They’re asking to die
Leave it to a member of the Anchorage Assembly to make clear what has been deadly obvious in Alaska’s largest city for some time.
And that is that a whole lot of motorists view their convenience as more important than human lives.
South Anchorage Assembly Keith McCormick laid it all out in a little-viewed Instagram video he posted in October to protest lowering speed limits to 35 mph in Alaska’s largest city.
“This is a continuation of the policy that blames drivers for the increased pedestrian deaths,” the conservative social warrior declared. And yes, just so no one gets confused, McCormick is a social warrior no different from the defund the police gang. The only difference is that he is pandering to a different audience.
His is made up of motorists who want to get around Anchorage as fast and as conveniently as possible.
Unfortunately, saving lives on the roads isn’t about convenience; it’s about physics and psychology. The physics are pretty well illustrated in the graphic at the top of this story. The psychology is more complex in that it deals with the behaviors of drivers and of pedestrians, some of whom are incapacitated for whatever reason.
Let’s leave it to the American Automobile Association (AAA), the 124-year-old advocacy group for motorists, to explain the behavior problems among today’s drivers. AAA has identified speeding, distracted driving, and aggressive driving as “prevalent dangerous hazards” on U.S. roads today.
- An overwhelming majority of drivers (93 percent) recognized the dangers of texting, emailing, and reading while driving. But more than a quarter (27 percent) admitted texting while driving, and more than a third (37 percent) admitted reading texts or emails while driving.
- Eighty-nine percent of drivers agreed that aggressive driving was dangerous, but nearly half (49 percent) admitted that they had within the previous 30 days driven driven 15 mph over the posted speed limit on a freeway, and 36 percent reported driving 10 mph over the posted speed limit on a residential street. The danger of freeway speeding is debatable, but neighborhood speeding sparks a frightening, six-fold increase in the probability of killing a pedestrian (see the graphic above).
- Eighty-one percent of drivers agreed that running red lights is dangerous, but more than one in four (27 percent) then admitted to running one in the previous 30 days.
- And 30 percent of drivers felt driving within an hour of using cannabis was fine. This despite researchers finding that “worse driving performance is evident for several hours post-smoking,” with pot users also showing an “increasing willingness to drive at 1 hour 30 minutes that may indicate a false sense of driving safety.”
Some of the driving problems – the drinking and the doping – can be blamed on people looking for an escape from the hurry-up world of today, while others are linked to drivers unwilling to disconnect from that hurry-up world when they get behind the wheel.
They elect to multitask while driving; they speed through busy urban areas; and pedestrians die.
Finger of blame
For this, in the view of the McCormicks of the world, motorists are not to blame; pedestrians are the problem.
Why?
Because, at least in Anchorge, McCormick claims, “85 percent” of them were rundown becuase they “were under the influence.” He did not stipulate what specific influence. God could have told some of them to cross the street for all anyone knows.
But McCormick’s suggestion appeared to be that these dead pedestrians weren’t looking out for cars because they were drunk or strung out on dope. And thus it was their fault they ended up dead.
This reflects a widespread Anchorage belief that collision prevention in the state’s largest city is the responsibility of vulnerable road users – including children – not the operators of deadly machines.
One can only thank God that so many Anchorage parents have recognized this and now drive their children everywhere instead of letting them walk or ride a bicycle, unless they happen to live somewhere along one of the multi-use trails in the city’s limited greenbelt system.
Where exactly McCormick got his 85 percent figure for walkers is unclear. The latest “Crash Analyses published by the Municipality of Anchorage is for 2024, and it reports drugs or alcohol were “suspected” in seven of the 15 pedestrian fatalities that year.
Seven of 15 is 47 percent, not 85 percent. And it’s not clear from the crash report how many of these deaths involved impaired walkers rather than impaired drivers.
But never mind that.
Let’s assume that McCormick’s claim is correct and consider the question it raises: Exactly how does a government reduce the number of road deaths among drunks and stoners?
Brain fog
How confused about human behavior does one have to be to reach that conclusion? Drunks, stoners and the mentally unstable are not known for their clear thinking, let alone for their embrace of laws.
Alaska has stiff laws against driving under the influence, and yet the city crash analysis for 2024 reported that alcohol or drugs were suspected in the deaths of eight of the 11 people (73 percent) killed in single or multiple-vehicle crashes that year.
Alcohol or drugs were also reported to be involved in another 11 motor-vehicle collisions that left motor-vehicle passengers with serious injuries. You can figure many, if not most, of those people would have died if not enclosed in a steel cage, but instead they were just maimed.
Obviously, a significant number of drivers are ignoring the costly consequences of driving drunk in Anchorage, and those consequences are significant. The Alaska Division of Motor Vehicles estimates that being busted for the first time costs the average driver $24,265.
These are mandatory penalties, and the costs associated with them only go up with any subsequent convictions. Yet, there are still way too many drunk and/or doped-up drivers on Anchorage roads.
So, how can anyone come to believe that street drunks with nothing to lose are going to behave differently if the city imposes a stricter law defining where they can or cannot ‘legally’ cross Anchorage streets?
Especially since most of the Facebook geniuses seem to generally agree with McCormick’s analysis and suggest that most of those dying are homeless individuals. For some of them, going to jail for ‘jaywalking’ might make life more comfortable than their latest makeshift hideout in an Anchorage park.
But none of them are going to jail unless Anchorage traffic laws are enforced, and enforcement of traffic laws in Anchorage is almost non-existent, which helps explain why there is so much speeding and reckless driving.
Petty politics
Some of what is going on here, of course, has nothing whatsoever to do with saving lives on Anchorage roads, and everything to do with Anchorage’s crazy lefty-righty politics.
Some on the right, like McCormick, think it’s politically useful to claim the city has a “policy” of blaming drivers for the deaths of pedestrians when actually, the policy is pretty much the opposite.
If the city had a policy of blaming drivers, APD would name those who run down and kill pedestrians.
It doesn’t.
Even when drivers are found to be legally to blame for running down and killing a pedestrian, APD covers for them.
The agency later updated the report to say that “the pedestrian, 85-year-old Carlton Higgins, passed away at the hospital.” And that was the end of any official comment.
Asked to explain a tiny fine for committing a homicide, APD explained that Higgins had been cited for “failure to yeild” after the collision, and that he had subsequently been treated just like 25 other drivers who were cited in 2023 for failure to yield to a pedestrian in a crosswalk.
“These cases all had similar fact patterns; the only difference is that nobody died,” APD explained. “There is no law in Alaska that says if you commit a traffic infraction and cause injury or death, then that is per se criminal negligence.”
Worse than you thought
APD did not provide the Landmine any information on how many people involved in the other crosswalk collisions were injured, let alone the state of their injuries. But the city’s “Crash Analyses” for 2023 reported 98 pedestrians were hit in 2023, and 18 suffered “a major suspected injury.”
Counting Higgins, seven pedestrians died that year. The seventh deaths, 18 major injuries and a reported 59 collisions involving pedestrians with minor injuries likely accounted for most, if not all, of the 25 drivers cited for failure to yield to pedestrians in crosswalks, given that APD has never been known to run a sting operation to try to catch drivers who fail to stop at crosswalks.
Why would APD target drivers? Anchorage is a community where motorists are responsible for killing plenty of vulnerable road users but are never to be blamed.
Who is to blame, according to McCormick and a bunch of Facebook geniuses, are dead pedestrians and a progressive Anchorage assembly that allegedly “decriminalized” jaywalking in the city.
That ;atter claim is what is called a “red herring,” something intended to divert attention from the real problem or matter at hand
The assembly did change the municipal law on crossing roads, but the change was more a clarification of what was and wasn’t illegal than the decriminalization of anything.
If you go back to 2021 and look at the then-seldom-enforced law that was changed, it said this:
“No pedestrian may cross a roadway at a point where a pedestrian tunnel or overhead
pedestrian crossing has been provided and which is accessible at road level at or near the
point of crossing, unless a marked crosswalk is also provided at that point. If a pedestrian
overpass or tunnel is not accessible and if no marked crosswalk is provided, a pedestrian
crossing the roadway must yield the right-of-way to all vehicles on the roadway which are so
close as to constitute a hazard.”
Or “between adjacent intersections in a business or residence district in which traffic-control signals are in operation, no pedestrian may cross except in a marked crosswalk.”
That is almost the exact wording that remains in the state law dictating the rules for road crossings by people on foot. The supposedly “decriminalized” Anchorage law now on the books says this:
The Anchorage assembly’s big crime was to clarify the vague word “near” to stipulate that if the distance between pedestrian tunnels, overhead walks and marked crosswalks, of which there are few in Anchorage, was greater than the length of a football field, pedestrians could cross the road between if they thought it safe.
Now, admittedly, the assembly was being a little “woke.” The main reason for the change was that in some communities elsewhere, law enforcement officers were accused of using similarly vague street-crossing language to harass pedestrians who were members of minorities.
There were no reports that this was going on in Anchorage, which might have something to do with the fact that little traffic enforcement of any kind. This is also a part of the reason drivers believe themselves to be a force unto themselves.
When the city lowered the speed limit on a small portion of Spenard Road to 25 mph, one driver on the social media website Nextdoor posted that “I’ll drive 25 on Spenard when they start arresting J walkers.”
The Facebook geniuses and McCormick appear to agree. Thus his opposition to lowering speed limits because they are a “continuation of the policy that blames drivers for the increased pedestrian deaths,” even though drivers are almost never blamed, at least publicly, and his warning that lowering speed limits “does nothing to improve road maintenance…but it does clog up your drive to work.”
The latter claim has to make one wonder if maybe McCormick spends too much time in the house, becuase what clogs up the drive to work for most in Anchorage is the motor-vehicle traffic itself. And this traffic is heavy as a result of almost everyone driving almost everywhere because many are afraid to walk or to let their children walk.
As someone who daily drove Goldenview Drive before the Goldenview Middle School was built, the author can testify to what causes traffic clogs – cars and trucks. In the days before long lines of parents drove their kids to school, Goldenview was wide open.
The shuttling parent drivers now clog it up nicely, but you have to sympathize with them. In a city where everyone wants to drive at deadly speeds, with the posted speed limits and a lack of traffic enforcement encouraging such driving, parents would be nuts to let their kids walk or ride a bike to school.
The only realistic way to alter this dynamic is to lower speeds and beef up enforcement. But a whole lot of Anchorage motorists appear to be opposed to that idea because, to them, the possible inconvenience of slowing down a little (a small inconvenience compared to the traffic pileups caused by bad driving that can shut down the Seward of Glenn highways in winter) trumps the loss of human lives.
What a wonderful thing to think that this is what Alaska’s largest city has become.
Categories: Commentary
