A Tenn. cyclist being struck from behind in much the way Fairbanks’ Jean Onorato was hit/Facebook

Two weeks ago, 61-year-old Fairbanks cyclist Janice Onorato was rammed by a car while riding along the Steese Highway north of the Central Alaska city.

Why Alaska State Troopers, who responded to this collision that left Onorato broken on the side of the roadway, thought it wasn’t worth reporting at the time is unclear. But then again, when a motorist hits a cyclist in Alaska, the collision usually goes unreported.

Such was the case when a motorist smashed into 48-year-old Matt Glover just south of Fairbanks. He later died in hospital.

Such is the case in Anchorage every year. The municipality’s 2023 Traffic Annual Report, the latest available, indicates that 91 cyclists were hit by motor vehicles in the city that year.

Luckily, none died, but 68 were reported to have been injured, nine of them seriously. How seriously, the report doesn’t say.  How “minor” the other injures, the report doesn’t say.

Sixty-eight is a pretty big number given that most of these collisions in happen in the summer months. It would appear from the data a cyclist gets hit in Anchorage every couple of days in summer.

One was struck at the Arc of Anchorage pedestrian crossing on Northern Lights Boulevard on Sunday. More than half a dozen Anchorage Police Department patrol cars responded to the scene, but the APD News, which is supposed to keep city residents informed of what is going on in the city now that dying mainstream news operations no longer provide much coverage of cops or courts, mentioned nothing about it.

Asked about how seriously the cyclist was injured, an APD officer at the scene at the time said only that “he’ll live.” An older companion of the young man still at the scene said they’d stopped their e-bikes to wait for the traffic light to change, and the young man let part of the tire on his e-bike hang over the curb.

A passing motorist clipped the tire and because the young man was straddling the bike, he was pulled into the side of the car as the bike was dragged down the street. His companion described him as “pretty bloody’ afterward.

Northern Lights has a long history of cyclists and pedestrians being run into by drivers.

“The top five roadways in Anchorage for the TOTAL number of pedestrian and bicycle-related
accidents are Northern Lights Boulevard, Lake Otis Parkway, Tudor Road, Spenard Road and
Minnesota Drive,” the Alaska Department of Public Transportation reported more than 20 years ago when motor-vehicle collisions were still being called “accidents.”

That description of collisions as accidents has since been abolished because motor vehicle collisions, aside from the rare one that happens when an animal charges onto the road from out of nowhere, do not happen accidentally. They happen because of human error on someone’s part.

Many motorists reading this – overwhelmed as many are by what has come to be called motonormativity, car brain or windshield bias – will now blame the young cyclist for leaving his tire hanging off the curve, as if it should be the responsibility of those too young to drive to watch out for adult drivers incapable of watching out for others on or near the road.

In this case, too, Anchorage has a law stipulating that “the driver of a motor vehicle overtaking a bicyclist proceeding in the same direction shall pass to the left at a safe distance, not less than three feet, and shall not return to drive on the right side of the roadway until safely clear of the overtaken bicyclist.”

This safe separation distance would appear to apply to overtaking a cyclist stopped along the side of the road as well, but the local law intended to protect cyclists has never been enforced in Anchorage in the many years it has been on the books.

As a result, many motorists are probably unfamiliar with it. Many certainly drive as if they are unaware they are supposed to give cyclists three feet of safety space.

The Sunday scene at the ARCA crossing/Craig Medred photo

Not necessarily safe

I am personally familiar with the Arc crossing on Northern Lights, which was installed to help handicapped individuals safely travel from a facility on the north side of the road to a bus stop on the south side. The traffic signal at this pedestrian-car intersection is one of the few button-activated red lights in the city.

When the button is pushed, the light designed to tell motorists to stop comes on in seconds. The only other light I know of that works this way in Anchorage turns on a flashing, over-the-road light at Elmore Road and 84th Avenue, which drivers regularly ignore because there is no crosswalk painted on the pavement there.

Most of the traffic lights in Anchorage have pedestrian crossing buttons that do nothing but signal the light to turn on the pedestrian “walk” sign whenever the light is set to switch from red to green as dictated by rules intended to keep traffic flowing as fast as possible in the state’s largest city.

When cycling or walking the dogs in the Arc area, I usually take advantage of a highway overpass to the north at Goose Lake as a courtesy to drivers, but I have now and then used the light-controlled crossing to satisfy my own curiosity as to how well Anchorage drivers comply with red lights.

The good news is most drivers stop for the light and painted crosswalk on the road there. The bad news is that too many don’t, and a fair number familiar with the light stomp the accelerator if they see someone standing on the sidewalk near the post where the light-triggering mechanism is located.

Given that traffic is mosts time already moving at 45 or 50 mph on Northern Lights, drivers who speed up literally come flying through the intersection. It’s wise to avoid entering the crosswalk until cars have already stopped to block cars still speeding toward the light.

Whether this young man’s bike was hit, dragging him into a maelstrom, because someone was speeding up to beat the light and not paying full attention to who was on the side of the road, we’ll probably never know.

A motorist blowing through the red light on a past occasion/Craig Medred photo

Just as we’ll probably never how exactly a woman at the wheel of a Ford sedan ran into Onorato from behind despite a flashing light on the rear of her bike and a bright vest on her body. Glover was similarly outfitted when riding along the Richardson Highway near Fairbanks, and despite that, he was hit and killed by a driver who claimed the cyclist came out of nowhere.

Driver Fred Aker told this website that he “bent down to look (in a truck mirror) and about four seconds later I heard a big thump. (I) immediately stomped on the brakes, looked up and Mr Glover was flying through the air as his bike rolled out across the fog line.”

Taking your eyes off the road for four seconds to stare into a mirror would be considered distracted driving in some states, but the Fairbanks Police Department did not charge Aker with any crime or even cite him for “Improper Entry/Exit-Controlled-Access Highway,” the ticketable offense for entering the Richardson from an access road and colliding with another vehicle.

Glover’s vehicle was, in this case, a bicycle, but that doesn’t change the law. Then again, some Alaska drivers don’t seem to recognize that when merging into highway traffic, the driver entering the flow is supposed to yield to the driver on the highway and not the other way around.

It would be tempting to here declare that Alaska motorists can be generally defined with the term “Bad Driving Is Us,” but driving behaviors and skills in the U.S. have so badly deteriorated in the 21st century that such a declaration would be unfair.

The American Automobile Association (AAA), an organization established by and for motorists, now classifies less than 35 percent of the people behind the wheel as “safe drivers,” warns that more than in one in 10 are a danger because they are either distracted or aggressive, and classifies one in 40 as “most dangerous.”

One in 40 might not seem like a lot until you consider that there a reported 242.3 million licensed drivers in this country. If you do the math, one in 40 works out to about 6 million “most dangerous” drivers on U.S. roads.

The AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety began investigating driving behaviors a decade ago because it noticed rising traffic dangers.

This has become obvious in Anchorage, which set a record for pedestrian deaths last year, but where bad drivers still manage to kill more of their fellow drivers than they do vulnerable road users.

Run down from behind

If a report from the Fairbanks Cycle Club is to be believed, Onorato, a neurologist in Alaska’s second-largest city, was one of those hit by someone who can only be described as a bad driver.

The club reported she was riding behind partner Moreen Fried, a veteran Fairbanks cyclist, when Fried “heard an explosion, which was the car’s tire being punctured by the bike.”

Fried immediately turned around to discover “Janice was hit from behind,” according to the report. “Then the driver tried to drive away but was prevented from doing so due to the flat tire and other damage to the vehicle. She (the driver) never got out of her vehicle, but others stopped to help Janice.”

Onorato’s bike was destroyed. She suffered some nerve damage, an internal tear in her buttocks, a lot of bruising and some road rash, but was lucky it wasn’t worse. Attempts to contact here in the last several days have proven futile.

According to the Fairbanks club report, an Alaska State Trooper who responded to the scene cited the driver for failing to yield and took away the driver’s license, but that does not appear to be the case.

A spokesman for troopers today revealed that Onotaro was hit by 70-year-old Peggy Hendrickson from Fairbanks and that Hendrickson was cited for “Failure to Exercise Due Care to Avoid a Collision” and “Failure to Provide Proof of Insurance. ”

The state waives proof of insurance citations without a fine if a driver can show they had insurance at the time of the collision. There is a $150 fine and a $20 surcharge to be paid on the ticket for failure to exercise due care, unless Hendrickson decides to contest it in court.

Anchorage attorney and road-safey advocate Marc Grober has suggested charges of attempted manslaughter would be appropriate cases like this one, but state district attorneys are loathe to file serious charges in motor-vehicle bike collisions for fears a jury loaded with people suffering with what has been called motonormativity, car brain and windsheild bias will refuse to convict an inattentive driver who slams into a vulnerable road user.

The driver who killed Glover was never charged. He was not even cited for “Improper
Entry/Exit-Controlled-Access Highway” after merging onto the Alaska Highway and striking Glover, who was pedaling there on his regular commute from North Pole to Fairbanks.

Manslaughter is a Class A felony in Alaska, which would render a charge of attempted manslaughter a Class B felony under state law. A Class B felony can result in imprisonment for up to 10 years, although state sentencing recommendations call for a one to three year sentence if it is a first felony and allow for a judge,” if the court finds it appropriate,” to grant a suspended imposition of sentence.

Fairbanks Cycle Club president Eric Troyer was baffled at how someone could have run into Onorato. She and Fried “ride frequently and try to be as safe as possible,” he wrote. “They use front and back lights, wear bright vests, and hug the shoulder…(and) they were riding north of Chatanika because there is less traffic there.”

He warned other cyclists to “please be careful and vigilant while cycling on the road. Unfortunately, as cyclists, we can do everything right and still be vulnerable.”

Because of this vulnerability, an increasing number of road cyclists are turning to rear-facing radar systems that can warn of vehicles approaching too fast from directly behind and/or equipping their bikes with rear-flashing lights that incorporate cameras capable of recording what happened in a collision, making it easier to take civil action against dangerous drivers after serious crashes or prosecute them if a rider dies.

In parts of the United Kingdom, law enforcement now solicits bike-cam and dash-cam footage of reckless driving for use in tracking down and levying fines on dangerous drivers and allows people to submit such footage online.

U.S. law enforcement has been slow to embrace this technology, but it is now coming into play in some states. Thanks to dash-cam footage, a California man was last fall convicted of serious charges for causing a crash that left nine people injured.

And a major breakthrough in dealing with incompetent drivers came in Colorado this year where prosecutors under pressure from the Boulder community and the family of 17-year-old Magnus White, a rising star in U.S. competitive cycling, filed serious charges against the woman who drove her car onto the shoulder of a highway there in 2023, ran over White, and killed him.

She was convicted of vehicular manslaughter and just this month sentenced to four years in prison  In the wake of Magnus’s death, his family also set up The White Line, a foundation dedicated to “changing driver behavior.

“Driving is a privilege, not a right,” the foundation’s website notes. “It is imperative that drivers be held accountable for their dangerous choices behind the wheel. These are not mistakes; these are choices that a driver makes that end with taking the life of another.”

To date, the foundation has been successful in getting more done than anyone did in the wake of the crippling of former NBA basketball star Shawn Bradley in 2021 or the death of New York Jets football coach Greg Knapp that same year. 

Both men were run down from behind, Bradley as he was about to exit a neighborhood roundabout near his St. George, Utah home, and Knapp as he pedaled in a bike lane in San Ramon, Calif.

Neither of the drivers involved in those collisions were charged, and authorities in both Utah and California have refused to identify them, as is something of a national norm. The excuse given for this in Anchorage in the past has been that unless a driver is charged with a “crime” for killing a vulnerable road user, the death is nothing more than a traffic incident in which police are not required to identify drivers.

Lack of consequences

And as long as a driver is licensed and sober, stays at the scene of a collision, acts contrite and lacks for a past criminal history, law enforcement in the 49th state remains willing to presume the collision was basically an “accident,” even if a vulnerable road user is seriously injured and even if it is now agreed these collisions are not accidents.

They are the result of human actions and someone is responsible. Sometimes it is a cyclist or a pedestrian, too.

Anchorage is now home to a large homeless population, many of whom ignore rules meant to protect them and lack for enough common sense (which is unfortunately uncommon) to look both ways before crossing a street, especially one with speeding traffic and texting drivers in the flow.

Given the way they wander around, Anchorage can only be considered lucky the body count isn’t higher than the record set last year. Part of this can, however,  be credited to cyclists having a much better survival rate than pedestrians when struck by motor vehicles. This is an interesting phenomenon that appears linked to a number of factors.

Cyclists tend to be younger than pedestrians, which makes them more durable, and they have a higher center of mass. Thus they are more likely to roll up onto the hoods of many vehicles – tall trucks and sport utility vehicles being the big exceptions –  instead of being knocked down and run over.

Since cyclists are usually moving with traffic, their speed also minimizes velocity at impact. A pedestrian hit by a car doing 40 mph takes the brunt of that force. A cyclist doing 15 mph when struck by a car going 40 mph reduces the speed at impact to 25 mph.

The bike is also pushed away from the point of impact on wheels, which further reduces the force of the collision and absorbs some of the blow.

Anchorage traffic statistics are rather startling in what a difference this makes. Of the 68 cyclists per year involved in serious collisions in the period 2020 to 2222, the municipality reports that only about two percent died. The comparable number for the average of the 89 pedestrians per year hit by motor vehicles in that period was about 10 percent or five times greater.

This is a long-running norm. The 2019 to 2021 rate for cyclists was under 2 percent while that for pedestrians was about 9 percent. For the 2018 to 2020 period, the rate was less than 1 percent for cyclists and about 64 percent for pedestrians.

How many of cyclists hit by cars suffer life-changing injuries instead of death is an unknown, and the same applies to pedestrians. But when deaths are looked at from the population level, both cycling and walking in Anchorage actually look safer than driving.

The per-year average death rate for motorists in the 2020-2022 period, the last for which complete data is now available, is 3.80 per 100,000 residents. For pedestrians, it was 3.11 per 100,000. And for cyclists, it was 0.27 per 100,000.

This looks good on paper for vulnerable road users, but is mainly a reflection of the fact the vast majority of Anchorage residents drive almost everywhere because the newer parts of the city, as is the case in many other U.S. cities, were designed for motor vehicles rather than people.

A lot of Anchorage residents are almost forced into heavy use of motor vehicles by design, and as a result, increase their exposure to possible collisions with other motor vehicles. Still, the fact that drivers surrounded by armor die in greater numbers than unarmored pedestrians and cyclists should concern Anchorage drivers.

But it would appear many, if not most, would rather take the risks of dying or getting maimed than slow down in the interest of everyone’s safety because, well, America has become a hurry-up society even when there is no reason to hurry.

As a consequence, people are maimed and people die with only luck and the capabilities of modern medicine keeping the carnage from being worse. Onorato can count herself among the lucky.