The deadly intersection of Benson Boulevard and C Street/Google Maps
No Safe Space
Seventy-nine-year-old Gladys Graf did everything right on her late-morning walk in Anchorage’s Midtown on Monday, and then she died.
Anchorage Police say that before crossing busy Benson Boulevard at C Street, she waited for the “walk” sign on the traffic light there and then entered the marked crosswalk. Neither “safety feature” worked to save her.
“It appears that the driver was making a…turn to go east on Benson,” an APD spokesperson later explained. “The light was green for C Street traffic, but they (the driver) had to yield to pedestrians for (the) turn as (she) had the walk signal. I hope that makes sense.”
The driver of the vehicle that killed Graf has not been identified. The reason for this?
In Anchorage, as in much of America, killing someone with a motor vehicle is not considered a crime. Technically, by legal definition, Graf’s death was a homicide, “the killing of a human being due to the act or omission of another,” according to the legal dictionary.
But there’s a catch.
“Not all homicides are a crime, particularly when there is a lack of criminal intent,” the dictionary adds. “Non-criminal homicides include killing in self-defense, a misadventure like a hunting accident or automobile wreck without a violation of law like reckless driving, or legal (government) execution.”
Recklessness?
Recklessness almost never comes up in connection with collisions that leave pedestrians or cyclists dead in this country because the bar defining it has risen ever higher as American driving skills have crept ever lower.
Bad driving of the kind that could easily get someone killed is now accepted as a norm, and the norm has become epidemic in the U.S. due to “Car Brain”, “Windshield Bias” or what researchers in the United Kingdom have labeled “Motonormativy.”
When Tara Goodard, an associate professor at Texas A&M University, undertook a study of the motonormativity attitudes of American drivers last year, she found them even more likely than British drivers “to excuse negative car effects.”
An overwhelming majority of U.S. drivers, nearly 94 percent, were of the belief that people should not expose others to their secondhand smoke, she reported, but when it came to motor-vehicle pollution, fewer than 20 percent thought any effort should be made to protect others from that.
Simply put, these attitudes, which accept inattentiveness and incompetence behind the wheel as a norm, help get people like Graf killed.
Granted, Graf might still be alive if she’d been younger. Young people usually don’t die when struck in relatively low-speed collisions like the one that killed her. Elders are a different matter.
Anchorage, which set a record for pedestrian deaths last year, is lucky that many of the pedestrians and bicyclists who get struck by motor vehicles in the city are relatively young or the death count would be even higher. Over the past year, I have interviewed several people hit by drivers turning right on red in Anchorage, and all of them lived.
One of them, forty-something Colin McDonald, later posted on his Facebook page that his heightened paranoia about riding in Anchorage after being hit helped him avoid being hit four other times “all when I had the walk signal. Three on people turning right and one turning left on a ‘yield to oncoming traffic.’
Anchorage drivers, sure “as 
Because of the extra danger to older Americans like her, the AARP Public Policy Institute has begun lobbying for a “Complete Streets” policy for American cities. AARP is what used to be called the American Association of Retired Persons before this country became driven by acronyms.
This applies to older people both in vehicles and outside of them, and for most older Americans, the risks in the MV might be greater than on foot or a bike, given that of the 42,939 killed in motor-vehicle collisions in 2021, 83 percent were drivers or passengers in motor vehicles, according to AARP.
One of the good things about slowing down traffic to make urban streets more walkable is that along with saving the lives of pedestrians, it would help save the lives of motorists. But there is something even better about making urban streets more walkable in the wake of the pandemic that killed the unhealthy and the unfit.
Walking, or riding a bike for that matter, improves health.
“Walking is critically important for older adults to stay physically active, maintain social
relationships, and effectively age in place within their communities,” AARP’s Policy Institute concluded. “But road traffic poses a major obstacle to walking safely in U.S. neighborhoods.”
That obstacle is especially evident in cities like Anchorage where most deadly motor vehicle collisions are treated as unavoidable and acceptable “accidents” even though the majority are due to human error linked either to bad roadway design or bad driving.
After the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) studied the country’s rising pedestrian death rate in 2018, it concluded that “drivers avoid hitting pedestrians when they are paying attention and have the time to see and avoid a person in the roadway.”
Many, however, don’t pay attention, which is part of the reason Anchorage set that record for pedestrian deaths last year. In fairness, drivers are not totally to blame for this.
The Anchorage homeless have earned a bad reputation for darting out into roadways, either because they don’t care about their own safety or because they have moved into the state’s largest city from rural Alaska and don’t understand the danger inherent in roads full of speeding cars with distracted urban drivers.
The municipality could eliminate some of their deaths by slowing and enforcing speeds on roads known to be killers – starting with Brayton Drive and Midtown thoroughfares such as Benson – but it remains focused on moving traffic through the city as fast as possible and the dead be damned.
In such a society, people like Graf become acceptable “collateral damage” as was Carlton Higgins – an elderly, retired dentist who was struck in a crosswalk in 2023 only to later die from his injuries, as was the case with Graf.
APD determined that Russell E. Webb, the driver of the Ford F250 truck that ran into Higgins, was solely responsible for Higgins’ death, but Webb faced almost no consequences for this. The husband of a retired Alaska judge, Webb was issued a citation for failure to yield to a pedestrian in a crosswalk and paid a $100 fine.
Nobody cares
It was an insignificant collision, according to APD, because Webb was sober, a properly licensed and insured driver, and – aside from killing Higgins – was following all other traffic laws before and after the collision. Webb also stayed at the scene of the collision and cooperated with police, which is taken to be some sort of sign of innocence for drivers involved in deadly collisions in Anchorage.
That same APD news statement lacked the information that Graf was in a crosswalk at the intersection and that the traffic light had displayed a walk signal. And those two facts have gone unreported by a local mainstream media that sticks to regurgitating whatever press releases APD feeds it.
Against this backdrop,”misinformed” is the only word to fairly describe the regular social media comments of Anchorage drivers complaining about homeless people wandering city streets and creating the possibility a driver could kill one and end up in serious trouble.
It is a rare, rare event for an Anchorage driver to end up in serious trouble for killing a pedestrian, or a cyclist, unless they are drunk or on drugs, and even then, drivers are often let off, as in the case of 65-year-old Eldridge Griffith in 2014.
The driver who struck and killed Griffith was reported to have been going more than 10 mph over the 35 mph posted speed limit on Anchorage’s Northern Lights Boulevard, made no attempt to stop when he saw Griffith trying to cross the road, had taken medications, had recently used marijuana, and was so disabled that police officers on the scene couldn’t get him out of his car to perform a sobriety test.
In a society tolerant of deadly driving such as this, there is little incentive for drivers to pay attention while driving, and sadly, many don’t.
Record pedestrian deaths are the result.
Colin McDonald is my son and his Dad and Ijust happened to be in Anchorage when he got hit by the car. It was a nerve wracking night. I don’t know what can be done but something needs to happen. a few years back my daughter was hit by a drunk driver running a red light in Anchorage totaled her car. I’m so luck my kids are alive and doing well.
If I understand correctly, this was a deadly “right hook”. It sounds glib, or somehow otherwise uncouth, but both pedestrians and drivers need to constantly hear about the danger or right-hand turns. Cyclists, in particular, need to be incredibly cautious about right turning traffic because that driver is usually looking left for cars, not right for pedestrians.
I have concluded that either right-hand turns need to be legally treated like a stop-sign, or else need to be completely barred when pedestrians have a walk signal.
Drivers – PLEASE beat into your heads that the most likely way you are going to kill somebody is by turning across a pedestrian to your right when you are looking left to see what oncoming traffic is doing. Every right turn is an opportunity for murder. Treat it like that. Tell your teenagers. I’d rather you drive around at 80 mph on the Glenn Highway than be careless with your right hooks.