crosswalk. But a sizable minority will do nothing, requiring one to jump back to avoid being hit, or they will hit the gas and swerve into the far lane in the belief they should try to get past faster before you get farther into the road.
Many drivers appear wholly unaware of the law. In Boise, Idaho, one driver who reluctantly stopped for me rolled down his window to yell, “You can’t just walk out into traffic like that! You’re lucky I stopped. You could get hit.”
His comment would indicate his stop wasn’t about his obeying the law, but about my getting “lucky.” And he did stop, which was a good thing.
But he was certainly right about another thing. Any pedestrian asserting a legal right to use a crosswalk – marked or unmarked – is liable to get hit in this country.
For that reason, I would not suggest anyone reading this enter any crosswalk – marked or unmarked – until traffic stops unless being prepared and capable of jumping safely out of the way of the driver who decides not to stop.
Pedestrians have to recognize certain realities here. There is little or no incentive for those Dangerous or Distracted & Aggressive drivers described by AAA to stop to avoid hitting someone because there are hardly any penalties if they don’t.
If they stop afterward and cooperate with law enforcement, the Anchorage Police Department considers a $100 fine the appropriate penalty for killing a pedestrian in a crosswalk because, as the Alaskan Landmine was told, this sort of death is an “unfortunate event,” not an act of negligence.
If the pedestrian is in an unmarked crosswalk, APD is likely to blame him or her for the collision and send the driver on his or her way. There is a national tolerance for drivers who kill people that applies here, and it appears linked to an expectation that drivers who ignore road laws now comprise a majority of drivers.
The latter has driven some cities to extremes to try to make roads safer.
Speed bumps to slow drivers on a neighborhood street and wands in an adjacent bike lane to try to prevent them from using it as a bump-avoidance corridor/Craig Medred photo
It’s almost as if authorities in the U.S. have forgotten why the country began to develop a system for licensing drivers at the start of the 20th Century and why, in the years that followed, that system expanded to require drivers to be trained before being issued a license in hopes of slowing the steadily increasing numbers of deaths on American roads, which increased dramatically even with licensing.
But licensing, and changes in motor vehicle design aimed at better-protecting occupants in a crash, did help to shift the motor-vehicle death rate from a peak of 30.8 deaths per 100,000 people in 1937 to around 14 per 100,000 today.
“Despite these historic drops,” the Council now warns, “we cannot remain complacent. From 2019 to 2022, the vehicle death rate increased 6.4 percent, the mileage death rate increased 10.8 percent, while the population death rate increased 16 percent.”
Biggest losers
What too often gets overlooked in discussions of these deaths is that dead pedestrians, cyclists and vulnerable road users are a minority of the dead.
Most who die on U.S. roads are drivers of motor vehicles or passengers in them. They accounted for 77 percent of road deaths at the end of the 20th Century, according to the Insurance Institute, before the widespread use of protective airbags started helped push the percentage down.
It hit bottom at 61 percent in 2022, but has since crept back up to 63 percent, according to U.S. Department of Transportation estimates. Not even the best of modern motor vehicles can fully protect their occupants in a nation where many cities have been designed and are now managed to move traffic at the highest possible speeds no matter the risks.
This is a reality many Americans have also come fearfully recognize.
Driving fear
Many schools, meanwhile, have become the scene of dangerous traffic jams at drop-off and pickup times.
Nowhere, it seems, is safe from bad drivers anymore.
When researchers from the University of Wisconsin took a look at where vulnerable road users were run down and by whom in Milwaukee, they found a rather amazing one in five were hit in parking lots where one would expect drivers to be most on the lookout for people on foot.
“U.S. pedestrian traffic fatalities increased by more than 50 percent over the last decade (4,302 in 2010 to 6,516 in 2020), raising serious concerns about pedestrian safety,” they wrote. “In the late 20th Century, many arterial streets serving historic neighborhood business districts (in Milwaukee) were redesigned to move vehicles through these neighborhoods at high speeds rather than to continue as pedestrian-oriented areas. Despite progress to provide more complete streets in recent years, today’s pedestrian crashes occur within the system produced by these past policy decisions.”
The quick and easy solution to this deadly problem is well-documented: Slow traffic, a move shown to have a direct link to declines in deaths and serious injuries.
Trucks and sport utility vehicles (SUV) with high, flat grills have of late become the focus of some worried about these deaths, and vehicles like the aptly named Dodge “Ram” are somewhat deadlier than cars with low grills and hoods that propel struck humans up onto the vehicle rather than smashing over them.
But there is this from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety which studied pedestrians injuries and deaths last year:
“At 35 mph, the risk of moderate injury climbed to 86 percent and the risk of a serious injury rose to 67 percent. As far as fatalities were concerned, pedestrians struck at 20 mph had only a 1 percent chance of dying from their injuries, but at 35 mph, the risk reached 19 percent; at 50 mph, it exceeded 80 percent.”
Scandinavian countries year ago recognized this, slowed traffic in urban areas and saved thousands of lives. In the United Kingdom, Wales in the fall of 2023 reduced speeds to 20 mph on roads in “residential and built-up areas where there are lots of people.”
Drivers outraged
Despite most Welsh drivers then traveling only 4 mph slower than the 30 mph speeds at which they were previously supposed to be driving in busy urban areas, Welsh politicians have been under fire ever since and are now reinstating 30 mph on some roads.
Most Wales residents don’t seem to care if lives are being saved. Polling in October by You Gov UK found seven in 10 opposed to the 20 mph limit with almost all right-leaning voters in opposition and 56 to 59 percent of liberal-leaning voters wanting higher speed limits.
Needless to say, few American politicians have dared to propose 20 mph speed limits – although such speed limits do still exist in the older neighborhoods of some U.S. cities – and 30 mph speed limits are common in parts of some cities.
In Anchorage, however, politicians haven’t even shown the courage to roll speed limits back to 30 mph in the areas where a majority of pedestrians have been killed.
In the U.S. in general, the deaths of thousands of vulnerable road users are considered acceptable collateral damage for the convenience of getting around faster, and the deaths of tens of thousands in motor-vehicle collisions are ignored, partly due to drivers believing seatbelts, airbags and improved motor-vehicle design will always protect them.
This belief in being always safe inside an iron cage is unfounded, but reinforced by a government seatbelt campaign – Click-It or Ticket – pushing the idea that seatbelts “save lives.” And they do.
The problem is that technology can only do so much to make up for bad driving, and American driving has become ever worse, which is why the number of motorists dead in collisions has begun to creep upward while the number of dead pedestrians and cyclists has skyrocketed.
How bad U.S. drivers was nicely illustrated by Mi Ae Lipe, a Seattle-based traffic safety advocate who writes a blog “About Driving in the Real World.”
A personal confession
“Up until this point, I had no idea how many potential hazards could be present even on an apparently quiet residential street, let alone a congested urban road. Learning what to watch for and how to continuously anticipate every possible risk was a revelation that immediately changed me forever as a driver. In the United States, this level of street driver training – one that emphasizes such keen situational awareness, proper habits, and decision-making, coupled with tremendous practice and a difficult driving test to prove that you have actually learned how to execute these skills consistently – is all but nonexistent.”
But on a personal level for most drivers, their lack of situational awareness doesn’t matter in a country where the consequences for being a bad driver are small even when you drive so badly you kill someone. And given that there are little or no consequences for being a bad driver, why would anyone invest the effort to be a good one?
Or even bother to slow down when they are in a hurry which most Americans are even when they have no real reason to be in a hurry.
Next: The Enablers
Categories: News
Nailed my retro vibes with this gem! Hypakle
Let me introduce you to some examples in ANC of crossings tge ASD Safety Committee (which includes a clueless rep from MoA Traffic who doesnt bother with data) feel are safe fir Elementary students to cross on their own.
The untold story about pedestrian safety can be seen in a microcosm here at Nunaka, lol