Pedestrian being hit by car/YouTube

Easy solution for safer streets

If the stories told by the many motorists who claim to have been traumatized by near misses with homeless pedestrians on Anchorage streets are true, maybe there is a simple and easy way to make streets safer in Alaska’s largest city:

Harness the power of the homeless.

OK, now you’re thinking, “what in the hell is he talking about?”

What he’s talking about is providing an incentive for all the bad drivers out there to drive like the good drivers who have managed, by their own admissions, to miss the intoxicated, blind-to-the-world, misbehaving or otherwise messed up homeless stumbling around in Anchorage.

Good drivers didn’t miss those miscreants by accident. They missed them because they were focused on their driving.

Some might find this hard to believe, but drivers who are paying attention while at the wheel can almost always avoid hitting pedestrians, cyclists, motorcyclists, other motor vehicles and even most of the animals prone to crossing streets, be they the moose and bears of Anchorage or, in the rest of the U.S., the more than 140 million squirrels, cats, rats, opossums, raccoons, dogs, and deer, reportedly killed on the roads every year.

So how does one incentivize bad drivers?  With the power of capitalism, of course, which is money.

You write a law to make them pay for being bad drivers. You make it mandatory that any driver who kills a pedestrian in Anchorage is required to pay a $10,000 fine.

Oh yeah, I can see someone reading this now, pulling their hair out and screaming, “That’s not fair! What if it’s not my fault?”

Go look in the mirror, you coward. If you’re really paying attention to your driving, if you’re driving defensively, your odds of hitting a pedestrian or cyclist are near zero. People don’t come out of nowhere as animals sometimes do.

Nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand times out of a million, the people who get hit by cars are visible in or near the roadway before they do something stupid, and a driver who sees them near the roadway and is prepared for whatever stupid thing they might do will not hit them.

I drive a lot, and I’m not afraid of being required to pay a $10,000 fine if a law like this were to be enacted. So what are you afraid of?

Looking at your phone too much, maybe? Daydreaming regularly because cars now almost drive themselves? Turning your head around too often to yell at the kids or dogs in the backseat? Driving so fast that you have to have the split-second reflexes of a Formula 1 competitor to avoid hitting that cyclist or pedestrian?

Or generally just not wanting to be burdened with the task of paying attention to the road?

A $10,000 fine would give you and others like you a good reason to pay attention.

The false ‘safety’ provided by crosswalks/YouTube

Cost savings

Anchorage’s city fathers, and mothers, are now in their great wisdom contemplating ways to make the city’s streets safer that range from modifying or rebuilding parts of the transportation system to “calm traffic,” as they say, to dropping speed limits in the areas where pedestrians are being hit and killed.

Most of the ideas they have discussed will work to a greater or lesser degree. All, unfortunately, come with sizeable financial costs.

Lowering speeds, which has proven to lower deaths by minimizing the damage when motor vehicles collide with each other or so-called “vulnerable road users,” is the cheapest of those options.

But there are costs in replacing signage, and if you want lower speed limits to work, you need to enforce the limits. Otherwise, many drivers will just go on driving at the speeds to which they have become accustomed, and they’re driving that way will create a feedback loop pushing nearly all other drivers to step on the gas so as not to obstruct traffic.

Thus the need for enforcement, and that is costly. Anchorage, according to the municipal budget, now spends about $140 million per year on the Anchorage Police Department. About 79 percent of that budget is spent on salaries and benefits for APD’s 614 employees.

This level of spending works out to an average of slightly more than $178,000 per employee. To do a better job of traffic enforcement, APD is going to need to shift job responsibilities for some officers, which it’s hard to imagine anyone wants done in a city already struggling with crime problems, or add more traffic patrolmen.

That will cost money.

Why should the municipality’s competent and good drivers be required to pay more in the form of tax dollars to make up for the incompetent and bad drivers when the latter could simply be made to pay for their bad driving?

Let’s be real here, too. A $10,000 fine for killing someone is putting a pretty low value on human life. But then, a lot of those getting killed are homeless and not worth much.

That is not a statement of moral belief, but a summary of legal reality. The author doesn’t think the lives of the homeless are cheap. A lot of them are just people with mental problems that society is today incapable of fixing.

But when the U.S. legal system puts a value on the dead, it bases that value on future earnings. And there is no reason to believe the next Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos is living among the Anchorage homeless.

As an Anchorage taxpayer, I’d much rather make the city’s inattentive, careless and sometimes downright dangerous drivers pay the costs of making our roads safer than pay more in taxes to try to make our roads safer.

And I have no doubt that making it mandatory that drivers pay for killing someone – and pay more than the now paltry $100 fine for running over and killing a pedestrian in a crosswalk – will make drivers devote more attention to their driving.

The drivers fuming as they read this are a testament to that belief. The same drivers will fume some more every time the APD News posts a report saying so-and-so pedestrian was killed at such-and-such an intersection, and the driver has been assessed the mandatory $10,000 fine for killing a pedestrian with a motor vehicle in Anchorage.

The more they fume, the better, because all the fuming is sure to cause them to pay more attention when they are behind the wheel, and it’s a given that drivers – even those with minimal driving skills – run into fewer objects, animate or inanimate, when they focus on driving.