Brayton Drive, one of Anchorage’s deadly roads/Craig Medred photo

A news analysis

The Anchorage Police Department is refusing to identify the hit-and-run driver who a week ago killed 33-year-old Aaron Cleveland on Brayton Road, a state-designated “bike route” that has become a hotspot for collisions between motor vehicles and vulnerable road users.

Despite the fact that it is a crime to leave the scene of a collision “resulting in injury to or death of a person” in the state of Alaska, APD spokesman Christopher Barraza Thursday said via email that the driver has not been charged “as the investigation is ongoing. That is all APD will comment on at this time.”

Pretty much nationwide, claims of “ongoing investigations” are a standard law enforcement tactic for keeping public information from the public. And in fairness to the unnamed driver involved in this homicide, it is possible the only crime committed was leaving the scene of an accident.

The original statement from APD said that “initial indications are that two pedestrians were walking south on or along Brayton Drive near Mockingbird Drive when one adult male was struck by a vehicle heading northbound on Brayton. The other pedestrian was uninjured.”

It is possible, for instance, that the other pedestrian pushed Cleveland in front of the motor vehicle or played some role in Cleveland’s death, but the statement also said “the vehicle fled the scene and remains outstanding. This is an ongoing investigation; more information will be released as it becomes available.”

The only information released after that was that the vehicle had been located 15 hours later and that the dead man was Cleveland. Everything else remains cloaked behind the claim of an ongoing investigation.

Precedent

APD used a similar claim of an investigation to avoid talking about the death of retired dentist Carlton Higgins in 2023.

In the wake of his death, commenters piled on to APD’s Facebook page to suggest that Higgins’ actions had caused his death, something APD did nothing to refute. Five months later, however, the Alaska Landmine revealed Higgins had been legally crossing the road in a crosswalk – where pedestrians have the right-of-way – when run over by a truck driven by the husband of a former Anchorage judge.

If not for the Landmine’s reporting, the perpetrator in the Higgins homicide would have gone unidentified, as is usually the case for drivers who kill vulnerable road users in Anchorage. The Landmine also revealed that a minor charge had been placed against Russell Webb for the death of Higgins.

Webb was cited for failure to yield to a pedestrian in a crosswalk and paid a $100 fine.

“When asked why the driver who killed Higgins did not face criminal charges, despite the finding that the driver had broken the law and was fully responsible for the collision, APD told the Landmine that no ‘other factors’ supported criminal charges,” the Landmine’s Paxson Woelber wrote.

“APD stated that the driver was not impaired, was licensed and insured, and was following all rules of the road other than those he broke when he killed Higgins.”

Health Science Reports in 2023 fingered “a lack of efficient and systematic enforcement” as one of the factors leading to an increase in deadly motor vehicle collisions in the U.S.

A 2024 study published in Transport Findingslater  beneath the title “Windshield Bias, Car Brain, Motornormativity: Different Names, Same Obscured Public Health Hazard.” It reported finding “robust evidence” that U.S. roads are becoming incresaingly unsafe, especially for vulnerable road users, because “people excuse the negative effects of car use in ways that obscure the public health hazard.”

At a governmental level, Brayton Drive could be the poster child for the willingness to “excuse the negative effects of car use.”

Human targets

An access road along the Seward Highway in South Anchorage, Brayton is a two-lane, one-way road with a narrow shoulder, no sidewalk and no bike lane despite being posted as a designated Anchorage “bike route.”

After 13-year-old Zakkary Mann was struck by a hit-and-run driver and seriously injured while riding his bike home along the road in 2022, the Alaska Department of Transportation, which is in charge of managing the roadway, declared the “bike route” signage meaningless.

Nothing has changed since.

As for the driver who hit Mann, that individual was never found because APD put no effort into looking for him or her. Mann’s mother, Shana, eventually turned to the media for assistance, but a story done by KTUU-TV asking for help in identifying the driver mainly resulted in Shana coming under fire for letting her son ride the road home from South Anchorage’s Get Air Trampoline Park less than a mile south because there really is no other route between the two points. 

The Anchorage municipal bike plan in 2006 recommended that a separated path be created along Brayton to provide safety for cyclists and other vulnerable road users.  Instead, an unaltered Brayton was incorporated into the U.S. Bicycle Route system. Thus the “Bike Route” sign indicating some degree of safety on a roadway where people are struck by motor vehicles with some regularity.

Zachary was lucky to survive being run down on the road. Others have not been so lucky.

Cleveland became the third vulnerable road user to be killed along the road in the past 19 years.

After 27-year-old Tia Smart was struck and killed while walking along the drive in 2016, the car-brain Associated Press suggested she was asking for it, reporting that although the “drive has no sidewalk…pedestrians are not prohibited.”

As if frontage roads somewhere in America prohibit pedestrians from walking alongside.

The driver who killed Smart was never publicly identified by APD, and it is unknown whether he or she was cited for anything.

After 38-year-old Kasey Turner was run down and killed along the road in 2018, an APD spokeswoman defended the unnamed driver who killed him by claiming “visibility and road conditions” were to blame for Turner’s death, and then pointed the finger at the deadman.

“Turner was partially in the roadway and not on a sidewalk, and he was wearing dark clothing,” she told the Anchorage Daily News. “Pedestrians should always utilize sidewalks or keep as far away from the main road as possible.”

There is no sidewalk along Brayton, and the statement that Turner was only “partially in the roadway” would indicate he was also partially out of it, trying – in other words – to keep away from “the main road as possible.”

As in the case of Smart, the driver who killed Turner was never identified, and it is unknown if he or she was ever cited for anything although Anchorage does have a basic speed law stipulating that “no person may drive a vehicle at a speed greater than is reasonable and prudent under the conditions and having regard to the actual and potential hazard then existing.”

The ADN did not think to ask the APD spokeswoman whether the agency should be advising drivers to slow down and use more care when confronted with “visibility and road conditions,” such as darkness and ice, that limit a driver’s ability to control and stop a vehicle to avoid running into people or things.

APD can’t really be blamed for its behaviour here, either.  It is simply reflecting what has become a societal norm in a country where bad driving is accepted as a necessary consequence of cities designed in such a way that people ‘need” motor vehicles to survive.

Though less than 65 percent of Americans drove to work in 1960, according to the U.S. Department of Energy, almost everyone drives to work now.  Largely gone are the 10 percent who walked and the nearly 20 percent who rode a bike or took public transit, which usually required them to walk some distance to work before they got off the bus or train.

Today close to 90 percent drive and the number of walkers has dropped to 3 percent, even though the lack of daily physical activity in this country is leading to hundreds of thousands of early deaths.

Health consequences

“Despite breakthrough advances in the management of acute myocardial infarctions and strokes, an 80 percent increase in the use of statin therapy in the last two decades, and a reduction in the national average levels of low-density lipoprotein cholesterol, cardiovascular deaths are now rising among working-age Americans,” researchers from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine reported in the peer-reviewed American Journal of Preventive Cardiology in 2020. “These concerning trends may be explained by striking increases in the incidence and prevalence of obesity and type 2 diabetes across the country. As of 2019, 69 percent of US adults were overweight or obese, and more than 30 million had diabetes.”

The study pointed out the well-established links between these epidemic health issues and a lack of physical activity plus poor diets. It also noted the failure of past efforts “aimed at curbing these epidemics by increasing the levels of physical activity and improving the dietary choices of Americans,” after which it added this:

“This failure may have been in part due to the fact that while lifestyle recommendations, particularly those regarding physical activity, are typically understood as targeting leisure time, the average adult working-class American men and women spend at least 50 percent of their workday awake time at their jobs. Moreover, more than 80 percent of jobs in the U.S. involve mostly sedentary activities, which results in daily exposure to long sitting hours and a colossal work-related lifetime exposure to physically inactive behaviors.

“Since 1950, the contraction of the manufacturing industry, the expansion of automation, and the rise of service and technology industries have resulted in an 83 percent increase in physically inactive jobs. Physically demanding occupations now make up less than 20 percent of the US workforce, down from nearly 50 percent of jobs in 1960. Thus, over the last 60 years, the American workforce collectively ‘sat down’; while in the 1960s, many workers would meet (healthy) recommendations for daily physical activity just with the activities performed during workhours, as of 2020 the majority spend most of their 8.5 ​hours per workday at work sitting.”

But not only are people sitting down more at work, they are spending more time sitting down in their motor vehicles as commuting times to work increase, and even more time sitting down behind screens – be they computer or TV screens – when not at work.

The researchers recommended the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) should get involved  in “workplace health promotion interventions” to  “to preserve our human resources.” Such federal intervention seems unlikely under the Trump administration despite Health and Human Services Secretary John F. Kennedy Jr.’s campaign to Make America Healthy Again (MAHA).

But there are things individual American communities can do, and the least of those things – in a country where necessary, physical activity is badly lacking – is to make it safe for people to get out of their motor vehicles and get around under their own power.

But instead, many communities, Anchorage among them, have ignored the problem. As a result, Alaska’s largest city managed to set a record for pedestrian deaths last year, and though APD is to not to blame for that, the agency does bear some responsibility for protecting bad drivers and treating the deaths of vulnerable road users as acceptable collateral damage