Anchorage gets $25M from Federal Highway Administration for Bragaw Street road safety project

The Anchorage municipality is set to receive a $24.9 million grant from the Federal Highway Administration, largely for an upcoming road project to improve safety along a 1.5-mile stretch of Bragaw Street in North Anchorage.

A transportation safety plan for the Anchorage metropolitan area was finalized in March, pinpointing the Bragaw corridor between the Glenn Highway and East Northern Lights Boulevard as the top priority. The city’s goal is to make the area safe for all road users, including vehicles, pedestrians and bicyclists, according to Melinda Kohlhaas, acting director of the city’s Project Management and Engineering Department.

The plan comes as road safety in Anchorage draws growing concern, especially for pedestrians and bicyclists. Last week, a woman was killed while crossing DeBarr Road on foot, just east of its intersection with Bragaw Street. Ten pedestrians have died so far in Anchorage this year.

While Bragaw is not the most dangerous road corridor in Anchorage, over a five-year period, 2017 through 2021, there were 471 crashes along the stretch, including 118 that resulted in injuries, according to the safety plan. Of those, 17 were fatal or severe. Eighteen crashes involved bicycles and 19 involved pedestrians. In 2022, the most recent year for which citywide crash data is available, there were 18 crashes at the Bragaw-Debarr intersection.

The safety changes on Bragaw could include a “road diet” — which traditionally means reducing lanes on both sides of the street from two to one, according the the Federal Highway Administration. Other possible changes include channelizing right turns and creating offset left turn lanes.

“Eliminating two of the four travel lanes will allow for bike lanes, increased spacing between driving lanes and sidewalks to improve snow storage, shorter pedestrian crossing distances, and safer turning movements,” according to the Highway Administration’s grant summary for the Bragaw Street project.

But the project hasn’t yet been designed, and the city doesn’t yet have specific details on exactly what safety elements it will include.

The north-south corridor has two traffic lanes in both directions, with a center turn lane along much of it, and it runs from the northernmost part of the Mountain View neighborhood to its confluence with Northern Lights

Bragaw Street provides access to Bettye Davis East Anchorage High School, nearby Russian Jack Elementary School, Mountain View Elementary, plus a Costco, churches, a fire station and large swaths of residential areas in the Airport Heights and Russian Jack Community Council areas.

The city expects to sign a grant agreement in the coming weeks, Kohlhaas said.

After that, “there is a lot of data to collect, design work to perform, and public feedback to gather before we have a complete idea of what can be done,” Kohlhaas said in an email.

The city needs to evaluate whether reducing lanes on Bragaw Street is feasible, she said.

According to the Federal Highway Administration, road diets can reduce crashes by between 19% to 47%. They tend to work on roads that see an average of 20,000 vehicle trips per day or less. Bragaw Street has been below that for the last six years, Kohlhaas said, with “typical volumes along the corridor ranging closer to 15,000.”

A similar project in 2017 to upgrade a stretch of Spenard Road from Benson Boulevard to Hillcrest Drive has increased safety for vehicle traffic, bicyclists and pedestrians, said Brandon Telford, engineering manager with the municipality. Construction for the final phase of that project is scheduled to start in 2026, between Benson and Minnesota Drive. It will similarly use a road diet, reducing the four vehicle travel lanes to two, with a center turn lane, and add in bike lanes and 8-foot multi-use pathways on each side of Spenard.

The volume of traffic on Spenard is much lower than on Bragaw, so it’s more clear that a road diet is a good option, Telford said.

“When it comes to Bragaw, we’re in more of a gray area. It might work. It might induce some additional congestion that we may have to evaluate, or it may be beyond what we’re able to accommodate,” he said.

A road diet would have at least one big upside: more room for snow storage in winter, Telford said.

Bragaw Street doesn’t have a dedicated area for street maintenance to store snow. That makes it difficult to keep vehicle lanes cleared, while also keeping sidewalks clear of snow and ice for “vulnerable road users like pedestrians, including students traveling to and from the high school,” Kohlhaas said.

The safety plan also suggests reviewing signal timing for pedestrians at the Debarr Road and Penland Parkway intersections.

“Pedestrians are overrepresented in our crash data, in terms of like, killed and seriously injured in crashes,” Telford said. “... And so anytime we’re looking at safety improvements on a corridor like this, that’s right in the front of our minds. How do we get those numbers down?”

The fatality of a woman on Sept. 8 “highlights the need for safety improvements in this area,” Kohlhaas said.

Before a design for Bragaw is finalized, the city will solicit input from the public, including from the businesses and residents along the street, the schools, and the community councils, Telford said. There will also be public hearings with the Urban Design Commission and the Planning and Zoning Commission, he said.

Under the federal grant requirement, the city has just five years to complete the project, which will be a challenge, according to Kohlhaas.

“It will be a big push to get the project alternative identified, the public on board, and the improvements constructed within the federal timeline,” Kohlhaas said.

In March, Anchorage Metropolitan Transportation Solutions, or AMATS, finalized the safety plan, the first such plan for the Anchorage Bowl and Eagle River/Chugiak area. AMATS is a the area’s planning organization, a collaboration between the city and state that sets transportation priorities and planning policies.

“The idea behind this plan is to take a comprehensive look at the entire AMATS area using data provided from DOT and the Municipality of Anchorage, and identifying locations that are kind of the high risk areas, and saying, ‘Okay, something needs to be done here,’ ” said Aaron Jongenelen, AMATS coordinator.

The plan prioritizes five of nine areas identified in its assessment. It notes that 13 other areas of high concern are already part of a construction program, or are slated for improvements.

It was also crafted with the federal government’s new Safe Streets and Roads for All grant program in mind, targeted to the grant’s requirements, Jongenelen said.

Finalizing the AMATS plan allowed the city to win the maximum grant amount just a few months later — an unusually rapid turnaround in transportation improvement, Jongenelen said.

The federal program was created with the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which directed $5 billion between 2022 and 2026 to fund regional, local and tribal initiatives aiming to prevent roadway deaths and serious injuries.

Usually, federal funding is routed through the state’s Department of Transportation for projects in the municipality. However, this grant program is different and the money goes directly to Anchorage.

“I think this is an awesome opportunity for our community and our state as a whole, to show that we have the ability to match other communities for need and win these grants and implement them to make our community better,” Jongenelen said. “I’m like a little kid with this, I’m so excited.”

Telford said that small portions of the grant will go to three other projects.

A speed management study will develop an Anchorage-specific process for setting speed limits. Another project will examine pedestrian crossing signals at intersections, adding “lead intervals” that give pedestrians walk signals a few seconds ahead of the green lights for vehicles. A final location for that study hasn’t been determined, though it was initially scoped for Mountain View Drive, Telford said.

The other project will test out a lane reduction on East Northern Lights Boulevard to improve pedestrian safety, he said. One of two westbound traffic lanes between Muldoon Road and Patterson Street will be temporarily closed.

“We want to demonstrate whether that’s possible without massive interruptions in the overall traffic flow,” he said.