Anchorage pedestrian fatality rate per 100,000/Alaska Office of Epidimology

Five times deadlier than average

With Alaska’s largest city setting records for pedestrian deaths on its streets, the Anchorage Police Department is bragging about its success in corralling rouge driver during its recent “Focused Pedestrian Safety Enforcement” effort.

But the data coming from that month-long effort, funded by a grant from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, is mainly an indictment of what APD hasn’t been doing.

The key figure? “Twenty-five drivers who were unlicensed or driving while suspended, revoked, or canceled,” according to APD.

These were 25 drivers involved in 661 traffic stops. This amounts to almost 4 percent of drivers stopped. And what we have here is a random sample indicating that one in every 26 drivers on Anchorage roads shouldn’t be driving at all, either becuase they don’t have a license or because it has been taken away due to their previous bad driving.

How many of these drivers play a role in an Anchorage pedestrian death rate of 5.18 per 100,000, or more than five times higher than the national average of less than one per 100,000 reported by the Governors Highway Safety Associatio,  is unclear.

But the American Automobile Association (AAA) in March published a research brief flagging unlicensed drivers – many of whom are involved in hit-and-run collisions – as a major danger to vulnerable road users.

“Pedestrians and cyclists were found to be particularly vulnerable to injury and death in hit-and-run crashes: approximately one of every four pedestrian and cyclist injuries and deaths in 2023 occurred in a hit-and-run crash,” the report said.

“Reults from the current study show that of known hit-and-run drivers, two in five lacked a valid license, perhaps incentivizing them to attempt to avoid apprehension,” That 40 percent number is likely higher given that AAA also reported that 53 percent of hit-and-run drivers are never caught.

The percentage for hit-and-run drivers who are never apprehended in Anchorage appears to be even higher. They are almost never caught.

Killers on the road

Meanwhile, how many of the record 15 people killed by drivers in Anchorage last year were killed by unlicensed drivers is unknown because a driver-protective APD doesn’t report this sort of thing. It doesn’t name killer drivers when pedestrians are hit. It reports only on whether the “driver remained at the scene” or not, and if the driver remained, APDis rarely any follow-up as to what happened.

An unusual exception involved a retired dentist killed near the Providence Cancer Center in 2023.

Six months after Carlton Higgins’ death, APD released a report to a persistent Paxson Woelber at The Alaska Landmine revealing that driver Russell Webb, the husband of a retired state judge, “pulled out of a parking garage in a Ford F250, stopped at a stop sign and activated his vehicle’s turn signal, and waited for traffic to clear to turn left onto Piper Street. Northbound traffic stopped for Higgins, who had entered the crosswalk and who had the right-of-way. But the driver failed to wait for Higgins to exit the crosswalk, instead accelerating into and striking him with his vehicle.”

Webb’s sentence for killing Higgins was a $100 ticket. Asked to explain this, APD said Webb was treated no differently than 24 other drivers cited for failure to yield to pedestrians in crosswalks in 2023.

“These cases all had similar fact patterns; the only difference is that nobody died,” APD argued. “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. The driver in this case was treated the same as all these other cases. ”

APD did not reveal how many of those other crosswalk violations involved pedestrians being hit, but the number was likely to have been significant. The city’s Annual Traffic Reports record that about one in every 30 of the 3,500 to 4,500 motor-vehicle collisions in Anchorage each year involves a pedestrian, and about 35 percent of those pedestrians are injured or killed.

APD reports only the most serious of collisions, primarily those in which a pedestrian dies at the scene or is taken to the hospital on the verge of death.

From 2016 to 2025, according to a newly released bulletin from the Alaska Office of Epidemiology, 92 pedestrians were killed over that span of years, and about a third of them died in hit-and-run collsions. If the AAA data is to be believed, it’s probable that a large number of the drivers involved were unlicensed and shouldn’t have been on the road in the first place.

Getting unlicensed drivers off Anchorage’s street would definitely make the city safer, especially since hit and run killers are so rarely caught. But getting unlicensed drivers off the street would require more active traffic policing in the city rather than a one-month event funded by  federal grant.

Neither the city nor the state, which is in charge of a number of Anchorage’s major arterial roads, have shown any interest in funding such an effort, and little interest in lowering speed limits to levels that increase the odds that pedestrians will survive collisions.

Motonormativity

As for a citizenry dominated by drivers suffering from car brain, the prevailing view seems to be that if a pedestrian dies on an Anchorage street, it’s his or her own damn fault for failing to stay the hell out of the way of cars and trucks.

The city’s homeless end up taking a big share of the blame for this because of a motorist perception that they are all stumbling around drunk or drugged, but the brief from the Office of Epidemiology would indicate that they’re not that much worse than the drivers.

The office reported that 36 percent of dead pedestrians were found to have a debilitating chemical of some sort in their blood, but so did one in every four drivers – 25 percent – at the wheel of what proved to be a deadly weapon.

“…Illegal driver behaviors such as impaired driving and fleeing the scene were frequently documented in crashes involving pedestrian fatalities, suggesting that many of these deaths may be preventable through improved driver behavior and targeted safety interventions,” the report said.

Improving driver behavior is, unfortunately, a tough nut to track. Urban design has for years encouraged drivers to believe city arterials almost everywhere in the country are speedways, and that they are in a competition to get wherever it is that they are going.

As a result of the competition, the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety last fall found that “96 percent of drivers reported engaging in aggressive driving or road rage behaviors at least once in the previous year” because of a need to:

• Get “to destinations more quickly.”
• Claim “control over sometimes chaotic driving environments.”
• Educate “other drivers on the correct way to behave.”
• Retaliate “against perceived slights.”
• And punish “other drivers for bad behavior.”

The results of that survey would indicate that changing driver behavior is going to be hard and that reducing speed limits might be a more productive way to save the lives of pedestrians.  The report from the  Office of Epidemiology provides some interesting data in that regard.

“Pedestrian fatalities were concentrated in several areas,” it says, with Midtown accounting for 25 percent of deaths and another 16 percent taking place in East Downtown, and at the 32nd Avenue and 48th Avenue intersections on C Street.

“In all other areas, fewer than six deaths were observed” in a decade, the report said.

It would appear from this that up to 40 percent of the city’s pedestrians deaths could be eliminated by reducing speeds in these areas to 20 mph, which gives pedestrians a 99 percent chance of surviving a collision, according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.

IIHS graphic

But you’re going to have a hard time finding an Anchorage politician, let alone an Alaska one, with the courage to stand up to motorists and propose that idea. Most won’t even back the idea of reducing speeds to 20 mph on neighborhood streets, something which is becoming a norm in other American cities.

Conservative Salt Lake City took that step four years on approximately 420 miles or 70 percent of the city’s public streets in  a move that required changing out 475 speed signs.

“These (new) signs will signal to drivers in our city that we want our kids to get to school safely,” Mayor Erin Mendenhall said at the time. “We want our neighbors to make it home from work without incident. But signage alone will not make our streets safer. It will take each driver in our city being committed to slowing down, staying alert and never driving under the influence.”

“A default, 20 mph speed limit on local streets has very little impact on travel times by bus and car but does have a huge impact on safety and livability for our neighborhoods,” added Salt Lake Council Chairman Dan Dugan, but good luck trying to convince Anchorage drivers of that.

For many of them, even two minutes of travel time is too much to sacrifice to prevent killing or maiming someone.