A motorist blows through a red light on Anchorage’s Northern Lights Boulevard/Craig Medred photo

A staggering pedestrian kill rate

If you are one of the few who spend much time walking in Anchorage, be afraid; be very afraid.

A “Dangerous by Design” study produced by Smart Growth America just ranked the country’s 101 largest metro areas by pedestrian fatality rates, and though Anchorage lacked a population large enough to make the list, the city’s kill rate – when compared to other cities – appears deeply troubling.

State of Alaska Epidemiology in April issued a bulletin on “Pedestrian Fatalities in Anchorage, 2016–2025” that pegged last year’s rate at 5.18 deaths per 100,000.

The Smart Growth report flags Memphis as the most dangerous city in the country for people on foot. It has a death rate of 5.5 per 100,000, and only two other metro areas – Albuquerque, N.M. and Bakersfield-Delano, Calif. – have death rates above 5 per 100,000.

The Smart Growth report does, it must be noted, use five-year averages for deaths, so it’s not quite fair to compare Anchorage circa 2025 to these Lower 48 cities, even though the post-pandemic fatality rate for pedestrians in the state’s largest city has been skyrocketing.

The city set a record for pedestrian deaths in 2024 and then managed to equal it in 2025. This followed an unusual lull in deaths in 2023. The state epidemiologists report the city’s five-year average at about 3.9 per 100,000, which would move Anchorage back to eighth, just behind Fresno, Calif., and just ahead of Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater, Fla., in the Dangerous by Design report on the country’s most dangerous cities.

But this comparison also needs a qualifer: Deadly cities numbers eight and nine are – like cities two and three – are warm-weather locations where people walk year-round. Anchorage is a winter city where non-existent or unplowed sidewalks reduce the number of winter walkers, leading to a slump in fatalities.

“When examined by season and time of day, the greatest concentration of fatalities occurred during
August to October between 11 p.m. and 2 a.m.,” state epidemiologists reported.  “Decedents
were predominantly male (61 percent). Driver behaviors included fleeing the scene (30 percent) and speeding.”

Escaping responsibility

Few of those drivers who hit and run are ever caught. Hit-and-run homicides are often hard to solve, and the Anchorage Police Department (APD), like other law enforcement agencies around the country, puts most of its time and energy into trying to solve homicides committed with other weapons.

This is not unique; it is a national norm.

“With roughly 40,000 hit-and-run crashes yearly and only one in five cases solved, tens of thousands of drivers are escaping justice every single year,” California’s “Attorney at Law” magazine reported in April. 

APD doesn’t publish data on how many, or how few, hit-and-run cases it solves, but there are no indications that it is doing any better than California law enforcement. And some of APD’s behavior reflects an agency that has decided catching hit-and-run drivers requires an investment of time and effort that isn’t justified by the lack of results.

When 13-year-old Zakkary Mann was struck and seriously injured in October 2022 while cycling to his home via Brayton Drive, a state-designated “bike route” in Alaska’s largest city, his mother couldn’t get APD to pursue the case. Officers did show up to investigate the scene. They found a driver’s side mirror from the car that hit the boy and a hood ornament that confirmed the car had been a Mercedes, as two friends riding with Zakkary at the time suspected.

But that was the end of it. APD made no public plea for information on a dark-colored Mercedes missing a side mirror and a hood ornament. Zachary’s mother was forced to turn to the media to ask then to plea for help from anyone who might have witnessed anything. Needless to say, the driver was never found.

But when drivers do stay at the scene of the collision that kills a pedestrian in Anchorage, they usually get off lightly anyway.

After Anchorage driver Russel E. Webb ran over and killed retired dentist Carlton Higgins in a crosswalk – a theoretically safe area for pedestrians – he was ticketed for failing to yield to a pedestrian in a crosswalk and fined $100. The fine was $120 less than the fine imposed on snowmachine operator Austin Gibbs after he killed two sled dogs in a collision with a dog team on the Denali Highway.

APD officials who unexpectedly revealed Webb’s ticket to The Alaska Landmine months after Higgins’ death, explained the slap-on-the-wrist penalty was due to “a similar fact pattern” to 25 other cases, and “the only difference is that nobody died. 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.”

So if it appears you’re going to hit a pedestrian in a crosswalk, you should probably step on the gas. Dead people can’t sue, and a $100 ticket is cheaper than your first consultation with a lawyer if someone survives to sue.  Not to mention the costs if they are disabled, and you end up paying for their care.

NTSB warning

A decade ago, the rate of U.S. vehicular homicides – and that’s what anytying involving one person killing another is legally called  – was rising at a rate fast enough that the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) undertook a “Special Investigation Report” into pedestrian safety.

“The number of pedestrians killed on our roadways exhibited a decreasing trend for 35 years, but beginning in 2010, the number of fatalities began increasing,” it reported two years later. “In 2016, according to
data in the US Department of Transportation Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS), a total
of 5,987 pedestrians died in collisions with highway vehicles in the United States – on average,
more than 16 per day.”

The report added that another 123,000 or more pedestrians were struck and injured, according to Centers for Disease Control (CDC) data, and warned that the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety had found that “pedestrian crashes have also become deadlier – deaths per 100 crashes increased by 29 percent from 2010 to 2015.”

The NTSB went on to offer a long list of recommendations for making urban areas safer for vulnerable road users. One of them was to lower speed limits, with the organization observing that “the relationship between speed and the severity of injuries is consistent and direct – higher crash speeds result in injuries that are more severe.

“The effect of speed is especially critical for pedestrians involved in motor vehicle crashes because pedestrians
lack protection. The average risk of a pedestrian being severely injured in a motor vehicle crash is 10 percent at an impact speed of 16 mph. The risk increases to 25 percent at a vehicle speed of 23 mph, 50 percent at 31 mph, 75 percent at 39 mph, and 90 percent at 46 mph.”

Since then, motorists have fought lower speed limits almost everywhere they have been suggested becuase the general belief is that slower speeds are inconvenient, which is not necessarily the case, and many motorists don’t care if pedestrians and cyclists get killed. They are considered acceptable collateral damage for the convenience.

But the problem isn’t just with motorists. The NTSB report also cited dangerous-by-design roads that get people killed in urban areas. Among the problems, according to the highly respected safety agency:

• Streets lacking sidewalks, crosswalks, curb extenssions, and speed bumps.
• Streets that encourage high speeds
• Streets that have intersections with multiple turn lanes
• Streets that force pedestrians into long waits at crossings
• And “arterial roads through urban environments (that) have wide, multiple lanes that are
  difficult to cross”

Those bullet points pretty well define the four, prime kill zones identified by Alaska epidemiologists in their bulletin on Anchorage pedestrian deaths. Twenty-five percent of pedestrian deaths were reported in Midtown,  it said, with another 9 percent in east Downtown and 7 percent at two intersections – C Street and 32nd Ave. and C Street and West 48th Avenue.

Many Anchorage drivers – among the most self-centered and self-entitled folks in the country – blame this all on the homeless. They insist the entire problem is with inebriates stumbling into the streets, even though inebriates almost never appear out of nowhere moving at the speed of a loose and fleeing dog.

Inebriates are not popping out of the woods or dashing out from between parked cars in the prime kill areas. Midtown and C Street have no roadside parking on the main thoroughfares and the trees were cut down long ago. In these areas, it’s easy to see anyone approaching the street on foot, if a driver is watching the road and surrounding environs ahead.

And yet drivers manage to run down and kill pedestrians at alarming rates in these areas, either becuase they aren’t paying attention or because they are going so fast that a tap on the brakes won’t slow their car or truck enough to prevent a death.

Social media in Anchorage is full of people complaining that they had to tap the brakes in Midtown to avoid hitting someone, and how it could have been they who killed a pedestrian. But these people seem to miss the main point of their own observation:

They didn’t hit anyone, let alone kill them, because they were paying attention and going slow enough that their brakes could stop them before they hit anyone.

Without a doubt, there are homeless people in Anchorage – some, if not many, new to the big city from rural Alaska where they never had to worry about being run down by cars or trucks – who make bad decisions on where and when to cross the city’s roadways.

But they’re not the ones who are supposed to be trained and licensed to safely operate a dangerous weapon, and they are not the ones whose intoxication endangers the lives of others. The state epidemiologists reported that 18 percent of those killed on city streets from 2016 to 2024 were, indeed, intoxicated, but so were 9 percent of the motorists who killed them.

Another 25 percent of motorists were reported to have some “substance” in their blood. The epidemiologists did not report what “substance,” but marijuana use by drivers in Anchorage is now so common you reguarly get a whiff of it when a smoker rolls down his or her window at an intersection.

And then, of course, there are a lot of folks taking prescription medicines that bear that warning label saying “MAY CAUSE DROWSINESS. ALCOHOL COULD INTENSIFY THIS EFFECT.  USE CAUTION WHEN OPERATING A CAR OR DANGEROUS MACHINERY.”

A higher percentage of dead pedestrians than motorists – 36 percent – were reported to have “substances” in their blood as well, but one would expect that given the number of homeless and/or elderly pedestrians among those killed. Most of those folks are likely to have medical issues for which drugs have been prescribed.

The most important thing, however, is that they died following the advice not to operate machinery while on the drugs. The got killed; they didn’t kill. And drugs are a serious issue.

 Antidepressants, for instance, nearly double the risk of a driver being in a crash, the CDC has reported. But Spanish researchers studying this issue went a step further in March. A gorup at the University of Granada published a new study warning that “when it comes to driving, some antidepressants cause effects similar to those of heavy alcohol consumption.”

Unfortunately many, if not most, drivers appear to ignore the labels on prescription drugs that warn against operating machinery because they live in metropolitan areas designed for motor vehicles than for people, and thus profess a “need” and a “right” to drive.

This design standard also happen defines nearly all of the newer portions of Anchorage and a lot of other cities.

As a result,  Smart Growth was forced to conclude that the entire 101 metropolitan areas involved in its examination of road safety are “too dangerous for people walking.” The good news for those living Outside, as Alaskans refer to the Lower 48,  is that in many of these areas have seen a slight downturn in pedestrian death rates in the last four years, in part due to cities reducing speed limits and narrowing streets.

Anchorage looked to be following the downward trend in 2023, but then sped off in the opposite direction. And there’s no indication anything is getting better this year than last year or the year before.

In fact, Anchorage drivers only seem to be getting worse. They are now driving so fast and so recklessly that the city has seen a driver waiting at a stoplight killed when his car was rear-ended at speed by the man at the wheel of a truck, and two people only days ago died in a head-on motor-vehicle collision on a smooth, straight section of the Seward Highway heading out of town. 

But hey, “this is Alaska, and we don’t care how they do things Outside,” as the old saying goes.